I, not us and them

I’m going to say “I” quite a lot in this column. Lately there’s been a little too much “we”, “us” and “them” for my taste, but mainly I’m doing it because writers indulge in the imperious “we” only when they’re feeling authoritative, secure enough to speculate on what “we” think; and right now I’m not

Sex without a happy ending

I don’t remember the theme of my high school dance. It might have been “Night of a Thousand Stars” or “20 000 Leagues Under The Sea” or “Arabian Nights”. In the mid-1990s my school was trying hard to nurture compromise and broad-based discussion so it’s even possible we ended up with “20 000 Arabs Under

I want no part of God or Naledi

Homo naledi is a racist plot using pseudo-science to link Africans to subhuman, baboon-like creatures. It sounded mad, and Mathole Motshekga and Zwelinzima Vavi were roundly jeered on social media for expressing it. I joined the chorus, because gigantic ignorance should not be tolerated in our leaders. But I can also understand where such paranoia

And on that libtard bombshell…

Some say he’s a rich member of the establishment who fakes his we’re-all-in-this-together persona to boost ratings. Others say he’s a witty bloke who has found an audience that adores his schtick and is comforted by his politics. All we know is, he’s called … unemployed! I go both ways on Jeremy Clarkson. (Ooo! A

May the force be with them

He was sweating, his golf shirt buttoned to the neck, his hair brutally combed as if he had just been packed off to kindergarten for the first time. She was tanned, barefoot, loosely wrapped in something homespun and expensive, and she looked bored. If this was a first date, it was between two profoundly mismatched

Apocalypse now or never?

The only poem I managed to memorise as a child was The Thinker by Anthony Delius. It features a depressed cricket who strolls gloomily around the rim of a toilet bowl, pondering the meaning of it all. Every so often vast and terrifying things happen in the toilet, featuring “a great roaring, an apocalypse of

Nostalgia for the still, small voice of calm

If someone, perhaps some deacon or caretaker, had asked me why I had slipped inside the church, I might have replied that I wasn’t really sure; that it had simply seemed like a good idea at the time. Some of it might have been nostalgia. I had come here as a child, Sunday after fidgety