”With one fluid movement, Mabele’s assistant heaves the bleating goat over his shoulder and into the open boot of the car. He then repeats the process with the second goat, which seems more stoical about its fate. The goats soon settle down and two satisfied clients drive off. Goats are famously obliging.” The divide between town and country, urban and rural, is by no means clear-cut.

In Beslan, they are filling in the holes. The cemetery on the road from the airport is a sprawling mass of upturned earth, each fresh grave marked out from the surrounding mud by a perimeter of red bricks. The flowers and bare wooden stick crosses jut out from the rough grazing pasture.

Four of South Africa’s leading apparel retailers — Edcon, Foschini, Truworths and Woolworths — have announced the establishment of a trust fund to help research and implement solutions to sourcing in the local apparel manufacturing industry, as well as confirming their commitment to local sourcing.

‘First it was the fags, now it’s the drink,” came the murmur from the street corners outside Ireland’s pubs this week. With smoking banned from bars, drinkers are braced for a different government crackdown after statistics revealed a country killing itself with alcohol.

Martha Stewart, who built an empire teaching Americans how to cook, garden and entertain, is facing a very different lifestyle after being told to report to a prison in West Virginia by October 8. The United States bureau of prisons on Wednesday turned down a request by Stewart to serve her five-month sentence closer to her home in Bedford, New York, and her elderly mother.

For singletons and insomniacs, he is proving the ideal partner. This is a man who does not snore or fidget in bed, and who is happy to wrap a reassuring arm around his nearest and dearest until morning arrives. He does exist, but — inevitably — there is a catch. This man comes without a head and is stuffed full of foam. He is the pillow-shaped man, the latest sleeping aid from Japan.