Is it that some people 'get it' and other people must aspire to get there? asks Denis Beckett.
The space I’m sitting in is an office, really, a larney one with embossed everything and leather everything and gilded everything. But high-class professionals like medics and lawyers don't say “office”. An “office” is what ledger clerks work in. The premier league have “Rooms” and “Chambers”.
Which are always in the plural. You might come to my Office, but I can’t go to a doctor’s Room, still less an advocate’s Chamber.
The chamber is what his mother might’ve called the pot under her geriatric bed. His habitat has been Chambers from the start, even back when the door opened from the passage and the secretary worked in the far corner.
My host is “eminent”, as they say of people at the top of professional trees. I sometimes think I’d be “eminent” if I’d stayed in my own profession. But I rate journalism’s unchained freedom of conscience highly.
And it’s alluringly easy to imagine you’d be great at this or that activity that you are not being tested in.
He is not shy about the value of his services, old acquaintance though he be. I suppose one day our ever more caring (or interfering?) society will make professionals ring a gong every time the bill turns another R1000, while they dispense advice. That’ll focus us.
But that stage hasn't arrived yet and we are two good South Africans, meeting our quota of amiable platitude.
That’s a nice habit, though nicer while sharing a beer than when one fellow is picturing buffalos and leopards leaping from his wallet while the other remembers Saucy Suzanne on float-building night.
When he does get going, I learn new respect for “captive audience”. Writers like to believe in captive audiences, but delude themselves. You’re always fighting your reader's option to turn the page or nod-off or pick up Deon Meyer or go out to plant turnips.
It’s when someone who knows precisely how to fix your central current problem is talking that you're truly captive, feeling your hair stand up on your head like a cartoon figure seeing a ghost.
Even when he side-tracks into showing off his background knowledge, you shut up, rather than risk prompting another side-track in explanation of why he had to make the first side-track.
In this position, the sound of a cellphone ringing is a rude shock. This can't be happening!
But it is. Move to position two: fury. WTF! Why isn't his phone on silent, like your own?
Third thought is a rolling of the eyes, when he holds it up with that Cheshire cat grin that implies “excuse me, won't be long, totally vital,” and he answers it!
Then you hear: “Hello Janice yes, thank you, fine, and you? Yes, she’s fine, visiting Gillian in Thailand at the moment, who is teaching English there, I wonder if you know? Yes, all going well and Bill? Janice, I have a client here, do you think I could phone back in 20 minutes?
Good, thank you, I’ll get back to you Yes, you too yes, shortly. Thanks Janice okay, and you too. Bye. Um, Denis, where were we?”
And that's where, I just learnt, you have to laugh.
We conceptualise society as a pyramid, where the top guys get things right and fraying takes place on the lower slopes, with peeing in concrete alleys and flinging cans out of cars and crisis education needed.
How helpfully levelling it is to view society differently, not as a place where some people “get it” and other people must aspire to get there, but as one where we all lack grace, can all use righting.
* Beckett is a writer and journalist. His Stoep Talk column appears in The Star on Mondays and Fridays.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.