This is what the view from a top of a mountain looks like. It’s the Lenong Viewing Point in Marakele National Park. I drove there on Sunday because something in me really, really needed to stand on top of a mountain. It wasn’t easy driving up that mountain, because the road is incredibly narrow and […]
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
Dear Sandton, you’re not immune to HIV
Dear Sandton, I get it. You’re rich. You drive nice cars and own nice things. You work in shiny corporate offices with designated parking spaces and live in gated estates. You meet people from work or on dating websites. You work the network or get picked up in the local Baron, or at least that’s […]
Posted inLifestyle
Do you give to beggars at robots?
Johannesburg is full of three things: • Cars. (The city is obsessed with them.) • Traffic lights (or, as we like to call them, robots). • And beggars. At red robots, all three come together. And every Joburg motorist therefore needs to have a view on beggars. A strategy, if you like. Do you give? […]
Posted inNews/Politics
St Francis, shack fires and the professionally offended
It sucks being an over-educated Joburg northern suburbs white liberal of a certain age. It really does. You haven’t given over to the cynicism of your parents’ generation, so you’re perpetually in knots over the twin anxieties of your whiteness and your privilege. You spent years at university studying critical discourse analysis, so you never […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Compounds, refugees and choosing your words carefully
This week, “compound” joined refugee as an apparently innocuous word that has become the centre of a debate around racism. The circumstances under which they were used are quite different, but both presented our national spin doctors with gift-wrapped opportunities to distract the public and their supporters from real issues of delivery and corruption. In […]
Posted inLifestyle
Why I’ve retired from men
So it’s that time of the year again: the anniversary of my divorce (or divorsary as a friend has termed it). It’s coming up for three years now – if this were a wedding anniversary, the appropriate gift would, apparently, be something to do with leather. I’ve been told on several occasions that it takes […]
Posted inLifestyle
Mental health: Can one person make a difference?
How much difference can one person make? Quite a lot, as it turns out. Today is World Mental Health Day, and I’d like to pay tribute to one woman who has made a difference to hundreds of thousands — perhaps millions — of people who need help, and whose efforts have saved many lives. I […]
Posted inLifestyle
Behind the scenes at the Rand Club
This month, the Rand Club turns 125 years old. Tomorrow, October 6, it hosts an open day from 12 noon until 5pm. If you live in Joburg, and you’ve always wondered what goes on behind that grand facade, this is the perfect opportunity to step through those doors into a different world. Until July this […]
Posted inLifestyle
Oh for our lost innocence
Pussy will rub my knees with her head Pretending she loves me hard; But the very minute I go to my bed Pussy runs out in the yard Who of you read that and snickered? I couldn’t help it when I came across it this evening. It’s an extract from a rhyme that appears at […]
Posted inLifestyle
Thoughts on the smell of burnt clutch
It’s traumatic. It really is. After a year and 10 months of driving the sponsored luxury British SUV and its successor, I’ve had to temporarily return to slumming it in a sensible Korean hatchback. A taxi drove into my parked car while I was in Chinatown on August 7. I’d driven to lunch in a […]
Posted inLifestyle
Once in a blue moon
Today, August 31, is a blue moon. It’s not literally blue, of course, just a reference to a rare month with two full moons. It’s also my birthday, so the single most depressing day of the year, even more depressing than the day after Christmas, or the SARS efiling deadline. In approaching this post, I […]
Posted inLifestyle
Why bare feet on Lego isn’t the worst pain of all
There are many types of pain. The distinctly unamusing throb of the funny bone. The lugubrious ache of the bruised shin and the coloratura shriek evoked by the stubbed toe on the coffee table, not forgetting the exquisite agony of the encounter between car door and finger nail, or tender sole and Lego (if Shaka […]