Sometimes I walk into Vinnies only for the music which often is straight from the sixties. This morning, still with water in my ears from the two hours in the pool, I listened to Marianne Faithfull's plaintive, quavering "As Tears Go By" which took me right back to 1968 when I lived in Lüderitz, wedged in between the cold Atlantic Ocean and the hot and dry Namib Desert of South-West Africa.
There I shared a company flat with another young German, Karl-Heinz Herzberg, who in the room right next to mine played night after night "As Tears Go By" while outside the desert wind never stopped howling.
Karl-Heinz had come to that quaint little German town in Africa some time before me and seemed to have found his niche there, whereas to me it was little more than a stepping stone on my way back to Australia after a disasteriously disappointing nine months in the (c)old country.
Robert Frost wrote "Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in", but neither my father and stepmother nor my mother and stepfather rolled out the welcome mat when I totally unannounced reappeared after my first two years in Australia.
They must've thought it would be better to be cruel to be kind, and so I kept moving instead of slipping under the old eiderdown and enjoying the old homecooking again. It turned out to be a blessing in disguise.
Decades later, and thanks to the internet, I was in contact with Karl-Heinz Herzberg again. He had stayed on in South-West Africa, had married and raised children, and watched as the erstwhile German colony which during my time there had been a South African dependency, had become the independent nation of Namibia.
These memories flooded through my mind as I listened to Marianne Faithfull singing "As Tears Go By" while riffling through Vinnies' book-shelves. By the time their retrospective Muzak had launched into "I Am Australian", "Georgy Girl" and "Waltzing Matilda", I was at the cash register and paying them a couple of gold coins for Natasha Solomons' feel-good novel "Mr Rosenblum's List" and the inspirational "First You Have to Row a Little Boat - Reflections on Life and Living" by R. Bode.
