

Paddi Clay
Paddi Clay spent 40 years in journalism, as a reporter and consultant, manager, editor and trainer in radio, print and online. She was a correspondent for foreign networks during the 80s and 90s and, more recently, a judge on the Alan Paton Book Awards. She has an MA in Digital Journalism Leadership and received the Vodacom National Columnist award in 2007. Now retired she feels she has earned the right to indulge in her hobbies of politics, history, the arts, popular culture and good food. She values curiosity, humour, and freedom of speech, opinion and choice.
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Articles By This Author

Not a nice war
- By Paddi Clay
- . Mar 8, 2022
I was in the middle of trying to unsubscribe to a wellness – or as they say in old parlance, a health and beauty –

Listening to the ‘lower class’
- By Paddi Clay
- . Jan 30, 2022
In Kathu in the Northern Cape on Tuesday last week, residents suffering from poverty, despondency and the debilitating scourge of helpless dependency, lined up to

Asteroids and Anxiety
- By Paddi Clay
- . Jan 2, 2022
Just when it appears we can perhaps breathe a little easier, literally, with the Covid-19 virus morphing into a less severe or lung-damaging, although still

The Big Job
- By Paddi Clay
- . Dec 5, 2021
As I passed through Rosebank, Johannesburg last week heading for my optician, I noticed a new shop:, Kentucky Town. It was a KFC pop up

A luta continua
- By Paddi Clay
- . Nov 7, 2021
The people have spoken – or, to be more accurate, 12 million of the 40 million or so South Africans eligible to vote have spoken.

All along the watchtower
- By Paddi Clay
- . Oct 10, 2021
Personally, I had planned to have a long-overdue pedicure, to finish John Boyne’s latest novel The Echo Chamber (a sharp and enjoyable comedy of manners

Oh the humanity (12th September 2021)
- By Paddi Clay
- . Sep 12, 2021
“This is one of the worst catastrophes in the world. And oh, it’s…burning, oh, four or five hundred feet into the sky. It’s a terrific crash,

The Ideal and the Actual
- By Paddi Clay
- . Aug 16, 2021
The swirling zeitgeist of excuses, postponements, delays, denials and ‘I didn’t know’s from the top of the greasy political pole these past weeks came close

Brinkmanship
- By Paddi Clay
- . Jul 18, 2021
In the Netflix documentary that is bound to be made sometime in the future on what is South Africa’s most cataclysmic post-apartheid political event, the

‘Journalism as a form of (dis)honourable behaviour’
- By Paddi Clay
- . Jun 20, 2021
Some snippets this week from the world of journalism unleashed a storm of accusations, lamentation on declining standards, and in a surprising twist, admiration for