Sunday lunch and an important conversation with a solitary kid

So my friend, previously known as The Photographer, Mark Morisson, invites me to lunch with his friends David Butler and Kate Shand. Or Kate invited me to lunch, but there I was at lunch in Greenside.

David is a well known South African actor and if he lived in the US he would have been a well known Hollywood actor. There are only so many real good actors in the world and he is one of them.

Kate is a very successful woman in something and she is married to David and they have kids ... four of them and they live in Greenside, a ''leafy suburb of Joburg" as the name suggests .

OK, so Greenside is not too far from Melville, I accept and I go.

David braais ( barbecues for my foreign readers) a Springbok and a sheep and does so excellently. The problem with braaiing (correct spelling) something wild is that it can become quite tough and dry. David does the Springbok justice and deserves applause just for that.

Invariably the conversation turns to Terre'blanche and Malema and the whole seeming mess. David sums it up perfectly: "It was a double whammy. If he was gay with a white person, he would have lost 50% of his followers, but sucking the cock of a black person is a 100% fuck-up for a white supremacist."

So the afternoon goes on with much laughter and typically Joburg indifference to 'serious' topics (we know about them).

When the lunch party starts to break up (at 7pm) I get occasion to speak to John-Peter, a solitary child who kept to himself all day. We smoke a non-drug, non-whatever hubbly-bubbly pipe together and he tells me his problem in school is maths.

So I tell him to trust his brain ... it can do maths.

That was the important conversation.