First post of December

It's the third of December, which means that my holiday is only 11 days away! I can hardly wait. I've finished the December deadlines, and now I'm spending my days trying to convince uncooperative people to grant me interviews for my January stories before we close on 14 Dec. But, being uncooperative people, they are not cooperating in the slightest. Strange, that.

I have realised something about the general South African and blogs: most of them don't have one and few even enjoy reading other people's blogs. So imagine my excitement when I discovered that some of the poor people on my monthly communal email list have actually been following my blog!

This could of course be because I tell them to in every email I send, but seeing nobody usually follows my advice I doubt it. I'm left to assume then, that they either really like this blog or they have way too much time on their hands. It's probably the latter, being December, and my comments and number of visitors will almost certainly drop drastically come the new year, but for posterity's sake I am going to enjoy deluding myself that their reason is in actual fact the former. It's better for self-esteem, self-acceptance and all those psychological good things that motivational speakers always talk about.

Nationwide could do with some of those now. The airline has had its entire fleet grounded and is facing suspension. Don't get me wrong - I'm all for suspending unsafe airplanes, but I feel sorry for a) the 6 000 passengers that were stranded without an option of catching another flight and b) the Nationwide staff that have nothing to do with maintenance, but who are still being clobbered along with the rest.

So sympathy to Nationwide employees, and rude words to SAA.