'A good traveller has no fixed plans.' Tao Te Chiang
Traveling at sixty – 67, to be precise – is a much slower affair than it used to be. This is partly by choice, by design, but also by force of circumstance. The chief circumstance, Covid, is of course much more than circumstantial. It is an Act of God, a force of nature, something that […]
BERT – the Big Easter Road Trip – is at last under way (Bert was my paternal grandfather’s real name, by the by – we called him Pooch). We have mapped out the trip in easy four-to-five hour driving segments, starting this morning from Johannesburg, heading south on the N1 to Bloemfontein, to spend our […]
Rob and I agree, there is something unreal about our lives right now. This odd sense of unreality rests, uneasily, on a simple fact: after more than four years of living in South Africa, we are just six months away from packing up our rented townhouse in Johannesburg, moving out and – Covid willing – […]
In 1972 I became a first-year student at the University of Cape Town, an epochal event that may or may not have had something to do with the fact that massive student protests broke out that year at white, liberal, English-speaking campuses across the country. While the events at UCT, and Wits, and the other […]
Sometimes a rhino is just a rhino. This big fellow, bringing up the rear of a group of white rhinos as they lumbered up a rutted track to the top of a ridge before disappearing down the other side, maintained a watchful eye as we jolted along in his wake, in the open LandCruiser, last […]
This was not one of thoseSwooping soaringPhoto opportunities, you know,Where the bird glides in fromStage left andExits beautifullyTo the rightWith a pristinePink and silverSalmon or somethingA missile ready to launchFrom its clawFlakes of morning lightFalling from its not yet barbecuedFlesh. This was murder, a brawl in the shallowsWhich ended badlyFor the thrashing creature in the […]
At a time like this, when half the world is on lockdown because of the pandemic, when civility and decency and the very foundations of democracy seem at risk in the face of racist populism and rabid know-nothingness, when the planes are grounded and we can barely venture out of our houses, when our ‘advanced’ […]
I am startled and yet not surprised, in returning to my blog, that almost a hundred days (of solitude, I am tempted to add, in the spirit of Marquez) have passed since my last post. Last time I wrote we were 10 days into the lockdown, and the number of reported cases in South Africa […]
It is Day 10 of the Covid-19 lockdown, here in South Africa, and autumn is in the air in Johannesburg. It has been an intense week of work, and the calm and quiet are strangely welcome. I say strangely, because the times are not normal, and we stay home not by choice but because we […]
Our water is off again, in Parkmore – not, in this case, on this umpteenth occasion, for some dramatic, globally important reason such as drought or climate change, but simply because of an aging infrastructure, a lack of maintenance, the incapacity and incompetence and lack of responsiveness of local government…. Not, let me add, an […]
