Having just finished Sapiens, it sounds like being around in the Stone Age wasn’t all that bad. Our happiness levels may well have gone downhill the moment we started sowing crops. What’s a sabertooth tiger attack every now and then matter if you’re happy!

I recently took up golf when moving back to Joburg. At this point I’d settle for a mid-handicap ‘mediocre’.

Any journalist who ever tried to do fieldwork in South Sudan. It’s hard enough in South Africa, but at least there’s no state-sponsored torture room waiting for curious writers.

The video kind. I’m an avid gamer. Lockdown has only thrown gas on this particular fire.

A Matrix-like ability to ‘download’ knowledge and skills. Golf, I’m looking at you…

Denys Reitz, Amartya Sen, General Grant, JRR Tolkien and Jeremy Bentham (but only if he is literally dead. It’s only right.)

Riviere, by Deftones.

Before joining DM’s family I had an application outstanding with the South African Army. So that would likely be where I would be!

Badger. Definitely a badger. The furry English kind from The Wind in the Willows, mind you.

My health, my privilege, my education, my family. That in the worst of times, I had more than enough.

I gave a friend a bespoke portrait of his dearly-departed bulldog. Literal tears were shed.

A message to the affirmative when asked out on a date from my now-wife, in July 2012.

Every morning there is a typo, broken link, or missing word in a sentence in First Thing, I get to live a fresh new horror.

That’s a toss-up between my camera and Ramsbury, the Destroyer of Worlds (a stuffed toy ram I bought in Japan years ago and lives where I live). Probably Ramsbury on account of he’s not so well-insured.

Anything my wife tells me. Right now that’s to empty the dishwasher.

Band of Brothers. Easily.

The aileron of a fighter jet would probably be quite fun.

Winter. Definitely. I spend summer mostly waiting for winter.

This would have to be poet and South Africa’s life-guide Lebogang Mashile.

The Covid-19 vaccine.

The Bronx Colors-brand orange spray tan we’ve had to watch run America for four years.