Category: this is south africa

Watershed Stripped Down

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A great evening out at Cafe Roux last night watching Craig Hinds playing acoustic versions of Watershed songs, plus some really decent cover versions as well. (Look, the hints were here.)

Bruce Springsteen, Leonard Cohen and John Legend were amongst the artists he covered, but it was just a really chilled Friday evening (he only worked out it was Friday 5 minutes before the gig – what a way to live) and a lovely intimate show, with plenty of chat and anecdotes from the man on stage.

Of course, different versions of all the “big” hits were there, too: Indigo Girl, Letters and Close My Eyes, and where they may lack a little in the lyrical sense, the soul, feeling and the gentle passion are really all there. And because of the nature of their tracks, they really lend themselves to acoustic adaptation.

But to be honest, the song that was really the highlight of the evening for me was Watch The Rain. Absolutely beautiful. Mesmerising and goosebump-inducing.

This being Cafe Roux, the audience were generally very well behaved, which was really great. A breath of fresh air. Well, save for Macbeth’s three witches at Table 2, that is. Never, ever underestimate the privilege of a group of white, middle-aged women to ignore the “Ssshhh – please let’s enjoy the music” signs on their (and every other) table, even at R300 a ticket for an acoustic gig, nogal. Honestly – just fuck off literally ANYWHERE else and talk – it’s really not hard.

But let’s (try to) not let that take away from a really great night out.

More of this sort of thing, please.

This was… different

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I don’t want to give too much away about this, but I was looking through some old South African music while I was dotting i’s and crossing t’s, and I found this, by famous local group Watershed (Indigo Girl, Letters):

A day out along Chapman’s Peak and down towards Cape Point, by the look of things.

A very decent cover version: nothing too wildly different, but certainly not exactly the same except for who’s singing it. Nice car, nice scooter… hey, wait a second! Weird twist.

Craig Hinds (for it is he) is still carrying the Watershed moniker and brand around SA. I’m rather tempted to go and watch one of his shows – just for old times sake.

Business must be good

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The economy is in a terrible state, so we’re told.

And actually, you only have to look around to see that that’s a pretty accurate synopsis. Unemployment is through the roof, costs are rising, inflation is up (and doesn’t seem to really match what’s happening on the ground), and we’re all feeling the squeeze. Multi-factorial stuff, but most of those factors can be narrowed down to a few knobhead politicians.

That’s for another post.

Sadly though, things still need doing. And we have a job that needs doing on our house, which is long overdue. It’s a project that will hopefully save us money in the long run, but it is going to cost a chunk of money up front. Like tens of thousands of Rands. And so, as any sensible person would, I contacted six different expert companies to get some comparative quotes.

Well, dear reader… Business must be better than we all thought.

Fair play, one contacted me back within a day, and we set some stuff up.

Less fair, but maybe ok kind of play, another one contacted me back after a few days, and (after a bit of misunderstanding), arranged to come out for a site inspection. But then didn’t turn up. Staff sickness apparently – when I called them. And because we all understand that these things happen, we rearranged another appointment and then they didn’t turn up again.

Red flag central, and an easy call for me.

I sent a Whatsapp saying that I wouldn’t be taking it any further, and I got a message back saying:

Great. No problem. Fully understand.

Wow. “Great”, really?
(And thanks for the apology for wasting my time.) (Twice.)

But even that was arguably better than the four who didn’t even bother to reply to my original message.

I really don’t get it. I’m literally wanting to give you business: to give you a lot of money for doing a job that you are apparently very good at. I’m doing the hard yards; I’m opening the dialogue and excusing you from doing the whole, time-consuming, costly, cold-calling marketing thing. Just give me a call.

But you couldn’t even be arsed to get in touch.

Business must be really good.

And so what do I do now? Because I’d selected those six companies based on the good reviews they had, and so now I must start selecting others that had less good or fewer good reviews. That’s already pushing me to seventh best and below before we’ve even taken into consideration that ? of them probably won’t even reply (data from a May 2026 study, n=6).

Because the thing is, much like voting for a political party in an election, selecting the least worst doesn’t necessarily make them any good. It just makes them less bad than the others. And in this case, the bar for that is so low that it’s a tripping hazard in hell.

So what choice do I have? The job still needs doing. And I still need to protect us from potentially being ripped off.

So here we go again, I guess.

Brilliant.

Agulhas Moon

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Today’s post is a bit of a test of the new WordPress 7.0 which I downloaded and installed this morning. If you’re reading this, it worked.

Except that there is a problem that only I can see: the backend really isn’t very pretty.

I suppose you could say that for a number of things (and people), but for an app that has been probably overly indulgent on appearance above function on the last few updates, this is a real let down.

Unless I’ve just missed a setting I need to tweak?

My font is tiny, my kerning is all wrong, and it’s actually rather difficult to read. Thankfully, I’ve checked, and none of these issues seem to be occurring on the front end of the blog (the bit you’re reading at the moment).

All you’ve got to contend with is the quality of the stuff I’m writing.
And yes, I recognise that that’s not great either.

But.

Let’s pop in a quick image of an Agulhas moonrise, meaning that you don’t have to look at so much writing.

Taken last time we were down there – handheld, nogal – and a good reason why there really wasn’t much beach left to walk along at high tide.

Anyway. I need to go and search (but with what terms?) for what’s gone wrong here, because it really isn’t conducive to producing decent content.

More tomorrow.

EDIT: Hmm. It has made a difference to the font on the front end as well.
That’s great. Exactly what an update shouldn’t do.