I have just come back from my first visit to New York. My equally addictive traveling companion took a photograph of me standing and smoking next to a big fat chimney which belched creamy  steam into Lexington Avenue to give our kind of zap sign to their ever so clean mayor, Mr Bloomberg.

Our hotel room was of course non-smoking so we dangled our arms out of a thin slit in the window to pollute the high sky and not our room for the sole reason that we were told that the hotel would fine us 250 dollars to de-tox it. Read the rest »

Three years ago I went to teach English to the locals of a remote village in the  former Transkei. I was 54 and a tad old I thought to be having a mid-life crisis which symptoms included nothing more dramatic than a restlessness, a constant shifting about in the seat of my oh-so-comfortable existence.

I lived 6 months of the year in an idyllic provençal village in France and the other 6 in another idyllic village Kommetjie, 35 minutes from Cape Town. There was no epiphanaic moment, my goals were clear and simple: I wanted to go back to teaching and where better than somewhere in Africa. Read the rest »