I

SPENT most of last Sunday evening listening to Gregory Porter, searching for the meaning of life at the bottom of beer bottles and spewing quixotic mumbo-jumbo that would have confused even Steve Komphela, the Kaizer Chiefs coach.

At some point my partner-incrime said, “Darn it, look at the time. I have to go to work in the morning.” Well, he didn’t say “darn it”, but you know what I mean. He then got a faraway look in his eye and told me how lucky I was to be a glorified bum who didn’t need to wake up in the wee hours and make the trek to “the plantation”. And then he said something flippant that I thought was actually profound: “Sometimes I want to tell my boss that when I came asking for a job, I lied. What I really wanted was the money, not the work.”

I’m notorious for my sweeping generalisations and I’m not going to