Would the Comrades make it past Polly Graph?

“They’ve jogged past Mangaung! They’ve slogged through Polokwane! They’ve sidestepped Nkandla! And now it’s the final sprint towards the Union Buildings! Bob, incredible drama here in the closing stages of the 2017 Comrades’ Marathon!” “Steve, absolutely. “What a race it’s been this – ” “Sorry, Bob, a correction: the Comrades have asked us not to

Assume the brace position

The cabin crew are smiling tight-lipped smiles but everyone knows what’s happened. You can see it on their faces when they slip out of the cockpit and quickly pull the door shut behind them. The pilot has died. And there’s no co-pilot, because the recently departed was an arrogant dickhead who insisted on working alone.

The fault is in our stars

A misunderstanding was inevitable. The French delegation spoke very little English. The South African politicians who sat across the table spoke a little French but were just at that moment pressing lobster thermidor into their mouths and so their words were muffled. What they did manage to say, however, was that the were offering the

“What a dust do I raise!”

Once, in certain sweaty parts of the world where the main exports were bananas and refugees, it was fashionable to name infrastructure after ideologues. South Africa has managed to restrain itself – you’re unlikely to find the Thabo Mbeki Glorious People’s Communal Tap – but we do still have a weakness for renaming roads after

What would Nabokov do?

The editor of the magazine was apologetic but firm. The column I had just sent him, while containing some good bits, was self-indulgent. “Too many notes,” he added, a politic reference to Amadeus that framed him as the tone-deaf Emperor and me as a misunderstood Mozart. But beneath the self-deprecating and flattering allusion was a