A very hot hello to all our readers. I think that this summer is going to be a very hot one if one looks at the past month. But hey! It’s summer and we live in the lowveld, what should we expect?

Unfortunately, we will not be publishing any constellation this month because Ben Coley from Celestial Events SA, who graciously submits our ‘astro-column’ every month, has had a major IT crash and lost everything. We wish him well in retrieving it all and look forward to the addition of his column in next month’s edition.

  We are grateful that we did get a response from the mayor’s office, but follow-up questions still go unanswered, and they did not get back to me following up on the investigations that were done as per the answers in the Mayors Minute, in August – so I don’t know the outcomes of those. I will continue to follow up.

  Thanks to Johan Marais from the African Snakebite Institute, who has happily joined our team of authors that submit most of our content. For that we are very grateful and hope that you, the readers, learn a lot from his input.

  We are happy to welcome Lauren Dold, who has also agreed to submit very interesting content from time to time. We launch her column with the ‘Five of Kruger Parks best picnic sites’, so enjoy the read, and exploring the sites when you have the chance.

  Then there are matters pressing our community, one of which is the new suggested R40 interchange. Forgive me here but I don’t get the vision, I don’t understand the thought process …. adverse road conditions and potholes, service issues (like water), litter, dumping, shacks, and the list can go on. We have not solved these pertinent and very prevalent issues, and now we are going to build a multi-million rand interchange, and the balance of the problems go unsolved!? I don’t get it. And I haven’t even got to the mall yet. It makes no sense at all. Without fair public participation and input, the whole town demeanour is going to change, in my view for the worse – let’s get our stuff sorted and maintained first, let’s look after what we have first, let’s make it function, let’s make sure that when people come through our town, they look at it in awe … because, surprisingly, it works.

  We can’t say that now, and it amazes me that the powers that be, seemingly ignore this fact. But if we were to get that right, then, and only then, should we be looking at other projects. I urge you all to involve yourselves with the SANRAL R40 petition – I congratulate those involved; we need committed, concerned residents to drive home our concerns and considerations. I truly hope that the petition bears fruit. It will have been submitted by the end of November, and I believe that it is important for us to take cognisance of the work being done in that domain and thank those that devote their time and effort to doing it, for all of us in the community. You can request the ‘concerns document’ from lizmari@hoedspruitgh.co.za

  And so it’s now a mere 23 days to Christmas – where did this year go? It’s been a big year for a lot of people, re-establishing businesses and contacts, and getting down to living again. Long may this continue. On our side there are some interesting developments in the pipeline which will all be revealed in the new year, but for now let’s look forward to Christmas and the festive break – we all need that.