Columns written during my time at IOL, and some written in the years since I left.
Cape Town – I spent a couple of hours in paradise this week. Well. maybe not paradise exactly, but it is a gorgeous piece of Cape Town. I was invited to spend some time with Groot Constantia’s winemaker Boela Gerber, and so a gorgeous late summer Wednesday was spent on the country’s oldest wine estate rather than eating lunch at my desk. I’m on a steep learning curve in the world of wine and the…
Cape Town – Every week I am supposed to write a column. And this week, it appeared that my ideas folder had run dry. That’s partly because I am much pre-occupied with the dreadful, all consuming task that besets the parents of Grade 7 pupils: the finding of a suitable high school. We did some research and went to some school open days last year (on the sensible advice of a friend, who said that…
In the summer my son Jack turned four, he started to develop strange white patches on the skin of his neck. Over the course of several weeks, the patches spread to his chest and right arm. The paediatrician was a little flummoxed and put in a call to a dermatologist. It was, she said, vitiligo. And so began our journey with a rare condition that most people know nothing about.
This week I was waiting on a pavement in the Cape Town CBD, waiting for a lift. A car moseyed up one-way Long Street, slowed, stopped. Reversed ten or twenty metres, made a right turn and proceeded on its way. Luckily there were no cars right behind it, and all was well. I smiled, thinking: “Only in South Africa…” And it is amusing, in its way. But really it is indicative of all that is…
The idea that somehow the sunset and sunrise on a particular day in our Western calendar have any bearing on the flow of life is what psychologists call magical thinking.
Being middle class is supposed to be a comfy, complacent sort of thing. But there are silent struggles everywhere you look.
