My handsome boi is good company with morning coffee… and any other time.

@withoutaleaf’s baking triumph. Three days and about 300kgs of butter. By the time we emerge, many of us will have developed a host of refined skills that will probably all be useless in the cannibal wasteland that will follow. We should really be practising barbecuing human hearts and syphoning deisel from speeding trucks while shooting lever-action shotguns with our free hand. Ah well, I was never going to achieve the rank of warlord. More likely I’d be food, second-class.

Trinket is the agile one. So using the balcony railing as her runway doesn’t bother us. Skitten on the other hand - who’s twice been witnessed trying to jump onto a coffee table and failing - makes us fret every time. I took a run Friday when the maximum lockdown restrictions ended. But I need to rethink. The government’s curious decision to only allow exercise between 6 and 9 AM meant that my run by the river was like Oxford Street on a Saturday morning. Most people were wearing masks, but the social distancing is near impossible. . In general our government has given a very mixed performance during the pandemic so far. They locked down early and hard - which is good. But they’ve failed to provide adequately for the massive food insecurity, tolerated extraordinary levels of police brutality (including multiple murders of civlians), and made decisions on lockdown policies that lack any evidence base. It feels, as usual, like the conflict between the essentially competent (if unimaginative) faction of the president and his allies vs. the remaining kleptocrats from Jacob Zuma’s economic strip-mining regime - including the police minister, Bekhi Cele.

That time @withoutaleaf decided to make samoosas for dinner. That’s all we had. A freakin’ pile of homemade samoosas. Because we’re grownups and we can do whatever the hell we like. It was pretty great. There was tamarind sauce. I miss those samoosas.

Morning e para aprender Portugués and drinking coffee in the sun on the balcony. Once I’ve reclaimed my chair from Trinket, that is. We sometimes call this coffee press the, “Darth Vader plunger,” - because it looks like the French Press that would be supplied on Imperial Star Destroyers (imagine the drain gurgle as Vader pours coffee into his helmet). We’ve had it many years and it’s travelled many miles. And it still keeps coffee hot for upwards of an hour.

Housecats. Except they’re free to wander. Luckily Skitten does not, as a rule.

I’m relying heavily on this grinning, moustachioed cyclops to see me through.

A fat, heavy bass guitar amplifier holding up a fat, heavy boi.

Huge throwback to when Africans had the most sophisticated society on the entire planet. If I remember, these columns are at the temple in Luxor built about 3400 years ago while Europeans lived in holes and thought fire-hardened sticks were pretty rad technology. Not just Egypt, this sophisticated society was also shared by the Sudanese empire of Kush. There are dozens of little-known pyramids in Sudan. But unfortunately of the two dictatorships, Sudan is the harder one to visit - and also the one that’s taken stronger steps towards democracy (probably because, unlike in Egypt, the dictatorship wasn’t massively supported by millions of US dollars and tons of US military equipment). I wasn’t strongly aware when I was in Egypt in 2000 the role of the world’s democracies in propping up Hosni Mubarak as they now do el-Sisi after paying lip-service to the democratic movement he crushed.

Marcus hanging out in the past being young and handsome. At the Milestone, Simonstown in 2002 or so? @kanesnaps, you remember?