Navigating jet lag
The price we pay for crossing time zones Around the start of the 20th century, my great-grandfather, Henry Grey Granger, boarded a ship in Southampton, England, and went to South Africa. He was 18 years old. Henry spent the rest
The abiding sting of racism
It’s been almost 30 years since the end of apartheid – and racism is alive and kicking (it kicks and it hurts). V and I were kicked at an otherwise happy event – the wedding of friends – last week.
Let’s talk about Chat
The world changed while I was not looking. In a flash, artificial intelligence (AI) was melded to real life. Of course, there was warning, but I was among the majority that did not read the signs. AI is rewriting how
Proudly 60
No, we won’t go quietly One morning a couple of weeks ago, I woke up and I was 60. Just like that. As I do on any other normal day, I took an early-morning walk. But something was not the
All roads lead to De Rust
… and other true stories The Karoo dorpie of De Rust was a blip on my radar – a stopover town en route to Cape Town, a place to pause to visit the Meiringspoort waterfall, and not much more. That
Eight things I love about Rhodes Village
The road has led me to Rhodes Village in the Eastern Cape Highlands and I’m slowly getting to savour the gems in this Southern Drakensberg hamlet. It’s so lovely that I decided to share a list of my favourites with
The green jewel of the east coast
Kwelera National Botanical Garden takes shape We’re standing in the middle of a wetland deep in the cultivated portion of the Kwelera National Botanical Garden. But there is no water, just a thick covering of invasive solanum, ready to
My top tips for chasing flowers
The flowers are fading, pulling on their seedy caps to sleep for another year. After a prolonged drought, it has been a magnificent year for flowers in Namaqualand and the West Coast. We were lucky enough to see some of
The convenient face of corruption
When facts don’t get in the way of a story If you blinked in the past few weeks, you might have missed the complete clearing of any wrongdoing by the company, Fabkomp, which manufactures motorcycle sidecar clinics and ambulances. This
Discovering the magic of story
Stories and the telling of them are part of our lives and the real world we live in. Since the beginning of humankind, we have used storytelling to communicate information and pass knowledge and history from one generation to the