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Striking Camp
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 […]
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Living In The Intertidal Zone
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 […]
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The Joburg Fringe 2021
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 […]
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Canada Day 2021
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 […]
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Hello Goodbye Madikwe
Madikwe is my happy place, my daughter likes to say. And indeed, when we arrived at our lodge at Mooifontein, the week before last, all the cares in the world seemed to just fall away. The four hour cruise up the N4 from Johannesburg, the half hour drive along dirt roads through the reserve, the […]
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Botanical Gardens
From the Lost Poetry Project This Sunday morning constitutional finds us traipsing across the stubby field, over the earthen wall of the dam where a couple of Egyptian geese meditate or drowse in a circle of brown water. We rise toward the morning light, climbing toward trees, seeing the rolling grassy joins and planes of […]
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The Debating Society
It was a tweet by Jonathan Jansen the other day that dragged the phrase to the surface of my mind, from where it had skulked like a prehistoric coelacanth in the deep-sea trenches of mordant recollection. That’s it, I thought. We are, in essence, a debating society. ‘We’ being South Africa. Jonathan is one of […]
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Fall
We don’t call it Fall, here in South Africa. We do it the English way. We call it autumn. Be that as it may, fall has arrived, including this morning an unseasonal thunderstorm and rain. It’s not just the weather that is changing, folks, it’s the climate, as you know of course, unless you’ve had […]
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If time is a river
If time is a river, it is a river with rapids and falls. We snipped another month off our wall calendar on Saturday, the first day of May, leaving just four months to go before we pack up and leave our house in Johannesburg and begin the long journey home, to Toronto. The calendar now […]
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No Accounting for Loss
Private loss and public pain. Not the same, and not commensurate, but both laying emotional and mental claim. Reminders that we do not control events, that life has a way of breaking through our seemingly ordered universe and seemingly predictable lives. That gratitude and humility fit better with reality than hubris or bravado, that our […]
The View From Here 