The Daily Sun

No, I am not going to bang on about the weather again. It is sunny today though, and I love it!

I spoke to Safiso (you remember, the Soweto guide) about newspapers. He said that the newspapers in South Africa are not left or right wing and do not support any particular party. I don’t believe him, so I am reading them to find out.

Red tops are always a good place to start. The Daily Sun’s tagline is “Make Noise!”. This is always the first of their many exclamation marks. I have always been against the exclamation mark, except when it is really necessary! Inside I was interested to read about some guy who found a curse under his shop. He has had a rubbish time for 6 years, with most of his family dying from really bad headaches and business going sour. The curse (tokoloshe) consisted of “a lizard, a key, a woman’s bra (not a man’s bra), a rat, a baby’s dummy and a human shit!” (their exclamation mark, not mine) and was found under the pavement by a sangoma (I am guessing a witch doctor of sorts). After digging it up, the sangoma burned the evil muthi and everything appears to have been much better since. If anyone puts a poo and a bra under my house I am going to go mental. But, to reflect, this is just the sort of poo that you read in the UK Sun, so that is reassuring, or not. In fact Safiso and I had a discussion about papers. He said that the Sun was full of unbelievable stories. I started off by trying to relate “Freddie Star ate my hamster” and diverted onto that story when they found a double decker bus in the North Pole.

The Sunday Independant is a bit more words, fewer EXCLAMATION MARKS! and quite a lot of odd interest stories. I think it is like the Observer, ie pish. It had a go at Trevor Manuel, the Finance Minister, who is raising some consumer taxes and, interestingly, plastic bags, airport taxes and road tolls. I say “interestingly”, knowing that approximately 1% of my already modest readership will find it interesting, but bugger it, let’s digress:

Driving the 350 odd km from Pretoria to Kruger cost a bit less than a tenner. And all with not one gantry in sight. Massive hard shoulders are abused at will; signposts are pretty good on the whole. When the traffic lights are out at a junction, you just take it in turns. Sarah was a fan of this, but we had a nightmare with it. Ah, the merry banter. Good old DfT.