From The Reluctant Passenger

I'm the most punctual person I know. One of the perennial mysteries of the human condition, as far as I'm concerned, is that people will lament the fugacity of time, the brevity of life, the fewness of opportunities, and then squander time, life and opportunity by being late. If we are truly powerless against time's winged chariot, then punctuality at least restores to us a measure of control over our own contingency. Though we cannot make our sun stand still, at least we can draw up a timetable.

One Monday morning soon after the successful conclusion of what Mhlobo reported in the Mail and Guardian as the Baboon Rights Trial, I set off from my home in good time, allowing my usual adequate margin to ensure that I would get to the office on time, slightly augmented to allow for the fact that it was Monday, and that the spirit of approaching Christmas was abroad like a large, stupid child on roller skates. I was barely on the freeway, however, when I realised that I had committed myself to a near-stationary block—it would have been inaccurate to call it a stream—of traffic. Indeed, I had hardly driven a hundred metres when the flow of traffic, such as it was, stopped entirely. People were getting out of their cars and peering down the central verge, and even climbing onto the roofs of their cars to see what was happening. The less rational members of the motoring public, which is to say most of them, were sounding their horns mindlessly. A man walking back to his car said to anybody who cared to listen, "The country's finally broken down." A woman in the car next to me shouted at him, "What's happening?" and he said morosely, "Nothing. They just pulled out all the plugs at the same time."

"They can't just leave us here!" she exclaimed indignantly. He shrugged and said, "Welcome to the new South Africa."

After a few minutes the traffic started moving again, but very very slowly. The fifteen-minute drive to Groote Schuur Hospital took forty minutes. As we crawled up Hospital Bend we came upon the cause of the delay: an aged tourist bus, probably brought back from the jaws of the wrecker to cope with the unprecedented loads of tourists now that South Africa was a respectable destination, had caught fire while labouring up Hospital Bend. The bus was beyond saving, little of its body remaining apart from a buckled flank announcing "Rainbow Tours Get You There," but two fire engines were enthusiastically dousing it with water, creating dense clouds of smoke and foul-smelling streams of water and melted tar. Two ambulances were parked next to the road, though there was no evidence of any injured people. This, together with the stationary cars of the usual crowd of rubbernecks, further clogged the road, not to mention the tourists, who were wandering around taking photographs of their luggage piled on the grass verge, and of each other posing against a backdrop of the burning bus or of Table Mountain. A young couple in baseball caps and dark glasses were perched on the back of a fire engine, to the evident irritation of the firemen. Next to the stack of luggage a scuffle broke out: uttering polyglot cries of outrage the tourists descended on a young man, evidently one of the rubbernecks who had seized the opportunity to help himself to an expensive-looking suitcase, which was now being reclaimed by its indignant owner. Two men, both wearing T-shirts saying "I ♥ the Rainbow Nation," were holding the would-be thief, and their fellow tourists were hitting him with cameras, binoculars and, in one case, a crutch. The tour guide, a diminutive blonde woman armed, presumably for visibility, with an open sunshade topped with a rainbow-striped pennant, was trying to herd the tourists together in a relatively safe spot off the road, but...