Nelson

I checked out and wandered to Nelson Mandela Square, a stone’s throw from the hotel. Under a typical blue Johannesburg sky, I admired the statue of him and drank in the banners celebrating the centenary of his birth in 2018.

I worked in a café at Johannesburg Airport for a while. Next to me a family sat down at 11.30am, and grilled the waiter on food service timings as they needed to be gone by 12pm. ‘Food usually takes 15 minutes’, he said, very reasonably. ‘Yes but we still need time to eat’, the woman protested, as if he was able to control the speed of her jaw.

‘Sorry madam, on reflection we cannot service your request in the allotted time as we need more than 15 minutes to re-engineer the chemical properties of beef to allow it to be cooked more quickly. Maybe you should have gone to a convenience store further down the concourse and bought a lemon to suck on.’

I nipped to buy a travel pillow. The cashier at the pharmacy was incessantly applying alcohol gel to her hands whenever she came into contact with a customer’s credit card or purchases. A sensible strategy as she looked to be hale, hearty and successfully staving off global pandemics.

Later in transit in Luanda, Angola, there was some over-zealous form-filling, shepherding, mask-wearing and forced use of alcohol gel as passengers arrived. After the chaos of the arrival, I sat down for a few hours, ate a doughnut and did some work.