More than you’d expect, actually. I’ll state this right upfront: I love to hate the world’s largest business social network. The random, irrelevant contact requests from so-called “friends”. The dull, tiresomely self-promoting discussion topics. Half the people on it haven’t updated their profiles since the Rinderpest. Oh yes, and then there’s the fact that after…
Let me state right upfront that I really do have better things to do than write about THAT poster. Four strategies (one of them for a campaign to celebrate our Constitution, which I’m excited about because it’s the closest yet I’ll get to putting the theory I explored in my thesis into practice). Various commissioned…
Sunday in South Africa is traditionally a big day for braais. And I have to confess, I’m not a big fan of them. Oh, I love braaied chicken sosaties (the ones made with thigh meat are the best). I enjoy the relaxed atmosphere, the Sunday afternoon smell of smoke, the soothing burble from sport on…
Every now and then, you see a marketing marvel, a product or service so obviously out of place, so spectacularly wrong, that you can only look on in amazement. Haute cuisine in Boksburg? That’s a bit like selling Dior in Delmas, or hosting a talk on Wittgenstein in the Kakamas town hall. Take the restaurant…
I am never very good with dates. Unless it’s a significant one, like January 1st or Friday the 13th, I tend not to notice the number on the calendar. So it was only late yesterday that I realised it was January the 18th, the fourth anniversary of my mother-in-law’s death. She was 67. It was…
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…
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…
“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…
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…
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…
