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/ 12 November 2004
Communist, Afrikaner, author of Dracula: Bram Fischer was many things to many people. Christened Brambleberry Foxglove Fischer, he rejected his bourgeois roots in the 1920s and briefly changed his name to Bram Tractor Fish-packer after a visit to the Soviet Union. On his return to South Africa, flush with the royalties from Dracula, he committed himself to a life at the bar. Or something alogn those lines.
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/ 5 November 2004
An unforgiving deadline has distanced this column from destiny. At the time of writing, Monday night, George W Bush and John Kerry were still kneeling at their respective bedsides, reciting the Overlord’s Prayer (“Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray my yes-men their vows to keep -”), and the future seemed uncertain.
Indeed, Monday’s observer (trapped five days in the past by the slow wheels of print journalism), had to make do with supposition.
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/ 29 October 2004
The dam in question is brown and long, squeezed in as an affront by water nymphs between desiccated farmlands and the ruddy oven walls of the Cedarberg mountains to the east. Last weekend it was three-quarters full, but the sun-crushed bluegums on the waterline haven’t been dampened in years, and the grass, optimistically spreading across the mud flats, is already yellowing. But at least for now the dam has a domesticated air about it.
They call me Liewe Heksie, but Lavinia is my name. I’m the cleverest witch that I know, and I’ve even been to the moon. That’s how I used to say hello to the children. It used to rhyme, too, when the nice uncles at the SAUK let me do my show in Afrikaans. That’s all gone now. I’m not complaining, though, you understand: my new place is small and the roof leaks, but I have my health.
So splendid was the agenda, and so eloquently was it read, and so warm were the sunbeams streaming down through the stained-glass representation of the ascension of Idi Amin, that the delegates at the first sitting of the Pan African Parliament decided to adjourn for half an hour to indulge their democratic ecstasies.
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/ 17 September 2004
Try to remember the kind of September when grass was green and corn was yellow. Or, if yours was an upbringing blessedly free of musicals, try to remember being little enough to have had an eternally stubbed toe and only scabby brake-pads for knees. Try to remember having jam on your forehead and burrs in your hair.
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/ 10 September 2004
On a bright Alamagordo evening almost 60 years ago, a posse of scientists sat in an army hut chewing tobacco and comparing Bunsen-burner scars. The faintly frantic air in the room that night might have been a result of their plan, the next day, to trigger the first nuclear explosion in history. Or it might have been because there was a small possibility that the blast would ignite the planet’s atmosphere.
I think therefore I am, said Socrates, and he was right. Obviously times have changed, and today’s thinkers, people like Gene Roddenbery and Gnome Chomsky, are more insightful on the whole, but Socrates’s motto is still worth celebrating, as our capacity to think is what separates us from the animals.
Australian daytime TV tells us that everybody needs good neighbours. ”Naai-burrs,” goes the ditty, ”Ivry-bawdy nades good naaaaaiii-burrs.” And they’re right. Who wouldn’t want to live just a blackjack-infested lawn and splintering picket-fence away from Kylie Minogue? Granted, she was still just Leedle Coily back in her soap days, and not yet an internationally famous rabbit-toothed bottom, but still.
Last Saturday The Guardian reported that a Mr Moammar Gadaffi of Tripoli had expressed an interest in buying an English football team, specifically Crystal Palace. By Monday, as both the club and his aides denied the rumours, he had subsided into a deep gloom.