Acoustic guitarist Tony Cox in NoordHoek

His show Stories from Wood and Steel brings together his gift for off-beat and sometimes downright wacky story-telling and his prowess on the steel-string acoustic guitar for which he is famed within and without South Africa. The show will have its debut at Monkey Valley Resort then will go on to the Grahamstown festival and beyond to the UK, Germany and Canada.

The 52-year-old Zimbabwean-born guitar player continues to astound all those that go to hear him. Selling-out venues wherever he performs with an audience composed of the most extraordinary mix of ages of between 10 to 90. Cox has become a South African icon and although mostly ignored by radio and TV he commands an ever deepening respect for his devotion to his chosen art and does not seem to want for any number of ardent fans.

Stories from Wood and Steel incorporates a lot of new material, some of it composed for his new baritone guitar that has the ability to, as I overheard a fan saying, raise goose-bumps with its sonorous tones. In his usual off-the-cuff and inventively humorous way, he has a few musical surprises under his belt that generally guarantee you being zapped by the man's seemingly throw-away yet awesome guitar-playing skills.

The music Cox generates on-stage has immense light, shade and contrast and you can clearly hear our common geography within the constructs of his notes. This I think is what makes him so popular with those South Africans living overseas who come out in their droves to support the shows when he is over there.

In August and September of 2006 Cox jets off to the UK for a tour that sees him taking in several festivals such as the Lewes International Guitar Festival and the Cornwall folk festival. He then goes over to Germany where he will not only be performing but contributing to an acoustic guitar compilation album that will sell world-wide and be released by Acoustic Music Records.

Cape Town aims to have the cleanest air in all of Africa.

A comprehensive air quality management plan was launched yesterday with the aim of ridding Cape Town of its notorious “brown haze” and making it the city with the cleanest air in Africa.

Some of the objectives of the 11-point plan include improving air quality in all informal settlements in the city and targeting vehicle emissions, which make up about 60% of the brown haze phenomenon encountered over the Cape Peninsula at times. Cape Town, which has been monitoring air quality since 1958, is at the forefront of combating air pollution.

The city has been proactive in starting its own air quality management system, which has been taken up in recent national air quality legislation. Dr Ivan Bromfield, manager of specialised health services in the city, said the plan would use all the tools and methods available internationally to ensure a proper and specific integrated system.

Another objective was to specify the ambient air quality standards for Cape Town, which uses guidelines set by the World Health Organisation.The city already has a pilot programme running in Khayelitsha to improve air quality there. The lessons learned from the project would be used in other programmes in other areas, said Bromfield.

Other objectives include enforcing current and future legislation around air quality and compiling an emissions database to establish the sources of air pollution. The database would be used to do modelling around the pollution problem and to provide information on which the authorities could take action, said Bromfield. The vehicle emissions programme has identified a number of sites at which free emission testing can take place.

Although random roadside testing of diesel vehicles is carried out at these sites within the boundaries of the city, it has been established that many vehicles are not caught in the net as they do not operate on the routes where testing sites were located. Bromfield said in future the city would also consider the effect of land use and transport planning where new industrial complexes were considered and new roads were built. The city would also use the plan to determine the health effects of air quality to identify trends and remedies.