Author: Grocott's Mail Contributors

The Latin phrase ‘De profundis’ means ‘From the depths’, and for Oscar Wilde, who wrote a long, protracted letter by this name from his prison cell at Reading, England, the depths were those of agonised despair. The famously flamboyant Irish playwright, novelist and poet had lived an exorbitant life of deliberate excess for many years and was acclaimed for his dazzling repartee and vivid writing. His idiosyncratic novel The Picture of Dorian Gray celebrates his delight in beauty, youth and hedonistic excess with a protagonist who is clearly based upon himself. But Wilde was ostentatiously gay in a Victorian London…

On 2 March 2017 the Eastern Cape MEC for Finance tabled a budget of R74.462 billion for the administration of the Provincial Government in the 2017/18 financial year. Of this amount, R1.070 billion, or 1.44%, was allocated to the Department of Economic Development, Environmental Affairs and Tourism (DEDEAT). As its name indicates, this Department carries, not without controversy, the dual mandate of promoting economic development in the Province and protecting the Province’s environment. Accordingly the Department’s operations are structured around three programmes, namely, Economic Development, Environmental Affairs and Administration, which received 49.7%, 28.3% and 22.0% respectively of the 2017/18 Departmental budget.…

Rochelle Duvenage Whether you are vegan, an environmental activist, or just enjoy fresh organic food, worm farming could be the next exciting project for you. We explored the ins and outs of vermiculture in practice. We documented the experience of Grahamstown local, John Davies – or ‘Uncle John’ as he prefers to be called – who runs a successful worm farm from his home. Davies runs a home-made, experimental growing system, constructed almost entirely from re-used and recycled materials. The system combines permaculture and aquaponics, producing a large quantity and variety of fruits and vegetables. He has an indoor ‘growing…

By Charlie Shackleton With the recent, albeit not new, scourge of xenophobic attacks in South Africa, I am somewhat hesitant to draw parallels in the debate on the relative merits of indigenous trees and non-indigenous ones in the public spaces of our city. Yet, it is not a trivial debate and it is one that is being engaged in by experts and laypeople in many towns and cities around the world. Are native (i.e. indigenous to a particular locality) tree species better adapted to the local conditions, do they suffer less pest damage, do they provide more or better…