Lost moments of glory

I hate Redi Tlhabi. For the benefit of the insignificant majority who do not reside in the province of gold, she hosts Talk Radio 702's mid-morning show.

The reason for my resentment is that she unwittingly stole my thunder during one of her recent shows.

Like most columnists, I keep a column ideas bank that I tap into weekly. For months I've been meticulously nurturing a column about things I consider to be generally overrated in life.

Imagine my consternation when I switch on my car radio one Thursday morning and Redi is busy giggling her head off as listener after listener regales her with their contributions to the question ... yup, you guessed it: "Who or what do you think is generally overrated?"

So I sit there in resignation as caller after caller goes about the evil task of reducing my meticulously assembled future column to an impotent heap of plagiarism, were I ever to publish it. Caviar, they say. Golf. Graeme Smith. Kim Kardashian's ass. Orlando Pirates. On and on they go, as I sit there grating my teeth, wishing I wasn't listening. About the only items on my list they don't mention include the phrase "grassroots level" and sex on the beach. You know, sand everywhere? You have to try it to understand.

This took me back to an experience I suspect most of us have had at one point or another. It was 1980. I was just another eight-year-old humungous skull perched atop a sinewy skeleton in Miss Ally's standard 2 class at Esihonqeni Lower Primary, Mpumalanga Township.

That's Grade 4, for the benefit of any born-frees reading this. Miss Ally was going round the class searching for the answer to a biblical question. I think the question was "What was the name of the mountain Moses climbed to fetch the Ten Commandments after he parked cheesy with a burning bush?" or something like that. What I do know with certainty is that the answer was "Mount Sinai".

I've shared in this very column how I'd harboured impure designs on Miss Ally from Grade 1. I imagined that giving her the correct answer would lead to us walking into the sunset hand in hand; goddess educator and eight-year-old human lollipop. To maximise the effect of my impending moment of glory, I allowed the mere mortals to fall by the wayside like proverbial dominoes with their ignorant answers. Gethsemane, Calvary, Babylon, they babbled.

Finally, I raised my hand triumphantly to dazzle Miss Ally and ... "Mount Sinai, miss!" came the answer, not from my lips but from those of a classmate with the face of a constipated emu christened Phineas by his obviously sadistic parents.

Oh no. I had mistimed my "Caesar triumphantly returns to Rome with the spoils of war" moment by 0.1 seconds. It took all my self-restraint not to grab Phineas by the throat, shake him violently while yelling: "You stinky, lousy emu! That was my moment of glory! Verily, verily I say unto thee, take it back!" That's correct. I was so livid I was thinking in Bible-speak. But it was too late. Phineas was the teacher's pet and I was just the angry boy with an oversized cranium.

Like you, my dear reader, I've subsequently had many of these moments in my life. For instance, I invented the internet back in 1983, the first time I ever saw a PC. But as I whiled away the time until I turned 18, I was pipped to the finish line. For interest, I'd also invented the mobile phone about three years earlier, while watching a simulcast episode of Buck Rogers in die 25de Eeu or Buck Rogers in the 25th Century to the rest of the civilised world.

The thunder stolen from me that I'm most sore about occurred more than a decade ago. Dark Lord, a friend of mine and I sat on plastic garden chairs watching the sun set over Hartbeespoort Dam at dusk one New Year's Eve. And that's when the idea of flexible, folding camp chair constructed out of sail was born.

A few months later I walked into a Makro and there was our chair, although I'm not sure whether this particular thunder was stolen or sold for 30 pieces of silver. Very soon after that, Dark Lord purchased the first in a long line of sleek, expensive luxury automobiles.

This is not to say that I haven't been guilty of my fair share of inadvertent thunder-pilfering myself.

One of my best friends tells me how he picked up a copy of my first book at the airport while travelling to New York. When we finally met for the first time he shared with me how, with every page, he became increasingly annoyed with himself when he realised that I'd written the book he'd been writing in his head for a while but had never really got around to typing. But, as I like to tell him, the individual whose thunder is pinched often has the last laugh.

As a result of that first book, I now make a living partially by writing a weekly column about passing out on pub benches while he runs a successful consultancy. I also ran into Phineas, at the Pick n Pay where he was working, a few years ago. I had to dig deep into my magnanimity reserves to quell the voice of the eight-year-old inside me who wanted to stick his tongue out and go: "So I guess this is where Mount Sinai leads, then."