Memory Project: The Bicycle
A bicycle is a human-powered vehicle consisting primarily of a frame, two wheels, pedals, a chain, gears, handlebars and brakes.
In Stranveld Private Investigators Monty, one of the two protagonists, likes coming to Pearly Beach in his old Beemer to do doughnuts in the carpark.
They turned off Charlie van Breda onto the track down to the sea.
“Yippee, yippee, yip!” Monty sang out on sighting the deserted parking area overlooking Silversands. “Gravel! Glorious gravel! Every last parking area in Gansbaai is now under tar. Boring old lifeless tar. This is God’s own gift to a doughnut specialist. Yippee, yippee, yip!”
He stopped dead in the middle of God’s own expanse of gravel, wrenched the steering wheel as far over to the right as it would go, engaged second gear, got the Beemer’s six cylinders screaming for blood, and let the clutch loose. They did three revolutions, and he reined the clutch in. It was time to yank the wheel all the way left, get the revs up, and then spin the car in the other direction. When they came to a halt facing the sea again, Monty cut the engine and sighed with satisfaction. “Ah, that’s better!” he said, as if he was buckling his belt on emerging from a brothel, or a toilet. “I really needed to do that.”
Unfortunately for Monty, the Municipality is busy destroying every last expanse of gravel in Pearly Beach by covering it in a layer of tar.


Stranveld Private Investigators is available from Smashwords.

To view my longer work as an author, you can find me on Smashwords here.
This is my writer's blog and it's a pleasure to have your company. You’ll see that the site is designed to showcase my writing.
View ProfileXplorio is your local connection allowing you to find anything and everything about a town.
Read MoreA bicycle is a human-powered vehicle consisting primarily of a frame, two wheels, pedals, a chain, gears, handlebars and brakes.
It is 2035. I am 28, and in the past decade I've lived through a sea change that seems far from over. It has largely been driven by the development of AI.
Five years had passed since the coup that reshaped the Republic. What had begun in secrecy and peril had, through persistence and reform, become a functioning and remarkably stable new order.
By the fifth year after the coup, the Council turned its attention to a sector long neglected, yet essential to any sovereign nation: defence.
By 2031, as the housing and agricultural sectors surged forward, the Council turned its attention to another pillar of national recovery: healthcare.
The Second Address to the Nation, delivered on 15 December 2026, was the most widely watched broadcast in South Africa's modern history.