LONDON: The Union Jack flying from the top of the flagpost on the Victoria Tower, above the House of Lords, is huge. I remarked on its size as we walked in the gardens below it late on Monday morning.

Then we strolled along the Embankment and up to Trafalgar Square, to attend a free lunchtime concert in St Martin-in-the-Fields, with the American counter-tenor Randall Scotting singing arias Handel had composed for the alto castrato Senisino. Counter-tenor singing is not exactly my cup of tea. “I’d like to hear him sing normally,” I whispered to Delia, after one item where he had risen as high as a mezzo-soprano. She reassured me it was an acquired taste.

LONDON: Easter Sunday was reported to be the coldest in Britain on record but here in Wimbledon at least the sun shone and our hosts kindly said we must have brought it with us from South Africa.

It also shone on Good Friday, the day we arrived, but on Saturday when we went off to see the new Lichtenstein exhibition at the Tate Modern, a flurry of snow greeted us as we emerged from the station on to the Thames’ South Bank.

As someone who began his journalistic career writing regional news bulletins for the SABC when the Broederbond ruled the roost in that beleaguered organisation, I still think it is more of a gemors now than it has ever been.

A “circus” some politician called it the other day.

If anybody can do anything to restrain Robert Mugabe, it is Pope Francis.

That is why we should welcome the unofficial entry of Africa’s greatest human rights abuser into Italy this week, to attend the new pope’s inauguration. Mugabe is banned from all member countries of the European Union including Italy, but you can’t visit the Vatican, where even tyrants are welcome, without treading on Italian soil.

Everyone is asking Acting Minister of Police Siyabonga Cwele (in the absence of his boss away on honeymoon) to identify South Africa’s National Key Points, but the National Key Points Act passed by the apartheid government in 1980, and amended by them in 1984 and 1985, provides the answer.

In Definitions, Section 1, it declares a National Key Point “means any place or area which under Section 2 has been declared a National Key Point”.