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Some New Year’s eve dancing music. Happy New Year 2009!
I’ll be back on the blog on the 4th January. Happy holidays!
I love a good road-trip.
At the end of a busy, intense year, there’s nothing quite like miles and miles of open road. And before long, there will be days of good friends and warm beaches and cold wine.
But it’s not just the destination I love. It’s the whole process of getting out of the city and watching the countryside change. The more I drive along the N1 and its subsidiaries, the more the nothingness of the Karoo unfolds. A nothingness that clears the mind of the noise of the year gone by. It punctuates the end of a year. Happily.
Or it would do if tomorrow, when I set off, it wasn’t in the company of one husband and three children (how did this happen to me?).
I have vague memories of worse, though.
As a child of the platteland, I remember my parents taking me and my one-two-three-four-FIVE siblings on a trip through Namibia.
In a Volkswagen Beetle.
Seriously.
Three children sat on the back seat. One lay in the compartment under the rear window. My toddler brother sat on my mother’s lap in the passenger seat with his leg in a plaster cast.
Nobody wore a seat belt.
We didn’t have a car radio. We couldn’t imagine anything like a set of DVD screens to hook on the back of the seats. I may have read something. My sister – aged 12-ish – knitted. By the time we got to Windhoek, she had finished a scarf with a neatly knotted ‘Fuck’ worked into it. She had decided to travel no further with her family.
My kids are too young to opt out like that.
I guess I’ll be stuck with them for the long drive I’ve planned.
Today Obama announced that:
Today, I am pleased to announce two leading members of my health care team whose work will be critical to those efforts: Senator Tom Daschle and Dr. Jeanne Lambrew. I have asked Tom to serve not just as my Secretary of Health and Human Services – but also as Director of my White House Office of Health Reform. As such, he will be responsible not just for implementing our health care plan – he will also be the lead architect of that plan. Jeanne will serve as Deputy Director of this office, working closely with Tom on these efforts. Read More…
At a state funeral today, Mugabe said: “Now there is no cholera, there is no need for war.” Also, today the the United Nations raised the death toll from the crisis to 783.
Time to go, Mr Mugabe:
Today’s Guardian reports that over the past few weeks the Zimbabwean government killed diamond miners:
… a Zimbabwean air force helicopter swept over the hundreds of fleeing illegal diamond miners and mowed down dozens with machine-gun fire. After that the police arrived and unleashed the dogs that tore into the diggers, killing some and mutilating others. The police fired teargas to drive the miners out of their shallow tunnels and shot them down as they emerged. How many died in the assault two weeks ago is not clear but the miners say it was at least scores. Some bodies remain unclaimed and unidentified in Mutare hospital mortuary.
Our reporters are struggling to verify the number of miners killed.
And here is another magazine cover dedicated to one of the Jen/Brad/Jolie threesome the media is so obsessed with. Jennifer Aniston poses naked for the January cover of GQ!
People magazine says that in the GQ interview Aniston ‘pokes fun at her recent swipe at Angelina Jolie’.
“The funny thing is, people don’t realize we all go away to The Hamptons on the weekends,” jokes Aniston. “That’d be hysterical: I’ve got Zahara on my hip, and Knox…”