There's a Trump in my cappuccino

In the face of gentrification in the small town where she lives, Karin Brynard gets more of a grasp on the madness that is Trump.

- Karin Brynard

It's early on a Saturday morning and I'm downtown in Stellenbosch, sitting with a cappuccino and an unopened newspaper, my thoughts adrift. Suddenly, a rather surprising word jumps into my head: solastalgia.

Holy mackarel, I think, where did that one come from?

I peer down the row of coffee and curio shops lining the street, wondering what could have prompted it.

After all, I'm sitting at a cute little table - à la Paris - on the pavement outside Fidders, one of my favourite shops in town.

A gem from yesteryear, it's one of the few remaining true-blue village shops where you can buy anything from a ribbon to a lamp, where the staff have maintained the same familiar faces over the years, greeting you by name, asking after the family or making small talk about the weather. You feel like a somebody here, at home.

The cappuccinos outside, however, are new. For survival, I reckon, because the rest of the town has morphed into a colony of tourist shops, focused on euros and dollars.

If you look closely, you'll still find a handful of older survivors.