Aunt Prudence strikes again

Few readers know it but The Stoep Talk Organisation – the holding company for the Stoep Talk Column – has a rich history of helping people and at one time ran an agony column by “Aunty Pru”. Readers were invited to send her their problems.
Mindful of how some agony columnists are said to make up [...]

Why I was so heavy as a kid

An old friend, Adrian Steed, emailed to say, “Congratulations to all who were born between the 1930s and early 1970s.
“We survived despite there being no childproof lids on medicine bottles; riding our bikes without helmets; spending babyhood in cots painted with lead-based paints…”
Stop right there.
Don’t joke about our lead-contaminated world. We might have survived [...]

What’s all this **** then?

Not long ago there was a fairly well-founded  rumour that  Britain’s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds had banned the use of the word “cock” when meaning a male bird.  What had happened was this: an article had been published in one of its journals in which it censored the phrase “cock blackbird” replacing [...]

Needed: a men’s liberation movement

As Monday is National Women’s Day and I have to clean my bicycle I hope you’ll forgive me if I tell you, once again, of the time I wandered upstairs into my cranium to pay a visit to the Pondering Division of my Memory Bank.
It was on National Women’s Day in 1997 and this was [...]

Nothing (comprehensible) excites a geologist

I’ve received an interesting email based on an informal note by a mineralogist at Mintek in Randburg nroth of Johannesburg  commenting on how the media rarely present geologists to the general population.
If you discount the “sound bytes” on Discovery Channel’s volcano specials, they rarely get a mention, he says.
Well, no wonder…
A big American TV company [...]

Gorilla in their midst

It was The Selectors on the phone. They wanted to know if I still had contact with Freek Saunders, owner of the Ventersklip Private Zoo. Readers might recall the name – he owns Smiler, the semi-tame, 400kg gorilla that he trained to play rugby.
When I say “semi-tame”, I mean the gorilla’s discipline during games was about on a [...]

Secrets of the Staff Room

One of the most dangerous things a schoolteacher can do is ask pupils to write what they think of their teacher.
 ”My teacher is fat and screams all day,” wrote one child.
“Miss Smith is nice but not very bright,” wrote another.
An insightful view came from Glen Shaw of Rosebank Primary when he was in Std 1. [...]

Taxiing to a dead stop

TOGETHERNESS Amadeus Tshabalala jinks his Toyota mini-bus taxi (with BMW hubcaps) through the rush-hour traffic.
He is a confident man of high spirits, as evidenced by the stickers on his rear window: “God loves Taxi Drivers” and “Defeat Constipation – Travel by Taxi”.
On the front of his taxi, above a dent which, ominously, is in the [...]

Wartime and Sex Problems

I was (to use that unfortunate expression) ‘brought up’ in London but, as soon as the Germans began their timeous campaign to create much needed public open space in our particularly crowded borough, the Clarke family was transferred to the quiet little village of Streetly some twenty kilometres north of Birmingham.
My father, who was involved [...]

Murder in the kitchen

Bob Woodgate of the Retirement Association in Johannesburg gives lectures to those who are nearing retirement. He warns males that once they start staying home all day they must “at all costs” avoid telling their wives how to run the house.
“It is,” says Woodgate, “too late to start telling your wife how to rearrange [...]