Articles

… The wonderful litema posters on the wall of the arrivals hall, Bloemfontein airport As you wait for your luggage, enjoy pictures of fantastic local artform, litema (pronounced dee teh mah), on the walls and your suitcases seem to arrive a little too soon! This is an...

The N6, between Bloemfontein and the Eastern Cape coast, closed this morning because of a strike, is now open again. Workers involved in the rebuilding of the N6 gathered at one of the stop/go points on the roadworks to stage their protest and the national road was...

We’ve had another water switch-off – ‘they’ say it’s once again because of the road works. It’s a problem for everyone – so why do I bother moaning? Because – take a look at the laundry (below). When the municipality switches the water back on after an outage it’s...

ALL the forecasts say this will be a shocker of a weekend: snow, rain and freezing weather around most of the country. On the way back from walking the dogs in the veld this morning we passed a little group of children with an older woman at the side of the road; they...

Great news for Smithfield and the Eastern Cape: the defunct Tiffindel ski resort has been sold (on auction) to new owners who hope to have the place running and taking guests by next winter. Tiffindel used to offer South Africans a home ski experience and it gave a...

… in the same week as BirdLife SA announces new project to track birds via satellite So excited! My friend Crystelle Wilson and I were atlasing a pentad outside Smithfield earlier today when we spotted a Secretarybird far off to our left in the veld. It was raining...

You’d think that the walls of a house would protect water pipes against even heavy frost. Not so! We’ve had years when winter temperatures went down to -13C; last week’s frost was not nearly so heavy, but the damage has been serious. The water pipe outside a bathroom...

Returning festival fundi, Duncan Hodge, stayed over with us last night; Smithfield is the ideal distance to break a journey from Grahamstown to Gauteng. This time he arrived without his Dalmatian, Daisy, so my dogs were a little disappointed. He saw a couple of shows...

Post box – platteland style We don’t have street deliveries in Smithfield, so the post office is a popular place. When I arrived to clear my post last week I noticed this red box, swinging open, with a collection of letters lying inside. It was a little sad, actually;...

Colleague and friend, Charlene Smith, is now living in Boston, USA. She’s hard at work writing, studying at Harvard, producing a great travel app (more about this soon) and generally living the stimulating life that New England encourages. Her latest production,...