Observatory

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. ...

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

More Autumn skies.

Observatory begins to settle into winter.

Not a single pic posted in July. Well, I’ve not gone more than a handful of kilometres from home. I’ll probably be one of those people with no pictures of this time that anyone in the future could recognise as being from the pandemic. But then I suppose there’ll be no shortage of pics of empty streets and masked faces. I’ll be pleased to look back at a picture of Trinket spotted through the kitchen window getting up to sneaky shenanigans.

On the way back from the shop, I stopped to talk to this handsome cat who was watching the world go by.

Skitten loves its new house. The upstairs carpeting is a neverending joy to it. And the balcony, especially now that it’s spring, is its pure delight.

The shuttered remnants of Gandalf’s - for about 20 years the main place for undergrads and other young people to go and enjoy cheap booze, crowds jacked up on youth hormones, and rock ’n roll music. Ian McKellan was once photographed hanging off the sign while shooting something in the area. I played a couple of good shows there though even when the place first opened I felt like a teacher chaperoning at a high school dance. Rock ’n roll is now on its last legs as a mass youth movement.

Off Lower Main Road Obz yesterday. Not much is holding out against gentrification now. The city is content for the few who weren’t already pushed off to distant wastelands by Apartheid to be pushed off to distant wastelands by rising rents and redevelopment. At top right is a mosque that I didn’t know existed. The daily call to prayer is emblematic for me of our diverse city and the history of that diversity in building it. Islam in SA began with Indonesian and Malaysian slaves being sent here by their Dutch colonists. Political prisoners too. The first book ever written in Afrikaans was the Qran, translated by a political prisoner from ‘Dutch Batavia’, Tuan Guru. ...

Trying out new jpeg settings on my little Fujifilm XE1. Never used a digital camera I liked this much. Straight out of camera jpegs can be tweaked to look so great.