Marq de Villiers is a journalist and author who never found a real job and so just kept on writing, a few million words by now, for newspapers, magazines and books (14 and counting, with a few ghost-writing gigs tacked on). Along the way he has lived in some interesting places (Cape Town, Moscow, Asturias in northern Spain, London and a short stint in Timbuktu), picked up a few awards (among them the Alan Paton Award for writing about South Africa, a Governor General's Award for Non Fiction for his first book on Water and another GG short-list for an appreciation of pinot noir, plus the Canadian Science Writers Association Award and a nod from the Julia Child and James Beard awards for literary food writing) and, not incidentally, married the art director and editor Sheila Hirtle, who has saved his ass on numerous occasions with pointed advice and sometimes ruthless editing.

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“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.