there is the high veld, the middle veld, the low veld, the bush veld, and now thoughts from the thorn veld,
Sheffield The thing about Johnson is that he desperately wanted to become prime minister, and he desperately wanted to have been prime minister. It’s just the bit in between he struggles with (Marina Hyde). BORIS […]
Sheffield IN 1908, just short of 15, my maternal grandmother Elizabeth Smith began her apprenticeship to become a dressmaker. In due course she passed her skills to her daughters (once by throwing a half-made dress […]
Sheffield THE silence, solitude and slower pace of life that accompany some people’s lockdowns are potentially nurturing. Those of us who choose to live alone anyway do it because it suits us. Also, according to […]
THERE’S an old saying, of unknown origin but popularised by Mark Twain: ‘There are lies, damn lies … and statistics’. Each day in this world of pandemic we are bombarded by figures and graphs. They […]
Sheffield Maybe if we were to take down all the road signs, the virus would find it harder to get about? (John Crace’s Twitter response to the government’s change of approach, 10 May 2020) ‘STAY […]
SOUTH Africans woke up on Friday March 27 to the grim realisation that they are again living in a police state. A nondescript government whose norm is irrationality has chosen a threatening, militaristic response rather […]
FAMINES, according to the renowned economist Amartya Sen, do not happen in functioning democracies. Nor do epidemics. There has been no better illustration of this than the Covid-19 pandemic that could become a turning point […]
Sheffield WHILE humans altered everything on the face of the world, these birds kept believing in a map that never changed (from Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver, 2018) One of the restorative parts of my daily […]
Sheffield I HAD established a generally happy routine in my ‘semi-retirement’ over the last two years. It contained very predictable blocks of time, providing structure to the week, the rest being open to choice and […]
SOUTH Africa is currently run by big fat people with guns and an attitude to match. Seeing pictures of a casspir entering a Cape Town township, an entire wedding arrested in KwaZulu-Natal, and heavily armed […]