Last week Tuesday, I posted about the brutal murder of an ex-colleague of mine, Noorjehan. I’ve been keeping an eye on the newspapers, and regularly searching the internet in the vain hope that more information had surfaced in the meantime. After the two initial articles I mentioned (Mom’s body found in bushes and Ma van…
I found the following insightful analogy on the Facebook site of Helen Zille, our new Premier of the Western Cape. One of her fans had posted this comment. I thought it was quite clever, so I’m borrowing it to post on my blog: “I bought a bird feeder. I hung it on my back porch…
I met Noorjehan Abbass many years ago, in my past life as a legal secretary at an attorneys’ firm in Cape Town. I can’t remember exactly how long we worked together, and I lost touch with her afterwards. She phoned me once in the intervening years, and told me that she had had two adorable…
We went for a brisk walk around our neighbourhood in the late afternoon. It was my favourite time of day: the sun was already low in the sky, and colouring the clouds with soothing swathes of gold and invigorating splashes of pink, with areas of pale blue merging gently into darker blues. The trees all…
… has finally come to an end. It’s close to midnight, and we’ve just returned home from campus after another marathon session. Yesterday, I’d been at work until late at night, reconciling accounts… a skill I’d learned from my previous boss. It feels good to do reconciliations and to make sure that the numbers balance:…
Last night, we headed down to the V&A Waterfront. We reached the big intersection at the end of Eastern Boulevard, where we had to turn right into Dock Road, which would take us into the Waterfront. The traffic was quite heavy, because it was shortly before 18h00, and there was a crowd of pedestrians, most…
It is a sad indictment of the priorities of our ANC led government that they have, once again, allowed money to overrule morality. The history of our country – one of the richest and most beautiful on the African continent – has not been a happy one. Since the bad old days of colonialism, it’s…
Every year in February, the Remember And Give (RAG) team at the University of Cape Town publishes an irreverent, funny, satirical – and sometimes offensive – magazine known as Sax Appeal in order to raise funds for the Students’ Health and Welfare Centres Organisation (SHAWCO), which does truly amazing and inspirational work in very difficult…
I was thinking a bit today about the inspirational talks I’ve been lucky to listen to over the last year. In February last year, Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens offered a series of star walks, in which visitors were allowed into the Gardens in the evening and taught a little bit about astronomy. We were fortunate to…
The Cancer Association of South Africa is holding its annual countrywide Shavathon on Saturday, 7 March 2009, the day before the big Argus Cycle Tour, where I don’t know how many thousands of cyclists make their 110 km way around the Cape Peninsula. The CANSA Shavathon (this year’s will be the sixth) is taking place…
In June last year, I wrote about an organisation in Colorado, USA, called the Peaceful Prairie Sanctuary. I’d received their compelling Letter from a Vegan World via a South African group of Vegans calling themselves Elated, an acronym for “Enhancing the Lives of Animals Through Ethical Decisions”. I hadn’t visted their blog (Peaceful Prairie Sanctuary)…
“Thank you for your patience, currently all our agents are busy.” Repeat that mantra about 100 times, and you can imagine that I am perilously close to exploding. And WHY, you may well ask, am I wasting my time with this? Because of UCT’s idiotic bureaucracy. Scenario: A non-UCT individual needs to be reimbursed from…
Grains of Sand 