The Desert

I've always like deserts. Since I was a kid. I still remember drinking a warmish coke at a small garage on the other side of Sesriem, and thinking that deserts are cool. There's space there. Nadine Gordimer once wrote - “A desert is a place without expectation”. She's right. The desert just is. Took a trip into the dunes yesterday afternoon. Even the grumpy teenagers asked to go again.

Street Photography

Street Photography originated in Europe, and is traditionally black and white. But colour is so much part of the whole fabric of society here, I couldn't do it in black and white without losing something in the translation. These were taken in a souq in Dubai, using only available light.

Late afternoon

Late afternoon is my favourite time of day. One of the advantages of living in the desert is that you don't have to drive far to get away from everyone, and still have a pretty cool place for a braai at sundown. And nobody gets to see that it's beer you're drinking instead of lemonade. This dune field is about 10km from home. The people in the pic are the two sprogs, the spousoid, and the BIL.

Jingle bells

To all of you that have been kind enough to read my blogs through the past year, may your Christmas be peaceful and safe.

Dreams are ten a penny..

What did you want to be when you grew up? How different is reality to what you thought it was going to be? We were all going to be successful and happy and live long exciting lives…. And then you discover that life is more complex than that. The girlfriend you love pisses off and marries some other doos, and the chic you do marry gains 30 kg just after you marry her and decides she doesn’t like sex anymore. What you study to be at university is suddenly not quite as good because of the downturn in that specific sector of the economy, and becoming a plumber would have made you a helluva lot richer than studying medicine for 6 years. And yes, you can now afford to buy the Porche you were going to drive when you were 30, but then the kids can’t go to university and the house will definitely not be paid for, and anyway – you now have a boep and you’re bald and the chicks don’t dig old fat people in sports cars. And on top of that driving the car to work every day in Joburg is not quite the same as parking it in front of the casino in Monaco after you’d raced it down all the way from Paris where you were going to have that little apartment overlooking the Eiffel tower. And you’ve given up on the small ship in the harbour because you get seasick…

Me? I was going to be a chopper pilot…