'A good traveller has no fixed plans.' Tao Te Chiang
The Saw Hold this, my father said, Meaning the board he was cutting For another project he would never finish. The silver-toothed saw snickered and whined. It was his way, I guess, Of reaching out. I saw nothing at all, A small boy who wanted only To go out and play. © Glen Fisher
Dribbling when peeing. Pain in the joints. Nose hair. Hairy ears. Dribbling after peeing. Bushy eyebrows. Cars that whip by too close. Cars that whip by too fast. Cars that crawl up your arse. Farts. Weak erections. Brief erections. Bad art. No erections. Hair loss. Milk. Wrinkles. Skin like crepe paper. Skin like sandpaper. Food […]
My new photo portfolio, Provincial Scenes, Ontario – do click on the link, and take a look, and do let me know what you think! – might also be called Scenes from a Life, the life in this case being my own, pretty humdrum existence, and the photographs taken, not on some fancy assignment or […]
If time is a river, and the river a road, then the long road winding 1400km from Joburg to Cape Town is both distance and time, surface and depth, ripple and bend, present and past. All journeys begin with a parting, with a saying of goodbyes: goodbye to our grand-daughter, Olivia, just three days old; […]
The other day I received a renewal notice, from a professional association I belong to – or belonged to, I should say. Normally – in the old normal – I would have renewed my membership without much thought, but this time I hesitated. It was not so much the money – over $100 – though […]
‘Ah, but your land is beautiful’ is the third novel by Alan Paton, the South African author best known for ‘Cry, the Beloved Country.’ Telling tales of apartheid and resistance, the title is an ironic reflection on the perception so often and so blindly voiced by visitors to this country – ‘you live in such […]
After 4 1/2 years in Parkmore Gardens, in suburban banal and exhausting Johannesburg, we are striking camp. The stuff we want to keep is on its way, first by road to the coast, then onto a ship, via Rotterdam to Toronto. The stuff we don’t want to keep, or really don’t need, is in the […]
Fans of David Attenborough’s will know that a lot of stuff goes on in that liminal, shape-shifting zone where the tide steadily, daily, breathes in and breathes out, where the percussion of seashells follows the outgoing waves as they withdraw down the beach, where the turtle’s eggs are laid in the sand and the small […]
My wife made me do it. Last year Rob entered a selection of her collages for the Joburg Fringe exhibit, and much to her delight one of her pieces, Rare, was accepted – you’ll find it here, in the 2020 catalogue. We went to see the show of course, and there it was, in pride […]
It is impossible to think of Canada Day this year without a long and somber pause to reflect, before anything else, on the unmarked graves of Indigenous children that have been found in recent weeks at Canada’s residential schools, and the atrocity that The Guardian newspaper describes with powerful outrage in an editorial today. Canada’s […]
Travelling Light 