I’m not usually one for dramatised versions of true stories on the internet, but (if you ignore the third paragraph), this one doesn’t go over the top, and is an interesting account of the Koeberg bombing, with just enough whimsical input to give it that personal touch.
Some good insight into the way that MK and ANC operative worked in the Apartheid state, without too much detail bogging things down, and the personal story of Wilkinson – who is as far from James Bond as you could possibly imagine – gives it a very human edge.
I’ve wanted to go to Tristan da Cunha ever since I arrived in Cape Town. It’s definitely safer than some mid-Atlantic islands. However, as someone that doesn’t handle the sea too well, the several day boat journey (from just up the road) is a really big obstacle.
Still, the place looks absolutely amazing – like nowhere else on earth – and the community’s lifestyle and relationship with the sea is fascinating.
Here’s an NPR… docu-site? – I’m really not sure what to call this sort of content – all about life on the island and the people who live there.
Looks like a church. Was a church. Now a house. With a Tower Bar.
It’s what Jesus would have wanted.
Again, there is the modern interior design, sitting somewhat incongruously within the original church walls:
And the windows that are just too big for the bedrooms:
Says the blurb:
The best feature of the entire property has to be the glass walkway with glass flooring looking down over the living room providing access to the mezzanine area which is currently setup as a spectacular cinema room with 8 electric leather reclining chairs and a projector screen that comes down over the stained glass window making this a very special place to watch tv or movies.
And they’re not wrong. It does look a bit wow:
R27 million in today’s local money. Which seems like a lot (because it is), but you do get a whole churchand “a stunning Victorian orangery with rainwater storage and paved flooring which makes this a special place to relax and unwind.”
Fair point. I can never truly be at peace in an orangery that doesn’t have rainwater storage and paved flooring.
Mentioned briefly here, here is some more photography by Russian Arctic photographer, Evgenia Arbugaeva.
This is part of her series Weather Man, tracking the day to day activities of meteorologist, Vyacheslav Korotki for The New Yorker. It’s worth clicking through on this link to see all the images, but the New Yorker piece is behind a paywall, so I have shared the blurb below.
Yacheslav Korotki is a man of extreme solitude. He is a trained polyarnik, a specialist in the polar north, a meteorologist. In the past thirty years, he has lived on Russian ships and, more recently, in Khodovarikha, an Arctic outpost, where he was sent by the state to measure the temperatures, the snowfall, the winds. The outpost lies on a fingernail of a peninsula that juts into the Barents Sea. The closest town, by any definition, is an hour away by helicopter.
He has a wife, but she lives far away, in Arkhangelsk. They have no children. On his rare visits to Arkhangelsk, he has trouble negotiating the traffic and the noise. Arkhangelsk is not Hong Kong. Korotki is sixty-three, and when he began his career he was an enthusiast, a romantic about the open spaces and the conditions of the Arctic. He watches the news on TV but doesn’t fully believe it. Polyarniki were like cosmonauts, explorers for the Soviet state. There are fewer now. Who wants to live like this anymore?
Evgenia Arbugaeva, a photographer who grew up in the Arctic town of Tiksi, spent two extended stays with Korotki. “The world of cities is foreign to him—he doesn’t accept it,” she says. “I came with the idea of a lonely hermit who ran away from the world because of some heavy drama, but it wasn’t true. He doesn’t get lonely at all. He kind of disappears into tundra, into the snowstorms. He doesn’t have a sense of self the way most people do. It’s as if he were the wind, or the weather itself.”
These images are dark, atmospheric and gloomy, as one might expect for the far North. But it’s not always that way. Arbugaeva’s work Tiksi, in which she photographs a family in a dying Arctic town, bucks the trend by employing bright colours against the cold, white snow, cleverly painting a wholly different picture of an otherwise depressing scene and situation.
It’s amazing what subliminal messages can be shared with just simple light and colour.
It’s been a while since I put some music up on here. And this one is nothing new. Just an earworm I picked up and I can’t get rid of. And the more I ignore it… well… you know.
Incidentally, I think I picked this up from the Amy Lamé Superfans show, which is a great listen if you know how.
The Smiths (yes, I know, I know) episode featured one woman who gave up her job to attend all of the dates on their 1986 British tour. Next level stuff, and certainly fulfilling the name of the show.
Whatever next – flying 23,000km for a concert at the other end of the planet?
