The Big Read: What would Dirty Harry have done?

The verandah of the hotel was cool and stately so I hadn't minded being ignored by the waiters until now; but I was starting to jones for my flat white.

An ancient man in a nearby wicker chair sighed; apparently he was feeling neglected too. Suddenly an elderly black man in a waistcoat appeared at my elbow. "A flat w-" I said, and then realised that the waiter was Morgan Freeman, going over to chat to the old man in the wicker chair, who was Clint Eastwood.

That's the problem with living in Cape Town: you can't drop casual racism anywhere without it landing on international megastars. Whether they're shooting Invictus or shooting the breeze in stilted Bono-speak with vendors in Greenmarket Square, they are everywhere. In the last year I've seen the top of Sir Ian McKellen's hat, Ryan Gosling's foot - hell, I've even seen Mamphela Ramphele going into the dairy aisle in Woolies, then changing her mind suddenly and going into the fruit and veg aisle before backtracking and explaining that she had been in the dairy aisle all along. But that's another story.

The trouble with living in a city overrun with A-listers is that you start thinking you're seeing them everywhere. A while ago I saw Annie Lennox at my local supermarket. Now I can't shake the feeling that everyone down at Checkers is Annie Lennox, including the man behind the meat counter who introduces himself to me in Malmesbury Afrikaans as Kobus. I want to wink at "Kobus" and congratulate her on a great disguise and very authentic-sounding brei.

This might all be hypothetical musing if I myself hadn't been a victim of Cape Town's celebrity infestation. I was sitting alone on a street-front bar stool, nursing a coffee, when I realised that I was the object of teenaged fascination: a gaggle of girls was conspicuously trying to look inconspicuous across the street, giggling, nudging, and staring at me.

I immediately assumed the worst; that, in an act of spectacular self-sabotage, I had forgotten to wear pants. But no, the pants were there. I glanced at the girls again and saw that their smiles were not mocking but admiring. Was it possible that they were from a convent and had never seen a 30-something man before? Perhaps they had only ever seen three human men - a geriatric gardener, a leper who combed the donkey, and a nine-year-old boy raised by wolves who had stumbled down out of the mountains, his skin calloused by almost a decade of being groomed by wolf tongues.

Should I smile? Probably not: their mothers might see and I might be put on some sort of list. What would Clint do? He'd make steely Clint eyes and drink that cappuccino as if it was a goblet of tar laced with gunpowder. Now being this is a double-shot cappuccino, the most powerful foamy beverage in the world and will blow your head clean off, I'd be asking myself one question: did I take four sips or only three? Do you feel lucky, convent novices? Well, do yah?

But they had seen that I had seen them, and now they were forming a tight huddle like a defensive Roman infantry formation where legionaries interlock their pinkies and rebuff attacks with wave upon wave of giggles and whispers of "Shut up! No, you shut up!" Now someone was hissing, "You ask him!" and her friend was slapping her arm and saying, "You ask him!" And then one of them said, "It's soooo him!" and another girl laughed and said, "It's soooo not him!" and at last I understood that they thought I was someone famous.

But who? Colin Firth, said my vainer angels. But self-doubting devils whispered, They think you're Susan Boyle. Yes, I replied, but they said "him". Ah, said the demons, but you just wanted to hear that, Susan .

The bravest of the girls had been thrust out of the huddle, and was crossing the street. I studied the foam on my coffee until her shadow fell across me. Then she said, "Sorry.?" I raised my head, hoping to look like Don Corleone in his garden roused by a tomato plopping onto his loafer.

"My friends want to know if you're -" she said, and then she looked at me properly. Her eyes widened and her smile cooled. "Sorry," she said again. "Sorry." And then she ran back across the road, shrieking with laughter. "It's not him," she howled. "I told you it wasn't him!"

I didn't feel hurt, just guilty for disappointing them. But mostly, as I watched them reel away down the road, whooping, I just wanted to ask them who, for one dizzying moment, I had almost been.