Litigium

“Put on a jersey or you’ll catch a cold.” Some people are so afraid of death that they neglect life. Mothers (most of them) can't kelp themselves from transferring their own life experience, or often lack thereof, to their offspring by proxy, so I was not particularly old when I realised that other kids were often allowed to do things I wasn’t. Victorian culture dies hard everywhere, but more so in the colonies, so my parents' generation still (felt they) could use the passepartout "because I say so" - try that on the kids of today! Having survived to nearly 50, I can attest that none of the activities were particularly life threatening, although I somehow instinctively knew that doing them would give me a life experience I’d be richer with than without. I must have been about 7 when the teachers at the Jewish Day School – refreshingly progressive for the 1960s – got my mother to take me to a child therapist because I ha...

My father was born at the beginning of the 20 th Century when the telephone was still in its infancy. The technological strides driven by the communications needs of two world wars took a while to filter down to the general public, and during my childhood in the ‘60s, I’d often hear my mother ask a friend she’d met “do you have a telephone?” and even giving her number to the many who still didn’t. It was well into the ‘70s before I first encountered two telephones in one house. My Grandpa was a doctor, so a black Bakelite crank-handle “cheese dish” stood in the surgery and another (stylishly edged by Ericsson in shiny brass) on the mantelpiece of the drawing room upstairs. Even then, a call had to be “reserved” with an operator. By my teens, chirruping “cricket” telephones had replaced most of the Bakelite monoliths and direct international dialling was an (expensive) reality but my father was nearing retirement before there was a telephone on every desk in the office and push-...

" A ccept nothing, B elieve nobody, C onfirm everything" is the traditional sound advice given to any trainee policeman or cadet newspaper reporter... Life, as I discovered early on, is not a popularity contest. I quickly realised that the perceived (preached) benefits of conformity – something our society encourages, applauds and rewards – fade into insignificance beside the benefits of free thought, an attitude which itself makes one relatively immune to the spears and arrows of the masses. If you don’t realise all by yourself that you are “different”, society will make you acutely aware of it soon enough. There are all kinds of clichés like “the swimmer who swims upstream becomes a stronger swimmer”, but there is no more obvious yardstick for the importance of conformity to the majority of human beings than the conformity experiments  of Dr Solomon Asch  in the 1950s. They say what doesn’t break us makes us stronger. Unless you hav...

It has often been asked of me, especially by those in my new homeland, why I chose to leave South Africa , a country that enjoys “such marvellous weather” and commands “such breathtaking natural beauty”, to live in Western Europe . The short-version knee-jerk response is “if you have to ask, you’ll never know”. However, taking into account that many (dare I say most?) Europeans have an image of South Africa gleaned from travel posters, or TV bytes of Nelson Mandela being welcomed into freedom by ecstatic multi-cultural crowds, the answer demands more explanation. But how does one condense the feelings, emotions and cold, hard facts that contribute to a decision to uproot oneself and leave the country of one’s birth for the uncertainty of self-imposed exile? After all, unlike some of my fellow non-European expatriates, I was not fleeing a war or political persecution. Granted, I had lost my job due to the post-apartheid policy of 'affirmative ac...