If the Aussie dollar could be said to have gone up and down like a bride’s nightie over the last few years, the trajectory of the Rand has been more like that of a mortally wounded albatross. One consolation for the South African economy is that this makes the country one of the cheaper places in the world to film. The upside for me personally is that for the third year in a row one of my clients has sent me to Cape Town to make a commercial.

The morning after I arrive here I switch on the TV in my room and hear a BBC World reporter talking about ‘a huge, dark, menacing presence looming over Sydney’. At first I assume this must be the ghost of Kerry Packer, but it turns out to be just an unusually telegenic cloud formation. Later the same day I get an email from a friend in Mosman telling me that the ensuing storm deflowered the jacaranda in his garden. I’m pleased to report that at time of writing the honour of Cape Town’s jacarandas is still intact, but my driver tells me they are not a popular tree here because their petals make the roads slippery and cause accidents. I think that says a lot about South Africans.

It’s not just the colonial architecture of my hotel which recalls a bygone era. Every afternoon the walls of the elegantly furnished lobby ring to the laughter of expensively-dressed white ladies of a certain age sipping earl grey tea served to them on silver trays by silent, smiling black women who bus in each day from townships where indoor plumbing has yet to be installed. Such portals to the past are more common in Cape Town than any other South African city, I’m told, because The Western Cape had only a very small indigenous population prior to white settlement, as a consequence of which the blacks here are still an anomalous minority.

This may also explain why it is also the only province governed not by the ANC but by its official opposition, the Democratic Alliance party. For some time now the DA’s even-handed commitment to improving public health and education and also supporting private sector business has offered South Africans of all extractions a pragmatic alternative to the fiscal mismanagement and outright corruption of the Zuma administration and the unapologetically militant aims of Julius Malemba and his xenophobic Economic Freedom Fighters. But for the past few days the DA has been engaged in a damage limitation exercise after a shadow cabinet minister re-tweeted a message from a colleague calling for the resurrection of the late and not universally lamented PW Botha. In the twittersphere, nobody knows you’re being ironic.

What’s the difference between ‘culpable homicide’ and murder? About twenty years, apparently. My last South African sojourn coincided with the end of the Oscar Pistorius trial. Twelve months later, and four months after his lenient jail sentence was commuted to house-arrest, ‘the fastest man on no legs’ is waiting to hear if the Supreme Court of Appeal will send him back to the slammer.

The last job I did here was filmed in the mountainous wilderness north of the city and baboons kept wandering in front of the camera. This year’s locations are all suburban, so wildlife poses no problem, and we have been lucky with the weather, which can be as changeable as Melbourne’s. But on the morning of the last day everything comes to an unscheduled halt when a group (flock? flight? squadron?) of paragliders launch themselves off a hill overlooking the beach where we are set up. They cannot be more than a thousand feet above us, but powerful thermals keep them in the air (and spoil our shot) for an astonishing half hour.

You can run from robbers but you can’t hide from hackers. In the past month I’ve been e-blackmailed in four continents, and judging by the varying syntax and grammar of their demands, not always by the same people. But the threat is always essentially the same: send $X to the following bitcoin account or we will tell your wife and your employer that you once registered with the Ashley Madison dating agency. It is entirely possible that I did. After a long dinner I have also been known to respond to late night infomercials for kitchen utensils. But as I haven’t had a wife for the last decade, and been self-employed for most of it, I won’t be forking out this time.