Grunt - 29 Mei 2013
11:23 (GMT+2), Tue, 28 May 2013
I’ve loved poetry most of my life. Yet you only have to mention the word poetry, and people throw up their hands in despair. They say it was too difficult, they...
Grunt - 22 Mei 2013
10:29 (GMT+2), Wed, 22 May 2013
As I sat down to write this column, I remembered that during last week I resolved to find something uplifting, cheerful, even funny. I was looking for just about anything...
Grunt - 15 Mei 2013
13:31 (GMT+2), Tue, 14 May 2013
Many years ago, I served, very briefly, on a SABC committee tasked with translating Afrikaans place names into English and English place names into Afrikaans. I never...
Grunt - 8 Mei 2013
13:26 (GMT+2), Tue, 07 May 2013
Last week I had a fascinating SMS from our notable – should that be notorious? – broadcasting corporation. The message suggested that I should get in touch...
Grunt - 1 Mei 2013
15:37 (GMT+2), Tue, 30 April 2013
I’m not a conspiracy theory fan, as you may already know. Not because I’m dissuaded by the idea but because I think, instead, that conspiracy is just another...
Grunt - 24 April 2013
11:24 (GMT+2), Wed, 24 April 2013
Do you have a Bermuda Triangle in your home? The Bermuda Triangle is where aeroplanes, ships, and people are reported to have vanished over the centuries; they are also...
Grunt - 17 April 2013
15:14 (GMT+2), Wed, 17 April 2013
Do you have a Bermuda Triangle in your home? The Bermuda Triangle is where aeroplanes, ships, and people are reported to have vanished over the centuries; they are also...
Grunt - 10 April 2013
11:34 (GMT+2), Wed, 10 April 2013
Five or six weeks ago, you may remember, I wrote about our friendly neighbourhood frog, who paid a couple of visits to our house, ensconcing himself – I always...
Grunt - 3 April 2013
16:15 (GMT+2), Tue, 02 April 2013
My paternal grandmother had a sideboard which dominated the room. It had the massive size and solidity of an Aztec monument. And like most sideboards at the time, it was...
Grunt - 27 March 2013
11:25 (GMT+2), Wed, 27 March 2013
When I first came to Bloemfontein about thirty years ago, I became aware quite quickly that I was entering a new environment, not merely geographically but culturally too...
Grunt - 20 March 2013
11:04 (GMT+2), Wed, 20 March 2013
When I was an undergraduate in Natal, decades and decades ago, one of the books prescribed for the History course was The Barbarian West 400-1000 by J H Wallace-Hadrill....
Grunt - 13 March 2013
16:08 (GMT+2), Wed, 13 March 2013
At my age, I believe I’m entitled to be a grumpy old man, if only on occasion. Having worked with the English language in various ways for decades, one of the...
Grunt - 6 March 2013
15:31 (GMT+2), Tue, 05 March 2013
When I was about thirteen, my parents carted me off to Nairobi, where we had to stay in a private hotel for a while before we moved into our own place. It was in the...
Grunt - 27 Februarie 2013
14:19 (GMT+2), Wed, 27 February 2013
Understandably, there have been some volatile reactions to the government’s idea of a tax on graduates. It seems rather strange that, in a country where there is a...
Grunt - 20 Februarie 2013
09:35 (GMT+2), Tue, 19 February 2013
It all began a couple of weeks ago during supper time. Our Scottie, not usually the most energetic of beasts, started sniffing the CD racks with a kind of manic...
Grunt - 13 Februarie 2013
10:10 (GMT+2), Wed, 13 February 2013
Sometimes, you get weekends like the one we had recently. We had to go to Johannesburg, a loathsome place at the best of times. So we headed off in a 35° Celsius...
Grunt - 6 Februarie 2013
07:52 (GMT+2), Wed, 06 February 2013
There were a few things on our shopping list as we set off for the mall on Friday afternoon. Friday afternoon isn’t a great time to go mall crawling; lots of people...
Grunt - 30 Jan 2013
10:15 (GMT+2), Wed, 30 January 2013
A number of items in the press caught my eye recently. The first was about the dozens of “illegal” businesses being conducted from suburban dwellings in...
Grunt - 23 Jan 2013
15:09 (GMT+2), Wed, 23 January 2013
We had to go to get our driving licences renewed a week or so ago. Neither my wife nor I was looking forward to it. Five years ago, the whole process had been an...
Grunt - 16 Jan 2013
15:56 (GMT+2), Wed, 16 January 2013
It’s always hard to write the first column of the new year. First of all, I don’t know what kind of festive season you had. Was it simply out of this world?...