Bafana Bafana might not have won the World Cup - which is very strange, because R Kelly said we would, and he's seldom wrong about soccer - but in the month that followed the final whistle, South Africa has been showered with praise from all corners of the world as host to perhaps the best Cup ever.

When you read this, the World Cup will be almost over. Tourists will be leaving in their droves as the country exhales one long, slow sigh of…of what exactly? Will it be relief that we pulled it off? Pride? Or just pure exhaustion at the end of a month where our world was briefly, thrillingly turned upside down?

People often behave differently abroad. Without the usual frames of reference, a certain independence gives rise to more exaggerated behaviour. This can go badly. Consider the reputation of Brits abroad, Germans in the Kruger Park, Americans in France, or South Africans in South London pubs on Friday nights.

It doesn't take much to be described as a "mad" these days. The guy at an office who wears socks with cartoon characters sewn onto them may well become known as "that mad guy in accounts". Insane is another word we use lightly. I recently heard someone describe what she just had eaten as "an insane breakfast". Were the eggs deranged? Did the toast need to be put in a straight jacket?

Literally, ubuntu means "humanity to others". It comes from a Bantu saying which translates as "I am who I am because of others". It's a nice thought, isn't it? But sometimes it feels like we are about as familiar with the concept as Steve Hofmeyr is with good music. We wouldn't know ubuntu if it slapped us in the face. It's not going to, but still, the point stands.

You can tell how someone feels about the World Cup by the way they pronounce those two words. The optimist says it like a drop-kick: the world CUP. Then there are the sceptics, who shove the words out of their mouths like they're pushing an enemy down the stairs, or spit them out like olive pips.

The buddhists tell us not to expect anything. Experience tells us to expect the unexpected. I was told by a man named Travis Hickey from Wyoming to expect delivery of my new laptop 'within the week'. That was nine months ago. So what do we do?

Everyone loves a happy ending. Any romantic comedy that dared to end without a last-minute dash to the airport would feel like a waste of money. Often the presence of Jennifer Aniston has already made it a waste of money...

I am not what you would describe as a physical machine. My dad was, which makes it worse. Its like Apple following the iPhone with the release of two tin cups attached by a long piece of string. He was built like Hercules. I am built like Billy Elliott.

Winter is over and everywhere we are crawling out of hibernation, pale and shivering like naked Greenlanders, blinking into the pale sun. It’s not been that bad, has it? It is never that bad. In fact, our winters are a bit soft...

Everybody remembers their first kiss. Except me. I think I’ve blocked it out, because the vague and fleeting flashbacks I’ve had over the years – which always play out like hazy soap opera dream sequences

There has been a lot of negative press about the vuvuzela. Journalists watching the Confederations Cup have been queuing up with their derisory descriptions, which range from the funny and annoying to the unfunny and annoying.

Opinions are divided on Heat Magazine. There are those who think of it as a waste of trees and there are others who are wrong. Of course, like many of you, I am the worst kind of hypocrite.

There are those who believe graffiti is an art form and there are those who see it as vandalism. A local city council recently outlawed graffiti and hopes to wipe it all off its province’s walls.

Trust nobody today – it’s all one big April Fools prank. The news you read this morning didn’t happen. That’s right; Crocodile Dundee is not running for president. Sorry.

What makes us South African? Braais, pap, Mrs. Balls Chutney? Madiba, Table Mountain, Boerewors? Is it Shoprite? Does Shoprite make us South African? There are too many answers.

There are a few things that divide the world right down the middle. Here’s one: There are people who refill ice trays and there are people who don’t. It’s that simple. Another one is Valentines Day.

It’s January. Time to go home. Gautengers are hobbling to their SUVs, ruing their decision to buy their sons the boogie boards that came crashing into their shins all holiday.

My hair is falling out. I look in the mirror more than I used to, and these days I see nothing but the peninsula of hair; the bays of newly exposed scalp. I found a photo of my mother’s father, whose follicular lot we are dealt. He’s 40 in the photo and didn’t even have a peninsula...

You may have come across the news that the world’s economy is in the gutter, and it’s not looking at the stars.The bubble has burst, and as the US and European economies in particular have discovered, that bubble was full of class-A bile.

Things were looking decidedly bleak for a while last month. The Large Hadron Collider was going to recreate the Big Bang and suck us all into a black hole, Zimbabwe looked further from peace than ever and oil was getting more expensive by the second.

It doesn’t really bear thinking about, but I know without question that my parents had sex in Spring 1979, because roughly nine months later my brother arrived squealing into the world.

My first date was at the cinema. We’d agreed to meet after slow dancing to Whigfield’s ‘The Summer is Magic’ a week earlier and I felt good. It’s hard to remember where I got the confidence from...

This just in: Matt Damon will play Francois Pienaar in a film about the 1995 World Cup. It’s an interesting bit of casting, don’t you think? Not only is Damon half the size of Pienaar, but, crucially, he doesn’t look like a duck.

When I was very young I wanted to grow up to be a fire engine. A few years later, noting with displeasure that my shoulders were not hardening and turning red and my limbs not mutating into wheels...

Mariah Carey has titled her latest album E=MC2. Unfortunately, this is a fact and not a punch line. Apart from being hilarious - I would pay good money to ask Mariah to expound on the theory of relativity...

My brother is an artist and we share a studio. In it, there is a cupboard we refer to as the ‘Technology Drawer'. Everything complicated goes in there. Our policy is that if we can't fix it with glue, it's technological...

Green is your new favourite colour, whether you like it or not. It has to be. Green is swinging elections, winning Nobel Peace Prizes.Green is the new black, it’s the new kid on the block, it’s the new everything...

I have nothing against jocks. Jocks don’t make things complicated (on the rare occasions that they don’t already find a thing complicated in the first place). Jocks are fine. Good jocks, that is. There are also bad jocks...

It’s a week or so after New Year, which means that almost all of us will already have buckled on our resolutions. Some of us will still be insisting that we can still get fit in time for the Comrades...

"Here comes another bloody newsletter from my credit card company with a new and improved list of suggestions as to how I should spend more money."