Another shot of outrage, anyone?

The joke goes something like this. A guy walks into a bar and orders a drink. The barkeep pours it, and the guy picks up the glass — and then splashes the booze all over his face. “Geez, buddy,” says the surprised barkeep, “why‘d you do that?” The man, genuinely perplexed, says, “I wish I

We’ve been framed

In the middle of Cape Town’s Waterfront there stands a large yellow frame. Viewed from directly in front, it encapsulates a famous scene: the city, loomed over by a perfectly flat Table Mountain. To be photographed inside the frame is to capture the quintessential Cape Town image. There’s even a white X painted on the

How to survive the Silly Season

Here is a drawing I have made for you. I know it looks like an ampersand but it’s not. It’s a drawing. & I call this piece Line Drawing of a Person Sitting With Knees Pulled Up, Moodily Gazing at the Ocean of Life (Out of Frame to the Right). I feel that it conveys

Fiddling while SA load-sheds

Do lobsters scream when you drop them into boiling water? I can’t say, never having done it myself, but I do know what frogs say when you slowly bring a pot of water to the boil around them: “Stop complaining about Eskom and do something constructive!” Last week our national swamp was in full voice.

No smoke without Koeberg

Last week I saw Cape Town die. A vast column of smoke was rising on the other side of the bay, an impossibly high V climbing into the sky. Whatever lay at the point of that V was not merely burning, it was being incinerated. This was a conflagration, a holocaust. And then the reality

Hello darkness, my old friend

Apparently something had cracked. Or someone was on crack. Either way, the word “crack” was featuring heavily in explanations for why the country had been plunged into darkness at the weekend. It didn’t really matter, though. Nobody was listening to the explanations. We used to, once. We would read official statements and google the bits