Its a simple enough house, but its got absolutely phenomenal views of the Kei River mouth, the sea and the Eastern Cape hills, so its a really beautiful place.
They had some really great old stuff too, so last night my dad arrived with boxes and boxes of things he didn't want damaged over the holidays.
And there's more coming sometime this week on a truck.
The point of this story however, is not what he did find, but what he didn't. As I was looking through all the boxes I found a whole lot of old bullets, and, since my family has never owned any guns, I asked him what they were for..
Now, my great grandfather was the bank manager in a town in the Eastern Cape, I'm not too sure which, but either way, he was pretty cool. When he was appointed, because they were obviously pretty bad-ass back then, he was given a gun:
An ivory-handled, long barreled, Smith & Western six shooter.
Up until about five years ago, it would have been in one of the boxes, amongst family crests and WWII air-force medals, sitting on my dining room floor. Unfortunately however, a new law was passed a little while ago requiring everyone who owned firearms of any sort to either register them, or hand them in at their nearest police station. So, since my grandad couldn't be bothered to register it, this beautiful piece of history is lost for ever, probably sitting on the desk of some Transkei police captain.
I like to thing however, that some corrupt cop sold it to an Eastern Cape gangster and now, known as the Ncalukeni Cowboy, he instills fear in the hears of his enemies with his beautiful, brightly polished, ivory-handled six shooter.
