I met Hugo in February 2016 in a little town called Wilderness on the South African east coast. He was in the courtyard by the post office and the local grocer, standing under a tree with about twenty or thirty spice grinders displayed behind him on a little fold-out camping table. He had Cabernet Infusion and Shiraz Infusion, but the one that got my attention me was "BBQ Ale Infusion".

So Hugo told me the story of the best spice that I've ever put on fish.

Hugo is a retired pro golfer who played the international circuit for many years. Retired and looking for a project to keep him interested, Hugo started making cooking spices out of natural ingredients by infusing the flavours into salt. Like me, he is a great lover of both barbeque and beer. Then he got sick and had to go have an operation and his doctor banned him from all alcohol, beer included, for three months. Oh, the suffering! At that time Hugo had already been making a couple of his spice infusions, so he thought he'd give beer a try. And what a fortuitous experiment that was, the product turned out to be one of the very best spices that I've ever had. We chatted a bit, I bought two of each of his spices, and that was it until a year later.

I like to go to the South African Garden Route about once per year to fly paragliders. Sedgefield and Wilderness are great for the sport during the southern summer, and its nice to take a few weeks leave from the cold and grey winter weather in Zurich. And so it was that in 2017 I found myself back in Wilderness, but no Hugo. I was devastated! Had I found the best spice in the world only to have it disappear without a forwarding address? I went to Sedgefield, where Hugo has a stall on Saturday mornings at the market, but still no Hugo. Luckily for me, I found his spices on sale at the restaurant 34 Degrees South on the Knysna Waterfront. But where was Hugo?

A year later, February 2018, back in South Africa on the now annual paragliding pilgrimage, this time with my wonderful wife Susi. And there, in his old spot in the courtyard at the Wilderness Milkwood Village Center, Hugo!

I was so excited that I'd found my spicy golfer and could finally introduce this fun guy to my wife, I didn't even notice that he looked tired and had lost some weight.

He showed me all his new spices (I love Worcester Infused Salt) and I told him how I'd just gone through this huge fight with cancer. Turns out I wasn't the only cancer survivor in Wilderness that day...

Hugo had, in 2017, been suffering from terrible headaches. Really bad ones. And then the hallucinations and waking nightmares started. He thought he was going mad! Seeing long dead people floating around the room was about the tamest of the strange things happening to him. So his doctor sent him to have a scan.

And BAM! A huge tumour in the brain. Malignant.

The chances of a successful operation and a meaningful life thereafter weren't very high at all, but without surgery a horrible death in the next few tortured months was guaranteed.

So Hugo decided to fight...

His old golf sponsor form the old days, BMW, made a car and driver available to him free, and Hugo started the arduous radio-chemotherapy regime to shrink the tumour down to manageable proportions in preparation for the surgery. Months of this later, absolutely exhausted, Hugo's surgery was a success!

Thanks to an excellent sponsor who made it possible for Hugo to get to and from the treatment, a fighting spirit determined to win, and an excellent medical team, here he was selling me my beloved BBQ Ale Infusion.

And then I noticed something else. Hugo was holding his left arm protectively close to his body. It was much weaker and the hand smaller and slightly twisted. I immediately thought he'd had a stroke.

Well, it turns out that his recent war with cancer was not his first skirmish with biological misfortune. As a child he'd had polio and his one arm is almost useless. I don't know why I hadn't noticed this when I'd first met him, probably because he has such a positive personality.

So, just to be clear, this guy with an almost useless arm had been playing the international golf circuit for many years, competing with the best. Wow! No wonder a little thing like a malignant tumour in the head wouldn't get him down.

I can quite honestly say that Hugo is a super hero.

Go see him on Saturday mornings at Sedgefield Market, behind the Engen filling station on the N2. He'll get you into a positive mood. (And get a couple of his infusions, people come from all around Switzerland to my barbeques just to get a taste of this excellent stuff.)