“Drive Safely. Think of your loved ones.” I had been in the taxi for three minutes, and already there was no doubt where I was.  Where else could I find an exhortation to safe driving followed by a noble justification calibrated to make even the best driver feel just a little bit guilty? Where else could I be traveling along an urban six-lane highway under a canopy of trees, with neatly clipped hedgerows on each side and in the median?… Read the rest

A Day in the Park. … Read the rest I have an aversion to the whole notion of royalty. To me it seems archaic, elitist, and about as antithetical to democratic ideals as it is possible to be. After all, there is at least a chance that the next head of the North Korean state won’t be a Kim. And I hate crowds. So I was not at all pleased when I discovered that a two day stopover in London I had planned many

It was December 1976… Read the rest, I had just finished my first year of university in Johannesburg, and I was traveling outside of Southern Africa for the first time. For someone like me, it was almost a foregone conclusion that my first foreign journey should be to England. After all, both I and my home country had strong links to the place. South Africa had been a British colony for century or so when it gained independence in 1910, and one

Part One of Three in which the author realizes that he owes his existence to steam, colonialism, and racism. … Read the restWhen I first visited London 35 years ago the city was very English, as I had expected it to be. Bus drivers, hotel receptionists, waiters, and immigration officials were English, and I heard English spoken on the Underground (actually, the English seemed to prefer not to speak on the Underground, but if they had spoken, they would have spoken English.) Today’s