My thoughts about the world
Wandering around the house, looking for my other pair of glasses, yet again, I thought: if I could harness this energy and put it into the electricity grid, it would go quite a long way to powering the country out of load shedding.
If you put it all together, we might even be able to save a stage of load shedding.
Continue readingWe all need avenues of escapism – a good book, a hike, a cup of tea. For me, it’s television…
Once, at a dinner party with friends and family, the conversation turned to what it must be like to live in countries near the Arctic Circle, with never-ending dark days in winter and (correspondingly) never-ending summer days. (One of our number has a sister who lives in Norway.)
Well, I said, in Alaska they have terrible trouble with mosquitoes.
Continue readingThere you are, on a warm summer afternoon, sitting in the garden.
Suddenly the sun goes behind a cloud… only it’s not a cloud. Rather, it’s a small, powder-blue flying saucer, coming in for a gentle landing on the grass.
Continue readingThe climate crisis is often, and rightly framed, as a problem generated in the first world. And solutions and mitigations are framed as ways in which the first world needs to change.
Rebecca Solnit, a writer and historian, describes it this way:
Much of the reluctance to do what climate change requires comes from the assumption that it means trading abundance for austerity, and trading all our stuff and conveniences for less stuff, less convenience.
She proposes a different way of looking at things:
Continue readingI don’t do much charity work, or volunteering – but every March I wear a dress every day.
I am answering a challenge from the Milk Matters organisation, which provides donor breastmilk to premature babies. I wear a dress every day, and people sponsor me, much as they might sponsor a runner for every kilometre they run for a good cause, or a child for reading a book in a school Readathon.
In addition to raising funds for Milk Matters’s point of view, this yearly event raises awareness, because the challenge also involves posting pictures of yourself in a dress on social media.
Continue readingI said I would get a tattoo… and I did.
Yep, I am now one of the millions of people around the world who have permanent ink on their bodies.
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South Africans are a lawless bunch – show us a rule and we will find a way to break it. And one of the nation’s favourite things is to refuse to pay the TV licence fee to the national broadcaster, the SABC.
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