Richard Stupart

I’m not taken too often to publishing sappy writing on this blog, and am even less prone to posting simply to show a link. But some stories are too beautiful not to be told, and pushed upon you, the reader. For the girl from Portugal I met for exactly one night and spent years learning Portuguese for, though I never saw her again. For someone loved more than she will ever realise as she goes to save the world. For every simple. honest story like those which may reside in your own life, do yourself a favour and read this damn link.

I’ve always loved that image, from Alice in Wonderland, of the rabbithole that goes on and on.  Far beyond where a rabbithole should really go, until you find yourself in a place that no rabbithole should contain.  If you pick the right rabbitholes, the whole enterprise can be rather rewarding.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve met God across his long walnut desk with his diplomas hanging on the wall behind him, and God asks me, “Why?”  Why did I cause so much pain?  Didn’t I realize that each of us is a sacred, unique snowflake of special unique specialness?  Can’t I see how we’re all manifestations of love?  I look at God behind his desk, taking notes on a pad, but God’s got this all wrong.  We are not special.  We are not crap or trash, either.  We just are.  We just are, and what happens just happens.  And God says, “No, that’s not right.”  Yeah.  Well.  Whatever.  You can’t teach God anything.

Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club, Chapter 30

Read the rest of this entry »

Last weekend was spent in Swaziland. If you have no idea where that is, then you would be forgiven. As long as you are not South African, in which case knowing the names of the landlocked nuggets of independence that constitute Swaziland and Lesotho really is expected. But I digress. Aside from such bizarre experiences crammed into 48 hours as a massage in a nightclub and watching a man dressed in an admiral’s outfit jam to the tunes in a club called House on Fire (Swaziland is landlocked. No I am not making this up), we also had a near brush with death on the first night traveling to the border.

Read the rest of this entry »

OK, so I have been a bit quiet of late – but for reasons that will be revealed soon enough, and which should explain my literary tardiness sufficiently for me to avoid the wrath of the reading public. Except Nichola – whose pesky wrath has hauled me out of writing laziness and back to these pages.  Wrath sent all the way from Japan for that matter. Wrath being the theme of the moment then, I will jump tenuously from that topic to an account of  irksome irritation with the Facebook generation recording their lives more than actually living them.

Read the rest of this entry »

This blog began with a post of cringeworthy literary value in August 2007 and now, a little over a year later, this will mark the 100th post I have managed to write. As a minor piece of nostalgia, and inspired partly by Lisa at Left Coast Cowboys, below is a list of some of the more read highlights since this blog began. I hope it makes interesting reading, and here’s to the next hundred posts!

Read the rest of this entry »

The certainty of life is death, but the passage of time between birth and death is ours and ours alone.

http://rustzeb.blogspot.com/2009/01/no-regrets.html

There are some strange winds blowing through the world these days. The post above was written by a blogger called Mad Asthmatic, whose blog I had just stumbled across via Left Coast Cowboys. Mad Asthmatic passed  away last week. That post was the last she wrote.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you are a regular follower of this blog, you will know that I live in South Africa. If you are a regular follower of South Africa (perhaps a shakier presumption – many South Africans aren’t), then you will appreciate what a bizarre, smile-inducing place this can be. This point was never clearer than at the traffic lights over the last three days where, on three separate occasions I received pamphlets like this. And this. And this.

Read the rest of this entry »

“In fact, I believe that we should think of freedom of the mind as a conscious and constant attempt to unthink order and authority. To think against hegemony of any variety…”

Breyten Breytenbach

We know that gravity exists because when I drop a ball, it falls down. It has done so since I was a small child, and people far older than me have been dropping things for a good deal longer and assure me that when they do so, the items have always fallen downwards, towards the earth. In all of recorded history – at least that which I know about – there have been no verified incidents of a ball (or anything else) ever falling naturally upwards towards the sky.

Read the rest of this entry »

Wandering aimlessly through the poor, occasionally nonexistent, lighting of Vilanculo’s brick city on Christmas night, I was trying to find an ATM to be able to draw enough money to return to Maputo the next day to meet friends who would be arriving there in a few days time. Revelers were spilling out of, or hovering loudly near the burnt orange light of dirty doorways – casual bars all, supporting Christmas night in the dust of the streets beyond. Read the rest of this entry »

Is it perhaps the case that few people really appreciate the size, scope and beauty of the world because they have been socialised out of it? Throughout school and, for those who finish tertiary education, you are dictated your world by others. By parents, by teachers. By your peers. And this, possibly, extends beyond formal education. We are a species that, excluding our pioneers, generally likes limits. Read the rest of this entry »