There are few places in the world as special as Cape Town, South Africa. While all the clichés about the beautiful mountain in your backyard, the wild South-Easter and Long Street are true, there is one special place in the Southern Suburbs of the Cape which epitomizes the greatness of the Mother City.

Sahara Park Newlands, located in heart of Newlands with the Table Mountain backdrop and draped in the smell of the brewery next door – this is a place where history repeats itself, hearts are broken, new friends made and local along with international rivalries are swept aside for one common cause: the love of Test cricket.

Once a year Cape Town locals are treated to a great Test match at Newlands and 2010 kicked off with a bang as South Africa and England came out to play. With the sun burning brightly in the sky and the Barmy Army in full voice, I took to Newlands for day four of the third Test between South Africa and England for what promised to be a great day out.

With Graeme Smith and Hashim Amla at the crease, we sat and watched the skipper get stuck in andwaited patiently for the bar to open (no drinking before the Boeing goes over at 11:00).

There is something incredibly special about any international sporting event in Cape Town. Not only are we the best crowd in the country (Newlands usually sells out every day of a five day game) but it’s also a city which is able to unite a country burdened with such a crude and unkind history.

The alcohol may be a factor but the realization of your mortatilty due to the sheer vastness of Table Mountain — which stares you in the face and screams:”you’re just little” while another six gets lofted down to long-on — is something which you’ll only experience at this ground.

When we realize just how mortal we are and how minute our existence actually is, we tend to become a lot more accepting and forgiving. When you walk through the gates at Newlands, the monkey hops off your back and cricket ground cradles you like a mother would cradle her infant. Here, colour does not matter, what happened in our unique but harsh history does not matter. You are locked in, away from your troubles and shielded by the beauty of Cape Town.

Idle conversation and light banter come standard. Some elect to spend their day drinking until they pass out.  The suits sit in their air-conditioned members area. The Newlands faithful nap, discuss tactics and bemoan the wrongful decisions of the umpires.

Day four of the New Year’s Test match at Newlands is a special day, as usual. While Smith’s decision to declare only after lunch proves incorrect, a day out at one of the most breathtaking grounds in the world is exactly what the doctor would prescribe for unwinding.

As the euphoria dies down and the crowd starts to filter out  and the shadows over the ground grow longer and play is brought to an end and cloud starts to blanket the mountain with the sun still brightly burning,  reality knocks on the door and you can’t help but sit back and take in the strange solitude and think: “I love this city”.

My previous lap top was about three years old (in computer years that’s about 60 – they’re worse than dogs) and it sounded like it was powering a nuclear submarine. It didn’t even have Bluetooth or a DVD-writer. Needless to say, then, that I am absolutely over the moon with my snazzy new 21.6ghz, 15 inch lap top, this baby even has Wireless – I’ve been strolling around the house like Florence Nightingale trying to find an unsecured network to tap into but without any avail.

All was well in the land of quiet laptops until about a day or so ago when I switched off the swanky new piece of machinery and noticed that it was busy installing some or other upgrade. While I was rather irked that I was never asked whether I want this update or not (I’m on one of those 3G contracts so the mobile ISP might as well come and take my kidney as a down payment on my account) but why is it not shutting down when I am in a rush to get out of the house?

I decided to ignore this, kind of like you do when your newly acquired significant other first does something which annoys you, but this trend started to continue. Since this first started – every time I switch off my computer, some or other new update is installing. I bet a few techies out there will quickly tell me how to correct this but for the semi-rookie, this is a main in the bum.

I know of numerous people who have the same issue and, despite turning the Automatic Windows Updates off, for some reason something is still always installing. This phenomenon is akin to your best mate dragging that annoying boyfriend or girlfriend along wherever you go – and whatever he or she does makes you want to scream.

It got me thinking that software programmers must be a bunch of sadistic folk. I am pretty sure that they take great joy in programming something knowing that it’s automatic update feature will grate somebody’s carrot for at least one week out of a month. How many service packs, updates, plug ins, and additional crap do you have to install before your programs actually work properly? I might be way paranoid but it sometimes feels that technology was invented with the sole purpose of trying to annoy me.

Things were better back in the day. Nokia 3310s were water and bulletproof. MS DOS had all the mathematical programmes you needed to develop your brain, dail-up allowed you to stay in touch with your relatives far away and Encarta had all the information you needed to research your school project.

The internet, and technology, has come a long way. It’s made our lives simpler in many ways but has it all become too  much to handle? How many of us still know what a post office looks like or what ink even smells like?

Maybe they’re not sadistic after all. Maybe they’re trying to keep us from losing our humanity.

While this stereotype exists because it is true – some of us do however work like bees and some of us aren’t fortunate enough to get any time off over Christmas. Whether you celebrate it or not, it’s still rather unpleasant to be sitting in an office on Christmas Eve while all your mates are galavanting around Town getting their drink on.

But there is always a bright side to everything so here are a few reasons to enjoy working over the Xmas period.

1. You don’t waste money and, if you didn’t get a 13th cheque, you won’t be broke by New Year’s.
2. You don’t have to be around a bunch of festive inebriates all the time.
3. You don’t have to wait in a queue to be seated at a restaurant.
4. You can avoid seeing that family that you don’t really like and you don’t have listen to Auntie Maggie’s story about “her Peter” or whoever else the star of the family is.
5. You don’t even have to waste money on getting them shirts they’ll never wear and deodorants they’ll never use.
6. Unless you are an alcoholic or a drug addict, you’ll cruise through a road block. (Not that anybody should drink and drive).
7. You miss traffic and you can probably sleep a little bit later than usual.
8. You get to take leave when the malls are quiet and the people are back to normal. Has anybody been to a major shopping centre in these past few days? It gave me hives.

So, while working over Xmas is probably not the most desired way to spend “the holidays” – at least there are some positives to take away from it.