Capeautumn on The Singemonkey

March 26, 2023

Sun, 26 Mar 2023 11:01:44 +0000

Winter is sweeping in early this year. It’s been a bit dreary since late February.

March 12, 2023

Sun, 12 Mar 2023 08:54:38 +0000

It’s been a few moons since my last windmill to blockhouse walk. And wouldn’t you know, the windmill is complete. Fully restored at last. Ok maybe they still have one sail to raise.

It was the Cape Argus cycle race - which I’d forgotten. It’s South Africa’s most prestigious race. I’m a what? A bicyclist rather than a cyclist. I have mixed feelings about the sports cycling community. They are arguably a hindrance weirdly to bicycles being prioritised as a mode of transport. But the distaste for them frequently goes dangerously too far.

April 16, 2021

Fri, 16 Apr 2021 12:14:35 +0000

Skitten making use of its little tower chamber again.

April 15, 2021

Thu, 15 Apr 2021 12:05:22 +0000

This joint has never been more important. One of the few live music venues left in Observatory. Closed during COVID but then reopened under new management.

Ever since the first juke box and then the first disco back in the 50s, the eons old practice of live music recitals has effectively been rendered obsolete. But by making a big show out of it, that death has been postponed. But it’s often quite a hard sell against the very flamboyant and immersive forms of entertainment it now has to compete with. But for those of us who love it and do it, there’s no real substitute.

April 15, 2021

Thu, 15 Apr 2021 10:56:39 +0000

Astonishingly, some suburban houses in Cape Town have retained their original low walls without their inhabitants being murdered nightly, presumably.

Though I also know it’s a relief when people don’t regularly hop into your yard. Cape Town is a cruel city. And being “middle class” here (actually being in the top 5% nationally) puts you in a weird place in terms of how to react to the countless people struggling at the margins. There’s a lot of ignoring, pretence, occasional sympathy, and the ever-popular blaming-the-poor-for-their-poverty.

April 15, 2021

Thu, 15 Apr 2021 07:27:24 +0000

Nataraja dances in the dawn light coming in our bedroom window.

April 14, 2021

Wed, 14 Apr 2021 16:48:25 +0000

More Autumn skies.

April 11, 2021

Sun, 11 Apr 2021 19:55:06 +0000

Observatory begins to settle into winter.

March 19, 2021

Fri, 19 Mar 2021 15:41:25 +0000

A truer love you’ll seldom see.

The weather is beginning to turn in Cape Town. And Skitten is far more tolerant of this kind of thing than she was a few weeks ago. It’s my birthday which, for symbolic reasons, means it’s Skitten’s birthday too. It’s 14 now. A venerable creature. It still doesn’t know anything. A little less feisty and not quite as adventuresome. But otherwise very much the same strange little animal that @withoutaleaf sent me from Maatjiesfontein back in 2007.

May 09, 2020

Sat, 09 May 2020 17:14:31 +0000

@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.

May 04, 2020

Mon, 04 May 2020 09:42:54 +0000

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.

April 04, 2020

Sat, 04 Apr 2020 11:58:08 +0000

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

March 27, 2020

Fri, 27 Mar 2020 08:14:44 +0000

It’s the new normal here on my plague balcony of privilege (feat. Mr Crumb).

May 16, 2019

Thu, 16 May 2019 15:28:00 +0000

@withoutaleaf wins today’s Trinket pic competition. The weather’s changing and the cats are becoming sun-seekers. (btw, if you want to see pics I don’t post here, check out our @krakatoa_band account).

May 03, 2019

Fri, 03 May 2019 14:22:33 +0000

A local monument to the great, cosmic turtle, A’tuin - which slowly paddles through space on its mysterious journey, it’s head full of ineffable thoughts, with the world borne on the shoulders of the four elephants that ride on its back.

May 03, 2019

Fri, 03 May 2019 14:17:30 +0000

School kids walking past parliament and a statue of the first prime minister of The Union Of South Africa. Maybe they’ll get to live in a country that’s not exploited by tyrants or thieves.

April 26, 2019

Fri, 26 Apr 2019 17:00:24 +0000

This is our last autumn in Ash Street. We’ve lived here since 2007. Without any plan in that regard we’ve both lived here longer than either of us has ever lived anywhere else. We’ll miss wonderful neighbours but it’ll be good to be moving… a full 3 or 4 blocks away.

April 18, 2019

Thu, 18 Apr 2019 15:39:51 +0000

Tulip… Y u no open?