Carol’s Column

I stood in a queue doing my thing with 2 799 804 other as-white-as-driven-snow South Africans. Humour flowed.

So, Nelson Mandela has a strong suntan. A suntan is attractive and anyway, a black president is better than having a bunch of Nazis governing us.

This referendum is the only way that F W could get 15 million blacks to pray for him

Forget the emotional stress, the in-bred guilt of being an ex white oppressor just by virtue of having lived here forever.

It is exhausting living in this new South Africa of ours.

Township violence distressed them, as did prevarication on the part of political leaders. The onion tree liked Mandela, while the maple visibly twitched for De Klerk.

Every bonsai has the right to determine its own future.

Our status symbol is small, black and exclusive, is a member of the ANC (as in African National Canines) and responds to the name of Henry-the-Hog.

Revolutions might come and go, but it's advertising that will bring about true change in this country.

I dashed into the kitchen and turned on my true strength of South African steel washing machine that would lighten my load and enable me to attend a protest meeting for the equal rights of goldfish.

Have joined both Christian Students' Association, the Muslim Students' Associations and the Black Students' Society.

I tied the kids to the roof rack and 18 hours later we limped into the Mother City which hasn't changed at all. That wonderful mountain's still standing, as are the "Whites Only" beach signs, and the thousands of up-country visitors.

and an Other Coloured SA citizen (perhaps green, purple, blue) was 07, while a non-SA citizen called Other Coloured (possibly lilac, puce or indigo) would be 17.

When people make you laugh, you should be grateful and this whole voter registration show is humour at its very best.

That's my point, we're becoming so damn normal and I find that heartening.

Ah, Carol, you made me smile when I was in prison.

Humour is like a desert flower. It blooms under the most arid and adverse circumstances with a brilliance that shines through.

Powerful, effective, cynical, ironical, often acerbic and sometimes bitingly vicious, our humour is part of our culture. It completes us, makes us whole.

Hopefully she will never learn that so does napalm and mustard gas.

Peter Marais should be re-deployed. Robert Mugabe should be re-deployed, but elephants?

I think this Christmas God wrapped His wings around us

If a scrum isn't the ultimate in male bonding, then I don't know what is.

Not for him the open veld, a weekend in the Kruger Park with hyenas snuffling his sleeping bag and being woken by the trumpeting of an elephant.

Not for him deep blue skies, a warming sun, the smell of sizzling boerewors and the sight of Western Province playing magnificent rugby under the oaks at Newlands.

Each night we'd stop just as the sun had dropped over the edge of the world and abandoned us to darkness.

The more remote, the better, the more inaccessible, the more desirable, and even our tent has a distinctive and unique quality.

So what, might you ask, was I doing sitting on a bobbing raft, surrounded by ferocious crocodiles, in the middle of Kariba Dam?

Besides, everyone has to catch a Tiger fish before they die.

Each dawn, in all his bald-headed splendour, he perches on the window-sill and graciously accepts the tit-bits handed to him.

In Africa she can get used to the sound of the Lazar boys snoring, that's good enough.

The best one ever in Botswana with our trusty four-by four stuck in three metres of mud surrounded by elephants and lion and we knew we were the luckiest people in the world.

a few cars came by and they all stopped to watch the herd of elephants at the hole, but not one of them looked at the tortoises.

I opened an eye and found a Cape Vulture glaring at me. I thought, he's strategically placed to pick my bones when I fall.

And so we did because let nobody accuse us of being a normal, sane family like any other.

Motherhood is fraught with difficulties. In fact, I've come to the conclusion that there's only one way to handle motherhood. Like alcoholism, it has to be taken day by day.

IT IS not inexpensive educating children and there's no doubt that had I known what I know now, I would have had .7 of a child instead of four.

My hair isn't high-lighted by the sun, it's no-lighted by age.

All my life I've wanted to be a comfortable, solid, tree trunk, Omo sofa mother.

In marriage one learns that some things are better left unsaid.

I know you marry a man for better or for worse, but to have to put up with his bald-headed nasturtium-eating relative, is stretching things a little far for any young fortyish-or-so bride.

It keeps me warm, doesn't answer back, doesn't snore or make night sounds, doesn't switch on the light to see what time it is and is always welcoming.

The only suede thing in this household was my husband's bald patch

Life is short and we should not be dictated to by blazers, trousers or even jerseys.

And this is the man I promised to cherish, love, honour and feed for the rest of my life.

THERE is nothing quite like the subject of clothes to rend a family apart at the seams. So to speak.

An iconoclast by nature, the Hog has always demanded his own space, which is how it should be.

People are smiling at me who have never smiled at me before.

MOTHERS of the world unite. Cast off your pickled cucumber sandwiches, cakes that fail and cricket matches that never end. For you have nothing to lose other than your sanity.

AT the third traffic light on the way to school yesterday, I learned I was redundant.

Hell hath no fury like a spurned goldfish I discovered when I mistakenly threw Golda Mayo down the toilet while cleaning out the fishbowl.

There was the champagne cork of our marriage, the one that had exploded joyfully from the bottle and hit the resident rabbi in the eye.

I'm the only one in the school without lice.

As our lice faded, so did our friends. We no longer shared the new status symbol with them.

A needed drudge is a many splendid thing.

A knock-kneed man in puce was trying to sell me God.

With reluctance, I climbed out. Good heavens, my feet were pleated.

Italy has more kinds of pasta than it has people. And they are all hanging in our house (the pasta, not the Italians).

It was true, the foul fowl had simmered away.

Remember that well-known African saying 'life's too short to whip an ostrich egg'.

And this morning, for breakfast, I gave him a frozen marrow bone stuffed with peanut butter.

as the baby is born, the angel touches it on the lip and everything is forgotten as learning is a joy, and the baby has a lifetime to learn again.

I'd always believed that when I died, I'd drive to heaven revving the gears of either a long-wheel base Landrover with a lift-up hatch for angel spotting, or a vintage MG.

After wading through enough bureaucracy to make an earthworm puke, I gave up.

it gave me great pleasure to edge sideways and crush his big left foot with my very large plaster cast.

Cars are like men. They give you endless pleasure and a great feeling of security the older they get.

It takes courage to marry a man whose mother says he has aristocratic feet and uses your razor to shave his beard.

A bath tub with a sail.

I discovered that I had one function in this marriage — that of balancing the boat.

I like dogs that look like dogs not walking fur coats, I hate rats and most of all I like a husband who snores because at least I know he's still alive.

I think life's too short to darn socks and sew on buttons.

Every genius has an off-day.

They say that the latest in-thing in Johannesburg's a grobbel. Has anyone a grobbel or two to spare?

Which is the perfect way to spend Mother's Day — if you're a father.

What other hamster has a police escort to hospital?

You know it's cold when you find the kids skating in the bath tub, the goldfish frozen in the bowl and Liquorice-the-labrador stuck to the side walk.

Only yesterday, we decided to sell the house in order to pay Nic.

That's one of ours.

It was massive, it must have weighed at least 50 kg. Well, 2½ kg anyway.

Supper was a surprise. Boiling water and toast.

I was hoping you wouldn't notice. I couldn't find the soup.

I mean, imagine a shop that sold new fathers for a reasonable price — or even better, offered trade-ins on the old models.

It was then I realised I was still one-eye done, as the expression goes.