The Bishop

Someone close to me once told me that I only open my mouth to change feet. For the sake of upholding tradition, I felt that a meeting with the new Archbishop of Cape Town shouldn’t be any different.



As if it wasn’t bad enough that the first time I spoke to him (albeit over the phone), the name was a little foreign to me and I may have treated him with a tad too little formality. I thought I should continue the trend over dinner.


The wonderful part about being young (yes, I have changed my tune since my lamentable updates about my age) is that you know absolutely everything. As my dad points out, blogging belongs to the realm of the young, when you still know everything and the solutions to life’s most pressing issues are merely a matter of common sense. Bigotry is also something of second nature to me. Hence, in a moment of perhaps careless folly, I made the (not uncontroversial) statement that “Men who live on their own become strange and tend to end up as weird old bachelors”. Who knew that I had touched a nerve? Of course, I meant men who become the strange old neighbours upstairs (I am thinking now of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Most Peculiar Man”music, or the strange guy who used to come into the pub I worked at and order a beer, just to sit somewhere else and curb the loneliness). In this context, women are as prone to become strange old cat ladies because, wait for it kids, humans aren’t meant to live alone. We are not leopards or Japanese fighter fish. We are community-loving, huddle-together-for-warmth, lets-stick-together animals, whether we like it or not. Now the Bishop, while he may live alone, lives within a wider community and becomes a ‘father’, a ‘brother’ and an integral part of the family. Hopefully that part of my disastrous slur will be apparent to him.


As my mother so kindly says “All the world is mad but me and thee, and I think I have doubts about thee." The truth is that we are all a bunch of wierdos, some of us are just better at camouflage. I love weirdness and I think its application in everyday life is so underrated. Oscar Wilde so memorably reminded us that there are not good and bad people, merely interesting and tedious ones. I pray that I am always one of the interesting ones.


The upside of the debacle is that the Bishop is now keen to read my blog. Talk about advertising! I can just imagine the slogans now: “Dogmatically Compelling”. “Of Cardinal Importance”. “Read this Religiously”. “One hell of a good read”. Sigh. If only.