Lifestyle

The jasmine is late this year. It’s nearly August and the flowers are still little more than tiny carmine spears poking out of a tangle of leaves. I love jasmine: it’s the scent of spring, of new beginnings, of possibility and the inevitably of clocking over of another year for me come the last official […]

Employment is a risky thing. I don’t mean the possibility of being pink-slipped or the company liquidating or poisonous cafeteria-unknowns. In my line of work, showing up is a bloody hazard. I spent the better part of the last three weeks praying desperately for an HIV-negative result. Some light: I’m a medical intern. Most of […]

Why do bad things happen to middle-class people? This is a question which has fascinated philosophers for centuries, or at least since the Masterbond scandal. Aren’t middle-class people supposed to be insulated against the harsher realities of life? They have short-term insurance. They have channel TV. Their children spend two-thirds of their lives safely ensconced […]

Sticky, bilious, yellow-green shame gushes from a hole in the ocean a mile down. Oh, Lord, don’t put it on the television. Better that we cannot see it. Our eyes decide what our outrage is based on, not the truth. We’ve made our systems more efficient — less effort, better feelings — we’ve “new and […]

So I’m sitting in a doctor’s waiting room waiting, as you do, for the doctor who is now over 20 minutes late, and I’m at a bit of a loose end. None of the magazines on the coffee table offer stories that will fill the gaping void in my sense of self, so I decide […]

By Stuart Thembisile Lewis Ah, what a month and what a World Cup! It was a showcase of all things South African which the world will not soon forget. From prophetic octopi to the Hand of God version 2.0, 90 000 vuvuzelas pointed at 11 Mexicans and 49 million hands over hearts of green and gold, from […]

By Stephen Richards It would appear to be an unusual time to emigrate. The World Cup appears to have been an overwhelming success, the country united, things running relatively smoothly and even prominent corrupt officials are surprisingly being found guilty. An email from a friend painted the picture of a revamped, utopian Durban beachfront. Cape […]

According to the annual Minority Rights Group report published a few days ago, “religious intolerance is the new racism”. What that means, in a nutshell, is that people are no longer hating other people on the grounds of the colour of their skin, but by the kind of scarves they wear, what day of the […]

My experience of white middle-class South Africans is that we tend to be very wary of others. Whether tucked away in gated communities, encapsulated in our cars, or running in the gym with headphones on, we like to keep at a distance from others. Even when in public, at the shops for example, we are […]