When I became the 574 478th journalist in the world to receive a forwarded link by email from a sub-editor friend in the UK about columnist Giles Coren’s little spat with subs on the Times, I knew it had to be fucking good. And it is. The letter has more bleeps than a Who Wants to […]
Tony Jackman
Tony Jackman is a journalist, budding playwright and sometime chef. He's written two plays, An Influence of Ghosts and Blue Train Coming, and back in the day wrote loads of songs. He paints a bit in watercolours when he remembers to, and apart from that he massages words and pushes grammar for a nice little magazine called myweek.
Posted inLifestyle
The apostrophical catastrophe of being punctuationarily illiterate
Pity the poor apostrophe. Just when it thinks it can park off unnoticed in a quiet corner somewhere, along comes another berk who doesn’t know how to use one. And you know what apostrophical illiterates do for fun, don’t you? If they see an ‘s’, they fling one in. Before it, after it, it doesn’t […]
Posted inLifestyle
Coffee and croissants, cornflakes and tik
I experienced something very unsettling yesterday. Footsteps on the pavement behind me, a voice saying my name. I turned, recognised a face in that way in which you think, “I know you, but who are you?’ He reminded me, and I was instantly whisked back six years to the many months before I left Cape […]
Posted inGeneral
Cometh the hour, will the man falleth flat on his face?
God love ‘em, the world could use more mavericks like Boris Johnson and Jacob Zuma. Keep your dull politicians, your people of note with their perfect pedigrees and coiffed scalps, honed in austere academies, planed and sanded at the finest finishing schools. Give us a world governed by floppy moptops, foot-in-the-mouth blunderers and sloppy dressers […]
Posted inLifestyle, Media, Tech
How to make lottery world history (and get free beers)
I just love lotteries. What I especially love about them is that you don’t even have to enter them any more. You just win them! I won four only this morning. I won lotteries in Spain (again!), France (my third), Egypt and Norway. Even if I had won only three since waking up, I would […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Bombin’ is the only way, a medley, by Jomb-Bomb McCain
John McCain was only joking when he mumble-sang “Bomb bomb Iran” to the Beach Boys’ Sixties hit Barbara Ann recently, says at least one of the scores of respondents in the US to my misguided plea for them not to vote dreary old John McCain into office this November. Of course he was only joking. […]
Posted inGeneral
Make this American world worth living in again
I don’t know whether that was a baptism by fire or merely an avalanche, but let’s just say that my post in which I listed 10 places I’d sooner live than have a green card has left me feeling kind of dumped on. Quite right too: when you stick your neck out, you’ve got to […]
Posted inLifestyle
Ten places I’d sooner live than have a green card
The way America touts its green card about the world and around the internet in “green-card lotteries”, as if we were all desperate to live in the US, gives me the zig. What is it about the “American Way” that is so off-putting? Is it the way Americans love to pat themselves on the back […]
Posted inLifestyle, News/Politics
Job reservation and egg on my blackface
Job reservation, which ensured jobs for white Afrikaners, especially in the civil service, was always one of the more insidious aspects of grand apartheid, but even something as foul as this can have its funny side. Flip forward a few decades to the new brand of job reservation — “whites, especially males, need not apply”, […]
Posted inLifestyle, News/Politics
Putting sex, glamour and wit back into world politics
Nicolas Sarkozy, regardless of his politics, looks like being a raver of a premier, notching up a divorce from one glamorous wife and a marriage to a supermodel in his first few months as president of France. It’s as if he’d planned it all along — get into power, marry the lovely Carla Bruni and […]
Posted inLifestyle
A vegetarian’s nightmare, oozing blood and attitude
Vegetarians throughout the land will be sharpening their carrots on reading what I’m about to write, but in the interests of levity I have to own up to my one acknowledged prejudice: no, not vegetarians, but vegetarianism. There is a difference. Many vegetarians do not make much of an “ism” of their chosen diet. They […]
Posted inBusiness, Lifestyle, News/Politics
Shopping and #@!*ing plastic bags
Remember Transkei daisies? They adorned the countryside way back when most carrier bags were yellow, in the days before the shopping police decreed that we should pay for plastic bags in shops. Five years ago, millions of decorative “daisies” were replaced by millions of rands, which have made their way … nowhere. All of that […]