So, I board what appears to be a peaceful and functional train at around 3.50pm – the carriage is almost empty, which isn’t very reassuring, but we rock along until just after Salt River. As has happened many times before, we grind to a halt. And we wait. Usually it’s a signal issue – someone’s […]

Who really knows, who can tell How many will die from a poisoned well? When courting bitterness be well aware That the corpse on one’s back will be rotting there And the hatred without will seep to within, No matter how stubborn, or how thick the skin. Joanne Hart, Cape Town  

I might not have it all, and what I’ve got may not last for all the days of my life. But I have it right now. I have the words. So, I’m lonely (a circumstantial and temporary loneliness), and I can feel Time sanding me down and sucking me dry. But I’m not alone:  I […]

In my work as a copywriter for health sites, it’s impossible to quantify how valuable Google is to me – being able to access studies in medical journals is just one way my life’s been made easier. But there’s an area outside my working day I’d like to highlight, and that is myth-busting on social […]

It’s a golden time – retirement is your reward for all those years of dedication and output! But how does it really affect people?  Health breakthroughs over the last decades mean that people are living longer, and that means more retirees. The trend has led to studies on how retirement affects people’s health and quality […]

What a time it has been, and I’ve missed you. Yes, I always say that – you must think me so fickle. In my defence, like all South Africans, I got a summons in 2015 to be part of the national alarm clock: we were asleep and it seemed like nothing could wake us. It […]

Amid the usual you-can’t-fix-anything-until-you-fix-everything bull on social media, the list of rapes and murders on my last post has grown to 8 cases over the last few days. Not 2 – it’s 8 that we know of. One of the most bounced stories today has been how justice was served differently on two South African teenagers. […]

Imagine – just for a moment – that we had a well-resourced unit dedicated to child protection, and another dedicated to sex offences. Imagine that we had a functional sex-offender data base, and properly resourced forensic facilities. Now imagine that our universities had functional psych faculties in each province that were actively researching violence and […]

It’s been confounding me for months: why does social media get us into such a frenzy? There are so many reasons, and I’ve figured out the more obvious ones: baiters; fake information; people who get off on horror or mischief; serial shamers (and their necessary dance-partners, serial reactors) and just plain trolls. But the genuinely caring […]

A slinging-match breaks out on social media – Venezuela, up until lately the most viable version of the socialist dream, has lost its entire economy and capitalists are saying: “I told you so.” Socialists are calling them names and it’s all going wrong. The following is a cobbled-together version of my side of a 30-tweet […]