So life really is not fair — except perhaps …

Awalk around Zoo Lake is one of Johannesburg’s great treasures, a saunter that is accompanied by the passiveaggressive honks of geese as they warn then dare and then allow you to walk past, but, hey, don’t try that again otherwise I may get up in your face. You get me, honky?

There is little silence around Zoo Lake, but there is noise that does not distract but delights. The lonely silence of a man eating his lunch on a bench. The peak-wearing pensioners talking over each other on their walks lest the other is as deaf as she pretends not to be. The startling questions about life from the drivers and couriers taking time out in the parking lot of the dead restaurant once known as Moyo.

“Excuse me, sir, but is life fair?” is not the sort of question you expect at midday in a car park from a man leaning on a fading Korean sedan. But, there it was, in all its two-step-WTF-trip-you-up moment. Is? Life? Fair?

It required an answer. He and his fellow drivers had obviously been deep in discussion about it. Life and fairness. It’s a question for the ages, for when you wake up, when you fall asleep, for when the universe deals you a good hand or a bad, for when the clouds in your head are low or high, for when you get in the shower still wearing your socks or the mirror goes all Joey from Friends on you and says, “how you doin’?”

“No, brother,” I said. “Life isn’t fair. If it was, I might not have been here so you could ask me that. Or, maybe not. Life isn’t fair because humans and nature aren’t made to be fair. They are made to make you fight and struggle and survive, and, one day, when you think you have done your fair share, it reminds you that your expectations and those of others not only make life a risky fire walk, but that your past has defined how you believe in fair. And don’t get me started on New Zealand rugby referees, Thierry Henry, TMO, VAR, DRS and shiver VAT.”

Instead I said: “Life isn’t fair. Life can f**k right off.”

They nodded. Life can f**k right off indeed.

And, then, there is Andy Rice, who sadly left us recently but will forever be with us. He was a fair man, perhaps the fairest I have met, whether in advertising, where he was the sun around which that sector spun, or a the guy I would meet for a natter in the Tyrone Avenue shopping strip in Parkview.

Andy Rice was a glorious example of what it meant to be a human being. When I first met him I was shaken by him, one, knowing who I was, and, two, having read all of my columns.

He was a voice of reason and direction in the maelstrom of creative living, because being a “creative” was not a job to him and nor should it be to anyone.

He made me laugh and he made me feel as if I had done something special, no matter how small, and that was his gift — his humanity.

I had, until recently, forgotten that I had played football against Andy’s team, the Cloggers, in the globally famous Joburg Social League. There are no points awarded in the league, just the weekly satisfaction of playing and, hopefully, beating one of the other sides.

How many others have taken their social league team to Wembley? How many others have had their obituary in The Times of London: “A keen sportsman, he ran his own social football team called the Cloggers, which, according to one of his players, did not have a great track record of points scored every season but sought comfort from their motto ‘form is temporary; class is eternal’.

“A modest domestic record did not prevent Rice’s team taking the pitch at Wembley Stadium. Graham Warsop, an SA business colleague, recalls Rice inviting him to play in a match but omitting to tell him until after the flights had been booked that the venue was in London rather than Johannesburg. ‘So we flew to England and it was quite surreal following Andy out of the tunnel for a 90-minute game on Wembley’s hallowed turf,’ Warsop recalled.’

“The following day Rice’s brother Tim arranged for him to play in a charity cricket match on the equally hallowed turf at Lord’s, making him almost certainly the only sportsman ever to play at Wembley and Lord’s in the same weekend.”

That hardly seems fair, does it? But, then, it was Andy Rice. He lived and bent life, that most unwieldy and unpredictable of things, to show us all that it can be fair in the long run. RIP, Andy.

ANDY RICE, A VOICE OF REASON IN CREATIVE LIVING ... BEING A ‘ CREATIVE’ WAS NOT JUST A JOB