This is daddy and I on a novelty photo badge we got at the Rand Show when I was five-years-old.
You can tell from my chewed-on smile that I wasn’t feeling particularly photogenic that day.
Today, I’m grateful my parents made me sit for this photo. It reminds me of all the things that link me to him; beyond personality, phenotypes and the fact that I love to wear hats just as much as he did.
Some muslims have a tense relationship with photographs, especially those of their dead.  I don’t.

My mum used to keep a songbook in High School. She’d listen to Springbok Radio and write down the lyrics of her favourite songs. I used to do something similar, except I had Google and printed out the words to stick into a plastic folder. Her method definitely had more romance to it. Her writing is also almost exactly the same today as it was when she was in Std 8 (She wasn’t sabotaged by keyboards). I didn’t inherit her legible penmanship.

These are my memories manifested; a badge and a notebook weighted with all the imagery and associations I osmositise  into them. They’re just things though; easily lost or destroyed because of this tangibility. Short-lived signifiers. But their signified is tatooed straight onto DNA.

Note to self: stop wasting life playing Bubble Shooter.

These n00bly executed desktop wallpapers are free for you to download, use and share.
Read more

A nine-year old girl was killed after a hit-and-run incident on Jan Smuts Avenue in Johannesburg this morning.
The child, on her way to school, was waiting for a taxi when the accident occurred.
The only passenger in the minibus said she felt the taxi hit something just before the driver stopped. “He demanded I leave the taxi right then and gave me my R7.50 back. I didn’t understand what was happening. It was only when I got off the taxi and he reversed and then drove off, that I saw,” she said.
The passenger could not recall the license plate number of the taxi. The driver remains unidentified.
–

That’s what the news story would read like, perhaps including other details like the eye-witnesses who were on the street at the time and the name of the passenger if she did not want to remain anonymous. There would even be a quote from the victims distraught father, her schoolteacher, the police, an outraged city official even. Her school would’ve been identified by the embroidery on her uniform. Her name would be on the schoolbooks in her bag.

I don’t know if anyone has written the story about what happened to that nine-year-old schoolgirl this morning. My colleague was the passenger in the taxi. That’s how I know.

And this is all I know.
And now you know.
Please remember her and her family in your prayers.

–update (April 25)– The story was covered by The Times