Things to do in the Mother City: April
Spier: Signature belies the estate’s depth
The historic Spier wine farm located just outside Stellenbosch has more than 300 years experience in making wine. It is now a giant in the South African wine industry and has worked hard to get their name out and expand their brand.… Read more
February gig guide
It’s Valentine’s Day this month. Just a warning: the moneygrubbers will be out to get you for the sake of lurve. Fuk’em. You’ve got better things to spend your long-awaited January pay cheque on (if you’re lucky enough to get a pay cheque, that is, you 20 percenter, you).
… Read moreA Moveable Feast: Hemingway gives us the gift of now
Never travel without a book. Fair enough. So it was forgetting to pack a novel that led me to buying Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast at the airport bookshop before boarding a flight upcountry.
With his love of hunting, game fishing, bull fighting, being wounded in World War I and on the front lines of both the Spanish civil war and World War II as a journalist, as well as having four wives, Hemingway has become synonymous with masculinity, often deemed to be toxic, to the point of being a parody.… Read more
A red, a white, and a rosé walk into a bar
Dry January. It’s a thing. Every January thousands around the globe abstain from alcohol for an entire month. I can’t say I’ve ever tried it myself. You see, my birthday is in January, and what good is a birthday if you can’t toast with some champagne?… Read more
Hansard: edge-of-your-seat repartee
Fiona Ramsay and Graham Hopkins are a racy duo. Phenomenal. Hitting 90 miles an hour around the turns in their repartee. The comebacks and self deprecations fast and furious, going off at tangents and on a camber in transparent bids to avoid the crash of self realisation.… Read more
Sewage on the seashore
The City has been proactive about closing beaches following reported sewage spills, but nothing done at other beaches where tests show water is highly polluted
Activists concerned City’s routine coastal water quality testing is little more than a tick-box exercise
Water quality test results from December show numerous beaches were too polluted for safe swimming, but nothing was done by the City despite other beaches having being closed during the holiday season following reported sewage spills.… Read more
Major development node slated for Stranfontein
The neglected, derelict Strandfontein Pavilion has been earmarked to become a new mixed use development node featuring almost 1,200 residential units with retail and ecologically sensitive recreational facilities to banish the resort’s apartheid origins.
Currently isolated from Strandfontein’s urban edge, it is hoped the development will spur further private investment in the surrounding area, upgrading the under-used False Bay coastline between Muizenberg and Strand.… Read more
Tourism is back on track, along with carbon emissions
Cape Town tills are expected to ring as summer visitor numbers are back to pre-covid levels, but as a long-haul destination, the economic boost also contributes to the climate crisis.
The tourists are back. Covid lockdowns decimated the tourism and hospitality sector, with job losses across the board in 2020, but according to City and Province officials, Cape Town and the Western Cape are expecting a bumper summer season, with visitor numbers back up to pre-Covid levels.… Read more
Mayor’s war on sewage – one year on
Cape Town still has a sewage pollution crisis, but mayor ‘inherited a bad hand’ and is ‘on the right track’
It has been a year since Geordin Hill-Lewis donned Cape Town’s mayoral chain and declared the city’s sewage pollution crisis a top priority, yet many of the biggest pollution problems remain largely unchanged.… Read more