"Old Sea Dogs", a true first year story...

Timothy Gabb (inset) is not your typical first year student. Throughout his high school, the poetry and prose of The Beat Generation developed in Tim an insatiable appetite for different kinds of inspiration, experiences and passions. After finishing school he said, "I needed to take a journey to discover myself, and to ask the questions that gnawed into the deep recesses of my dreams". A "crowbar of words" had formed, which had pried their way into his life, meat for the butchery of university. His inspiration for the future, grounded by two sea-faring years in the Mediterranean, had permeated the will to write what is real, and initiated a past interest into the methods of Tom Wolfe and Hunter S Thompson. This path has led him to the AMM building a top the old wise hill of Rhodes University.


To understand Tim’s journey is to understand his experiences and to see what truly brought him to the knowledge that is giving a voice to his dreams. Three short months after finishing school, Tim found himself aboard the "Francesco Petrarca", a three mast classic sailing ship, of the Spanish isle, Palma de Majorca. A new world of excitement opened up to him: "I had to adapt and transform all that I knew. At the same time I revelled in my new-found independence, getting drunk with old sea-dogs!"


Quite surreptitiously, the power of writing and journalism was growing in strength, due to his dive into the works of "New Journalism" and the childhood memories of Mark Peters, a family friend and Newsweek war photographer. According to Tim, it was "the sheer courage, determination and lengths to which [Mark] pushed himself, in order to reveal to the public what was really going on throughout the world, that ultimately moulded my ideas of what journalism should stand for."


Tim wasn‘t sure what university life would be like, it was an impulse, an instinctive feeling that led him to apply to Rhodes. "Grahamstown was not the place I thought I would end up, it is really different from the adventure and excitement of Croatia and Majorca but for some reason that I just can‘t explain it feels so right", he says. However, it has not all been plain-sailing. Seemingly lost in thought, Tim stares out over the golden ocean as if searching for some lost memory, a fragment of a past life. "There have been tough times, university is a process of growing and moulding. I, like many other first-years, have experienced my fair share hopelessness and anguish," he says.
It could be easy to stereotype a man with long blonde hair, a unique sense of style and that calmness that only comes with having grown up in a small, coastal town. " I grew up on the beach, yet that is by no means a grip on categorising me. He is a man that rebels against anything that is not his own: "I will chart my own course in this life, I will be the creator of my own destiny." Saying that with great conviction, Tim illustrates his sever from any ideology or practice: "Subjectivity is the only truth that I understand. No words of man will I take as absolute!"


As the stars begin to canvas the night sky and the wind whispers its last chords, all that is left is the serene music of the ocean. "Sometimes I miss the salt on my skin, the adventure of travelling the open ocean, but I am here for a reason and I aim at maximising my chance", he says. Tim is not a stereotype, he has charted his own course through the stormy waters of first year. Tim Gabb is determined, set like stone amongst the clay: "There are stories out there that blaze in their need to be found, secrets, the findings need to be illuminated."