I recently went with my friends Manuela and Gail to Diagonal Street, a historic Joburg shopping street. Diagonal Street – known for its fabric, blanket, and muti (traditional medicine) shops – is so named because it runs on a diagonal for three blocks between Albertina Sisulu Road and Kerk Street. Manuela wanted to shop for fabric; Gail and I came along for an excuse to get out of the house.

Second in my Roadhouses of Gauteng series.  Browse all of my roadhouse posts or view a map of the roadhouses I’ve visited.

In my first roadhouse post, I mentioned I’d been meaning to do a roadhouse series for years but never got around to it. One of the reasons it took so long is because documenting roadhouses – at least in the way I want to document them – is not easy to do alone. I needed to find a roadhouse partner.

Tenth in an occasional series about my favorite coffee shops in Joburg.

Remember the good old days, when I used to meet people for coffee in interesting places and then blog about it? I’m ready to bring those days back.

Welcome to my second 2Summers 2021 Support Group Post. Here are some updates, both good and bad, since my first support group post:

1) Good: January 2021 is over.

2) Bad: It’s still raining in Joburg, for the 13th (feels like 130th) straight day.

First in my Roadhouses of Gauteng series. Browse all of my roadhouse posts or view a map of the roadhouses I’ve visited.

I’ve been planning to blog about South African roadhouses – the equivalent of American fast-food drive-ins – since 2015, when I ate lunch at the Casbah Roadhouse in Brakpan during a Joburg Photowalkers outing.

In the middle of 2020, I started seeing social media posts about the fence outside St. James Presbyterian Church in Bedford Gardens. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the staff at St. James were tying one white ribbon to the church’s palisade fence for every person in South Africa who died of covid-19.

Smokey, a.k.a. The Melville Cat, died more than three months ago on October 7th. Smokey himself delivered the news of his passing in a blog post the next day, and I intended to write my own tribute to him soon afterward. But for some reason I kept putting it off.

It’s Monday, January 11th, 2021. It’s dark and rainy in Joburg and the holidays are officially over. South Africa is suffering through a second wave of covid-19 – worse than the first wave, as many experts predicted, and likely to worsen further as millions of South Africans return to work in the big cities after celebrating the holidays at home. We’re back in Level 3 lockdown, with a strict curfew and alcohol sales banned again.