The most depressing sound in the world is the tweeting of the Olive Thrush, Turdus olivaceous. It’s the first bird to wake up for the dawn chorus just before the earliest light leaks over the horizon — and it’s the sound that all insomniacs dread. The mockingly sweet notes mean that soon it will be […]
Sarah Britten
During the day Sarah Britten is a communication strategist; by night she writes books and blog entries. And sometimes paints. With lipstick. It helps to have insomnia.
Posted inLifestyle
Where have all the Maltese Poodles gone?
Sandton sheep, a school friend used to call them. They were everywhere, behind every security gate, in every flat and on every lap. Even if you couldn’t see them, you could hear them. They were the emblematic animal of the Joburg suburbs. If we were going to redesign the city’s coat of arms back in […]
Posted inLifestyle
Would Joburg be Joburg without the Hillbrow Tower?
“The skyline is burning” goes the song I’m playing in my car. The track is titled The Horizon is the Beltway and it’s appropriate (in that way that random things often are) because I’m driving around looking for vantage points from which to photograph the Sandton skyline. Now that I’m introducing Sandton into my work […]
Posted inGeneral
Can we please all stop spelling ‘lose’ as ‘loose’?
No. It couldn’t be. Not here, of all places. But there it was, in black and white, on page 38 of the one bastion of standards in which I still believed, the Mail & Guardian. “The opening of the Gautrain”, reads the sentence in question, “has only marginally dented OR Tambo’s R230-million parking income, loosing […]
Posted inLifestyle, Media
On loving our possessions
This is possibly the single thing I love most in the world. I cannot quite explain why, but when I look at it I am filled with love. I don’t get to look at it often, because it’s safely folded away in a cupboard, waiting for the day I have a room of my own […]
Posted inBusiness, Media
Christmas spending: where’s the money coming from?
Sandton City is a madhouse. The reports are disturbing: gaggling crowds of teens everywhere, shops heaving with bodies, zombies wandering from store to store, gift lists clutched in clammy hands. Some of my hollow-eyed acquaintances report that they didn’t even make it beyond the parking lot. Christmas is coming, and apparently South Africans are shopping […]
Posted inGeneral
11 things I am grateful for
It was, quite simply, unthinkable. Not even the most paranoid would lie awake at night worrying about it, and yet it happened. A woman stepped into a lift in New York City, as millions of people do every day. Only this time, she got her foot caught in the gap between the lift car and […]
Posted inLifestyle
On driving a flashy car in Joburg
It was extraordinary. I’ve never had so many looks from the diners gathered on the pavements of Parkhurst; not even in 2005 when a cyclist crashed into the back of my black Fiat Stilo — MARMITE GP (don’t ask) — at the traffic circle at 4th avenue and 10th street, causing several grand’s worth of […]
Posted inLifestyle
Should I just give up on men?
So there I was at the Indaba Hotel with a large group of fellow guests, having my toes twiddled by therapist at the Mangwanani Spa. I’d been tidying my cupboards out (again) and, quite by chance, found a voucher which was due to expire in the next three days. I booked, went along, and spent […]
Posted inGeneral, Lifestyle
Can DJ Fresh tweet what he likes about suicide?
This afternoon while scrolling through Twitter as I do, I noticed an unusual exchange. You don’t usually see a hugely popular DJ in a back and forth with the South African Depression and Anxiety Group (Sadag), so I followed the conversation to see what it was all about. And quite frankly, I was appalled. Here […]
Posted inBusiness, General, Lifestyle
Are Christmas gifts just a horrible waste of money?
December is almost upon us and Christmas is less than a month away. Already the malls are heaving with hollow-eyed wrecks ticking off mental lists of people on their Christmas gift lists (some of them fantasising, no doubt, about bombing a place that approximates Dante’s fourth circle of hell). Ernst & Young is predicting a […]
Posted inMedia
Did Durex screw its own brand?
Handing your Twitter account over to a complete doos is the PR equivalent of giving a loaded gun to a drooling moron. Jen Thorpe has written about the Durex Twitter cock-up from a feminist stance. Inevitably, there are those who can’t see anything wrong with what Durex did. But from a brand point of view, […]