. . . That’s what it looked like. The view from the top of Silvermine, at 8.30am on Friday 13 of June, 2008. A day which turned out to be a particularly splendid refutation of the supersition, by the way. Anyway, stopping to take some pictures of this and gaze seemed far more urgent and important than getting to work on time, whatever that is. Now had they been here, Christopher Hitchens, Dawkins, the rest of the ants crawling up God’s trouser legs, would of course have gone down on their knees, begun speaking in tongues and calling out Hallelujahs. Me, I’m a bit more objective. I just thought it looked really cool.

Except this just happens to be particularly splendid example of the species. (Since no-one’s reading this, it’s a great opportunity to practice being non-self-effacing.)

You’re looking towards the hills on which the denizens of Riebeek Kasteel (an hour north of Cape Town) have placed the arse of their village. Actually, you’re also looking through the windscreen of my battered old Opel, a few months before it insisted on retirement. The rain drops on the windscreen lend this image a completely authentic, non-vaselined, non-digitised and slightly uneven softening blur. That’s probably enough about this one.

A passing car; no idea who they are.

From which title you may gather, I do not very much like Hermanus. Its architecture and planning make it feel rather like Johannesburg-by-the-sea, even more so than, say, Plet. However, like so many places, it can be rescued by a fortuitous combination of elements, rather like one of those grim old saints that every now and then gets dressed up and hauled down the village streets in procession. (I’m speaking figuratively; definitely no saints in Hermanus.) This I took about 20km away from the big H.

These stone pines, though not indigenous, are very much a part of the Cape Town landscape, their older branches frequently stripped away by the south easterly winds and their long trunks yielding but not submitting to the same element.

This is not a great photo. It’s just a photo. Cape Town likes to consider itself a world-class city. Its very own home-grown refugee crisis, and the staggeringly incompetent and inhumane response to that crisis, suggests it’s actually rather a shabby place. I cannot help wondering how much better these people would be treated were they white.

Port Nolloth is a wild town on the West Coast full of fishermen and diamond divers and landladies who wear flight suits. It’s pretty much the last place on your left before you hit Namibia. Taken with my old Pentax K1000. Perhaps the crop could be better, but I don’t really feel like cropping it.

I can’t remember if this photo was my idea or theirs, but I jumped onto the wall of a bridge, and snapped it with my beloved Pentax K1000. Actually, the Pentax does not snap, it slides open and shut with almost lingering precision, dignity and certainty . . . Cool kids and blessed emulsion. Central Cape Town, one Saturday morning in late 2003.

The strange ways of the oceans — long rolling swells slide into False Bay, past Cape Point, from where I prised my way between the tourists to take this picture, which for some reason subsides into dramatic darkness on the right