Or, Superman underpants

Last week, at Sailing School, I decided to get away for a bit of a relaxed sail, and so jumped on my boat and sailed off to the other side of the lake, anticipating a gentle and relaxed sail. And it was a gentle and relaxed sail for the first bit. I managed to make myself comfortable on the boat, open my beer, then lay back and relax. Unfortunately I didn’t realise there were fishing nets laid out all across the section of lake I was sailing on, which isn’t usually a problem because my boat can sail over them, but a bit of net caught on the rudder, so thinking it was a quick fix job, I just casually leant over the side of the boat to pull it off. Unfortunately at this very moment, I went over another net, which made the boat judder, resulting in me falling off the back. I did grab for something to hold onto, but unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) the only thing I grabbed was my life jacket. Which left me in the water while my perfectly balanced boat sailed into the sunset alone.

I then spent the next ten minutes fighting to get my life jacket on while trying to cut myself free (luckily I had a knife in my pocket) from the net my foot got caught in, in my vein attempt to swim after the boat. After I realised my boat was not stopping any time soon I started my long (and terrifying) swim towards the very far away land. After about five minutes of hard swimming and screaming my lungs out, I came to the very scary realisation that no one could either see or hear me, and since the boat was still on a perfectly straight course (amazing boat!), no one had reason to be worried. I was over a kilometre from shore and was not getting picked up any time soon. It is a very scary realisation that there is absolutely nothing you can do to help yourself, especially when you are swimming on your own, surrounded by nets full of fish, in a dam infamous for crocodile attacks. At that moment I suddenly thought about the H-metro headline, and wondered if they would write about the silly little girl who got chomped by a crocodile while swimming among fishing nets. And that’s when I started swimming hard again. I could think of nothing worse than my entire life being reduced to a badly worded headline about a ridiculous incident.

Luckily for me, some friends had seen me sailing across and had sailed out to try race me, and, noticing a screaming, splashing idiot in the water far away from any land or boat, went to investigate. They managed to pull me, exhausted, onto their boat and let me recover a bit before dropping me back in the water close enough to my boat to save it (not an easy thing to get back in that water). I have never felt so relieved in my life as the moment they pulled me onto their boat; by that stage I had been in the water for almost half an hour, swimming against the wind and fighting not to get caught in the nets around my feet. I realised just how dangerous sailing can actually be and decided that from now on, wearing a life jacket all the time is a very good idea!

I’m certainly not going to end up an H-metro headline yet!

I felt my stomach drop before my mind had even consciously registered the sound: Sirens. On my way to work this morning, the car I was in had to pull over to let the Presidential motorcade pass. As we waited, we watched the outriders bully cars into various positions. I felt angry with the power they were exerting; and helpless in the face of my own fear: Don’t let them come here.

The motorcade whizzed past, the police drove their motorcycles drove off, and I finally exhaled.

Overall, it was less than five minutes – but it cast a shadow over my whole morning.

If I were president, I’d want my five minute morning encounters with motorists and pedestrians to make the hundreds of people I pass each day feel better -  not worse. Okay, so maybe I wouldn’t dish out candy and flowers every day. But surely the daily show of force and aggression does more harm than good?

I’ve wanted to take this photo for a while now because it expresses how I feel about politics in Zimbabwe. It’s all such cock and bull as politicians jockey for privilege and power for their own benefit. Maybe that’s politics the world over, but I find it very depressing at this time  in my home country. As the 2013 elections loom large more then ever there seems so little to differentiate between the main political players. Arrogance is writ large and self aggrandisement is the name of the game.

Fear is the enemy of creativity, the hotbed of mediocrity, a critical obstacle to mastering life. Few embody the defiance of fear with grater dignity and grace than reconstructionist Maya Angelou, who has overcome remarkable hardships — childhood rape, poverty, addiction, bereavement — to become one of today’s most celebrated writers.

More from Brain Pickings

It’s shocking the kind of danger journalists continue facing across the world in their daily “routines”, and I put routines in quotes because these are people going about their normal work like any other, but which has turned out to be a perilous undertaking.

At the World Press Freedom Day celebrations this year being held in Costa Rica, one panelist literally grieved over how even countries that have promoted themselves as paragons of democracy have shown shocking impunity in their treatment of journalists.

This of course is the argument that has always been advanced by regimes that have not disguised their intolerance to press freedom that the these developed nations cannot preach to them about human rights, press freedom when they are themselves the worst violators.

It is a debate that is sure to go on for years to come, yet what has generally been agreed on during this year’s press freedom celebrations is that little is being done to ensure journalists are safe, not just embedded war correspondents as one would imagine, but the everyday journalist seeking to report anything from government corruption to organized crime.

I was jolted by one panelist who said that Pakistan remains one of the worst countries in the world to work as a journalist as journalist killings have become a daily thing despite “Pakistan being a democracy.”

Pretty instructive stuff as this resonates with many countries, some which we will not mention by name!

While other governments take journalist killings in their strides, what has emerged as worse practices is that some countries that violate these freedoms say, look, no journalist is in jail here, no journalist has been killed by state security forces, so why accuse us of being enemies of a free press, see we even have a plurality of newspapers!

As journalists celebrate this important occasion, even an African Union director of information conceded that African governments still have a lot to do to ensure journalists work in safe conditions, an acknowledgement that indeed many African countries remain hostile to a vibrate and inquisitive press.