So, like I do at the start of every new year in my life, I’m changing a few things. The first: I will spend more time outside. Next: I will do something new with all the reams of words I have lying around. Last, and most important: I will mute, block & expunge Homo Trollus […]

It’s still Spring in Cape Town – all moody beauty cloaked in fresh winds and pale new green. But two things happened this week that were far from the ordinary – that’s beyond an understatement: they’re really the stuff of horror. The first thing: The youth wing of South Africa’s ruling party, the ANC – […]

Spring is a dramatic and lovely season in many places – I think about an April in Kingston when there were so many blossoms in the air that I had to keep shaking them out of my hair! But Spring in Cape Town is a bit of a mood-swinging cabaret. It has resigned residents shedding […]

You have to wait until the last five minutes of the entire first True Detective series to find out that it’s really one hell of a love story. That’s not its intention. The series is proper modern Gothic thriller, with Rust uttering some of the most intricate, lyrical and arid takes on existence I’ve ever […]

She taps on my door at the start of one of our routine black-outs – rolling load-shedding while we try to build more power stations to keep 53 million people lit by night. Which is going to be hard, as each contract gets bedevilled at every level by politics, corruption (the same thing) and bloody-mindedness. […]

I call a friend who is on a business road-trip – it gets lonely out there, travelling from town to town, so I’m checking in. She’s at a restaurant finishing early dinner, and we chat. Just before we say good-bye, my friend tells me that she fell yesterday and has grazes all over the place; […]

I can do this. Surrounded by all the dead wires and useless switches in my walls, this small thicket of four candles is all that I need. All my life I’ve written my reams in long-hand: really, I have. On writing-pads, in note-books, on the fly-leaves of novels, on the back of ATM slips – […]

Sometime on Thursday morning, this past week, 18 year old Loyiso Ziqubu decided to go jogging. He was on holiday and, as an aspiring athlete who played soccer for his school and a local team, Loyiso made sure that he stayed fit. It was a beautiful morning (Cape Town’s had a week of crisp, clear […]

It’s walking down a leafy boulevard, surrounded by high-end bistros and apartment blocks, but you’re really a gazelle and you can hear the deep coughing hunt-call of predators from just beneath carefully-trimmed lavender borders. It’s tapping out 21st century snap-phrases, and posting them on cloud-couched cyberplatforms for sparkly future-people to read, but only when the […]