Fog lifts from South African cricket

Winter brings to Venice fog so thick, the poet Joseph Brodsky wrote, that finding your way back home is simple regardless of how new you are to this city of tormentingly tiny, twisting lanes and identically beautiful squares. The tunnel your body made through the soupy shroud on the outward journey will remain unfilled for a long time after you have passed. So merely retrace your steps.

In San Francisco, the fog that makes the Golden Gate Bridge look as if it has floated into the scene from a JRR Tolkien novel has a name - Karl - and its own twitter account, which posts in the first person. "All that is sunny does not glitter, not all those in the fog are lost," is Karl's tagline.

Cape Town is in that league. More water than three times its annual average rainfall billows over Table Mountain every year in the form of fog. The flat-topped peak that offers the heart of the city a hug is often quilted in thick, grey-white wetness that tumbles over the mountain's craggy edges with heart-stopping relentlessness before flowing down the foothills and into the streets below. To the west along the Atlantic seaboard, the ocean disappears and is denoted only by mournful blasts from a lonely foghorn.