Lucy Beresford

South Africa is buzzing — and not just in the afterglow of victory in the Rugby World Cup. Johann­esburg, built in the 1880s on the back of mineral excavation, is experiencing a contemporary form of gold rush. At the gleaming international airport, yuppies of every hue shape deals on their laptops. A ride into town takes you past shopping malls almost as large as the gold dumps on the outskirts, into a city of building sites. Another sports fixture, the 2010 soccer World Cup which South Africa will host, is often touted as the trigger for this construction boom, but much of it would clearly have happened anyway. Parts of the smart northern suburbs are gridlocked by road-closures related to the building of Gautrain — a 25 billion rand (£1.

Middle-class Delhi-ites have fallen in love — with supermarkets. The ‘Organised Retail’ concept has exploded here, as mini-chains such as Big Apple, Food Bazaar and Reliance Fresh seek to get a head-start over the likes of global brands such as Wal-Mart and Tesco — both rumoured to be looking for sites in the capital. Big Apple (slogan: ‘Think Fresh’) consisted in 2005 of just one store employing 30 people; by August 2007, the group hopes to have opened 300 stores. Analysts say the market is growing at over 25 per cent annually.

‘We men don’t want to wear condoms, we want the West to find a cure.’ This dilemma, faced by HIV counsellors at the Mildmay Centre near Entebbe, mirrors that experienced by those hoping to help Uganda financially. Mukasa, a handler at the chimpanzee sanctuary on Ngamba Island, 45 minutes from Entebbe by speedboat, gives me the analogy: the chimps there are hand-reared orphans. Five times a day food for them is tossed over the fence. A Pavlovian response has developed: they come whooping through the undergrowth at set times — and can never be released into the wild, as they would not survive. They are literally sustained by handouts.

This year will be remembered as the one in which the psychopathology of Britain slipped down the toilet. Just last month the imagination of the nation’s television viewers was captured — some would say hijacked — first by the comedy show Little Britain, with a series of sketches about a geriatric woman who is oblivious of her own urinary incontinence, and, secondly, by the sight (courtesy of infrared cameras) of Carol Thatcher taking a night-time pee beside her camp bed on I’m a Celebrity — Get Me Out of Here! And there’s no point in telling yourself that I’m the sad one for watching these programmes, or that they are fringe entertainment.