At the end of my three-night Bruce Springsteen concert odyssey, I am sated and elated … and a lot stupider than I was before I started on this ground-hog day like live-gig marathon. I should wonder how The Boss feels – he’s the one who did the equivalent of three long-distance hauls in four days, […]
Tonight I am going to see Bruce Springsteen for the first time. It’s a big deal. Not because his live shows are legend. Or because his songs sustained me through some of the darkest hours of my life. But because it feels like coming home. I wasn’t ‘Born in the USA’, but I should have […]
People in South Africa are talking about little else but the state of Nelson Mandela’s heath. Since he was hospitalised three weeks ago the nation has been on a permanent vigil. Will he make his 95th birthday? Will he make tomorrow? While the rumours rise and ebb like the tides, and the Mandela family call […]
Halloween in Fort Lee, New Jersey, 197(?) I came across this picture by chance, while loading photos from last weekend’s Halloween shindig onto iPhoto. Halloween in Fort Lee, NJ, circa, I think, 1974. There was that tug of nostalgia as my mind gathered scattered fragments of longago. I remembered the broomstick my dad persuaded in […]
It was the fourth fire to come through in a month. The fourth time we nosed the smoke, felt the alert begin to tingle in some back part of the brain. The part that’s always on, like a radio station in the background. It’s telling you what to get together, just in case, while you […]