I knew someone who was an echt mama’s boy in real life who took insane risks smuggling wristwatches into Zimbabwe on weekends.

When I find myself in a homogeneous phase of my life, I like to have a caption for it. Guilty Repose is what I came up with for my caesura in Gaborone, which softens it: I went slightly decadent.

He was a leading-man type who was just over the line into paterfamilias roles and hating it.

We’d had some minor postprandial necking in the car, in the course of which I’d wondered if he was uncomfortable kissing in a sitting position.

The saté would get between your teeth. He had toothpicks with him and handed me some proleptically.

Here he made a slightly sacerdotal gesture with cupped hands and I thought the excursion was over.

Then as he gets closer and keeps scrutinizing, it turns into the surface of the moon, cratered, with points of oil glittering and her lanugo showing up.

I am unbelievably cathected when it comes to fat, which works out well in that it impels me to be a good influence on friends who need to lose weight.

It also had the carom quality of indirectly apprising him that in his description of the sun he had missed a bet by not comparing it to a cow.

But it was a proof of gentility that he overlooked my first parapraxis in his presence and is probably even one of the reasons I was moved to persist despite an otherwise not-auspicious encounter at Tutwane’s.