Buckets full of bull

So much bull around these days it’s hard to keep up. Who is the craziest billionaire of them all? No prizes for an answer because it’s all in the eye of the beholder.

For those of us not good with money, apparently one million seconds in time works out at 11 days while one billion seconds comes out at just over 31 years. You have to be very smart or very crooked to be a billionaire.

In these parts, crooks hide enormous wealth skimmed off under the counter.  Our fabulous natural endowments of gold are plundered daily in cahoots with the China. None of these riches touch the sides of the national fiscus on the way to China or Dubai.

As usual, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Much needed funding is not going into dilapidated health and education sectors. But we know that, don’t we?

Fact. Not bull: The gambling industry in Britain walks away with some $1.5 billion in profits a year while social care and psychiatric rehabilitation for gambling addicts costs the exchequer about $1.2 billion annually. (Hands up, if like me, you too hate all the blanket advertising for electronic betting on cyber slot machines etc, football and all sorts of sport.)

Not bull: Hotel accommodation and help for illegal migrants costs more than the winter fuel allowances for struggling British old age pensioners.

Bull is open to individual interpretation. The Trump Musk fall-out, like a Marvel comic, is great drama to some, a scary upheaval to others.

Plodding on into this endless, sticky mire, we have now built a spaghetti junction overpass for $88 million when the original quotation was two thirds of that. Money disappeared as most roads and streets are pockmarked with knee-deep potholes. ‘Road safety’ is an oxymoron. A car has hit the sign.

A statue of  Mbuya Nehanda, one of  the first militant opponents of colonialism executed on orders of Hanging Judge Watermeyer in 1898,  stands on a pedestrian walkway high above the centre of town. One man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist.

One man’s bull is another man’s truth.

Still going strong. The Victoria Falls bridge 125 years after it was built. Paul Simon, 83, and Paul McCartney, 83 on June 18, and an emotional Willie Nelson at 92.

Halcyon days of all time greats. Paul Simon performing in Zimbabwe in February 1987 with Ladysmith Black Mambazo and Miriam Makeba. Hugh Masekela was also on stage at Rufaro stadium.