While reading an interview with Barry Hilton, the following revelations about his marriages caught my eye: “Then after I wrote off marriage and cursed it I met my darling Sandy, who is 19 years my junior, but you’d swear she is the older one in the relationship,” he told the interviewer. “When she met me […]
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
How much do you value your online friendships?
Some of my best friends are people I have never met. Some of them are people I first got to know online, then met in person. And still others are people I may never see again, but with whom I maintain ongoing contact. Could an online friendship be as rich, as meaningful, and as rewarding […]
Posted inMedia
Why is SA Tourism wasting this opportunity?
“Hello ma boy! Hallo ma boy!” Such a uniquely South African expression. The fact that we’re watching a man lovingly telling this to an enormous male lion that could kill him in seconds if he felt like it — well, that’s just part of life in amazing (as opposed to poor, benighted) Africa. Now, while […]
Posted inBusiness, Lifestyle
What do you do when you don’t have a job to go to?
With all these thousands of retrenchments, a lot of people are suddenly finding themselves with something they haven’t had in a while: time. So what do the newly redundant do with it all, now that they have so much of it? The writer of this article in the Times has noticed that men are starting […]
Posted inLifestyle
The riot at the swingers’ party and other tales
“They felt uncomfortable with him eyeing them off and I asked him to show some respect and take his clothes off,” said the manager of a nudist colony, who was explaining how a mini riot had started at the White Cockatoo resort in northern Queensland. “He then threatened to bash me, there was some argy-bargy […]
Posted inNews/Politics
A shit storm in a teacup
So, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has electrified Australians with the use of the word “shit storm” to describe the political consequences of job cuts. “People have to understand that, because there’s going to be the usual political shit storm, sorry, political storm, over that,” he said on live television. Kevin 747’s political rivals have accused […]
Posted inGeneral
The woman who mooned the Queen Mary 2
I was sitting on a lawn in Sydney’s botanical gardens, trying to fit the whole of the Queen Mary 2 in my camera lens, when the woman in front of me started to take her clothes off. I first noticed her when I chose my spot on the slopes opposite the wharf where the world’s […]
Posted inMedia
Is it wrong to mock Indians?
So The Rude Awakening has offended the Indians, and people who are offended on their behalf. Hardly surprising, really; in the past, Jeremy Mansfield and Co have incensed the whole of Boksburg and Brakpan combined, so nothing scares them. It seems that there have been a number of complaints about a show that broadcast last […]
Posted inLifestyle
Emigration can be very bad for your health
The title of this blog entry was originally going to be “The flip side of freedom from fear”, but nobody would have read that. If I’d titled the companion piece to this piece “The main reason I’m glad I left South Africa” instead of “The noise in the night”, I’d be rivalling Traps at the […]
Posted inLifestyle
The noise in the night
The other night, a loud noise jolted me out of my slumbers. Immediately, I went into panic mode: adrenaline surging, heart thumping, muscles rigid, hearing attuned to the slightest clue as to what the cause might be. I waited. Another thump. The pipes? Then the faint sound of water running. It was the woman who […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Sifting through the ashes for someone to blame
Like most people in Australia, and many around the world, I’ve been following the reports of the terrible fires that ravaged the state of Victoria on “Black Saturday”. I’ve watched with horror as, night after night, news reports show more awful footage of the devastation. There are burnt out hulks of cars in the road, […]
Posted inGeneral
What is it with all this “willy-nilly”?
Why do South Africans, especially South African politicians, love the expression “willy-nilly” so? What exactly is its appeal? Here’s a selection of quotes, acquired willy-nilly — pronounced weelie-neelie — online, though they don’t begin to reflect the popularity of the word (I’ve heard it often in interviews on 702 and the SABC, for example): “We’re […]