Rose-Tinted Glasses . . .

Rose Views may have been an apt name for this Johannesburg apartment block - 200 yards from the entrance to one of the city's most expensive shopping malls - in years gone by, but now it's little more than an ironic statement about life in South Africa two decades after the fall of apartheid. Now, middle class whites and their well-of black brothers live with their guns and big dogs barricaded behind huge walls topped with electrified razor wire, all to keep the 'lower classes' at bay.

As a former South African, now living in the safest - boring, you might say - area of Canada: no fences, few guns, no fierce guard dogs, no serious crime, I'm in awe of the casual acceptance by my old friends of the normality of fear in this supposed 'rainbow nation'.

I miss the 300 days of sunshine they enjoy, but wouldn't swap the frozen misery of the worst Canadian winter for this kind of existence . . .