ANGUS SHAW Blog

First the good news …

The bad news is that after years of neglect this is not being done as a public service.  A summit meeting of heads of state and government is coming soon....

Times they are a-changin’

After my recent piece from chaotic, dispirited and decrepit Harare I dug out something I did for Skyhost, the Air Zimbabwe in-flight magazine 15 years ago when we still had...

So sorry, dear Valentine

As local legend has it, the hopeful young man takes roses to a girl on Valentine’s Day. Jeez, she cries, I can’t eat flowers! She would have preferred bread, maize...

How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

Stanley Kubrick’s classic film comes to mind all these years later. It’s about psychotic leaders hurling us towards disaster in the Cold War era. In Kubrick’s script, how to love...

Postcard from Harare

  Our ruler and his entourage have met Ms Maloni, Italy’s neo-fascist prime minister. What is unusual about this is that we don’t often mix with her kind. Our body...

Clint and the silly King Cnut

Clint, as in Eastwood, the actor, film director and producer, is the abbreviation of the first name Clinton, like Dick is for Richard. A dick, as a male appendage, can...

The ball is in your frying pan now

Harare, Zimbabwe Language, they say, is a wonderful thing, a moveable feast of expression and misunderstanding. An advert in our paper said: SOFIA. Only $849.99. A flight to the Bulgarian...

Folly through a looking glass

  Sudan skyline, 2024   Back In Vietnam, an estimated 3 million people died over a decade, most of them civilians. Some 280,000 US-allied forces, about 58,000  American soldiers among...

How to uphold “the sanctity of women”

Harare, Zimbabwe Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, who is getting tactical nuclear weapons from Putin, has been here in 2023, followed by President Ebrahim Raisi of Iran, not to be confused...

‘Entebbe hostages played football’

Interestingly, one of the hostages aboard that Air France flight hijacked by Palestinian militants to Uganda and freed by Israeli special forces in 1976 has said in a recent radio...