Abandon your plans if you want to get a life

Imagine that opposite this page there were to appear an advertisement under the headline ‘Free Return Tickets to Cape Town’, worded something like this: ‘Hundreds of free flights to any destination served by South African Airways! Write to us with your preferred itinerary and a brief explanation of why you would like to visit the place you have chosen.’

Suppose you chose Cape Town. You would dispatch your entry more in hope than anticipation, suspicious that there must be a catch. But suppose there was no catch, and you won. Would you not be delighted? Of course you would. Yet I have just come from Johannesburg airport along with another 35 people, all of whom – to a man, woman and child – had been raging, shouting, howling, and in more than one case crying, because they had been made a better offer than the one I’ve just described. All we were asked for in return was to postpone our departure to the same flight on the following day.

So why the gnashing of teeth? One man was so angry that he hit another passenger whom he suspected of trying to push in, then lunged at the lady ticket-clerk. Children, seeing their parents’ distress, began to cry. Husbands shouted and wives buried their heads in their hands. It looked like an Old Testament scene of human misery.

Nor do I exclude myself and my three companions. The feeling among us was one of minor catastrophe. We were at first offered the free flights as a voluntary option. None of us volunteered. It meant missing an English Monday. One of my group works for a newspaper and wanted to be back at his desk. Another had left his elderly mother for a week in a residential nursing home; it might be inconvenient for his brother to collect her.