Archive

I’m not the only one who puts words on paper – it’s rich and rewarding, except financially. I’m not alone. Alongside Liz Truss, David Cameron’s story was also remaindered in bookshops, selling for 50p. (But I did enjoy Prince Harry’s book, especially when he tells of shooting down Taliban escaping on motorbikes and thought of…

  The spectre of Iran hangs in the air … today, as war rages, the indelible hand of the ayatollahs, the mullahs and their Islamic theocracy has got everyone by the short hairs.  Here beginneth the first lesson: On profligacy, repression and violence in the extreme. In theory, a time comes when misrule ends. In…

Harare, Zimbabwe Black Friday, usually around November 24 every year, is not a shopping bonanza in this neck of the woods. For us, November 14, a Friday in 1997, was a very Black Friday. The painful anniversary is on this coming Tuesday. On the day, Robert Mugabe ordered nearly four billion local dollars to be…

Harare, Zimbabwe If the world has too many problems right now – endless wars, famine and pestilence – it might be the time to spare a thought for Elvis Presley’s blue suede shoes. You can burn my house, steal my car/ Drink my liquor from an old fruit jar/ Do anything that you want to…

A Trivial Pursuit question: Who was the white South African dowager who said she would prefer to be murdered in her bed than have to make it herself in the morning? The rich have housekeepers in the Western world. In Italy, reasonable house help is not on tap. It is do-it-yourself, with high-tech electric devices…

    In these parts, if you order tette delle monache with your cappucino you’ll get a delicious cream-filled cake more commonly known as “a nun’s breast.”     Italians don’t seem to swear very much, not that it’s easy to tell. Focaccia doesn’t mean what it sounds like to an Anglo-Saxon ear. It means a type…

In the cyber world, there is no escape. Switch it off, or go to a place without it. A desert island somewhere? No can do. News follows me like a stalker in the night. A fine young missionary doctor, admired for his emphasis on preventative health education in rural communities without access to drugs and…

No booze on EgyptAir from Joburg to Cairo to Rome and so I got stuck into the best book I’ve yet seen on ‘Lucky’ Lord Lucan, the earl of the realm who disappeared in 1974 after murdering his children’s very British nanny in London. Laura Thompson’s “A Different Class of Murder” is full of hitherto…

Dateline: Ostuni, coastal southern Italy Italy has a right-wing prime minister. Ms Giorgia Meloni is the first woman in the high office but not so pleasant is that she’s a neo-fascist. Not a Mussolini more a Trump, as one commentator puts it. She is 46 years young and not of much interest to those of…