It’s December again (“hello, hello Dezember” to my Joburg folk), and your thoughts right now are probably filled with the incredibly arduous job of buying Christmas gifts, fattening the Christmas turkey and stocking the Christmas-hosting house with the appropriate foods and liquids. Good on you. Oh, by the way. If anyone has a direct number to Santa, please tell him that I’ve tried really hard this year to be good, and wouldn’t mind a Mazda 2 Coupé for Christmas. I saw one last week in Mount Edgecombe, and coveted it muchly. But I digress, as is my wanton habit. Where was I? Oh ja, Christmas.
While you older people might be having all sorts of Yuletide fun times, spare a thought for your poor, soon-to-be-a-school-child-no-more teenager. You see, come January they will suddenly find themselves in the cruellest place on earth: university. The lowest circle of hell that Dante didn’t know about. Had he known, he would have declined to mention it in his Inferno out of fear and horror. Of course, if you want to spare your poor teen a torrid time of it, you will need to have considered this when you brought him or her into the world in 1991, and started a college fund. If you did, then you can ship him or her off, safe in the knowledge that he or she will not have to suffer the indignity of — and I’m referring specifically to UCT here — a res induction that involves cutting their hair with a pair of sheep shears, Jammie buses and res sub-wardens. Speaking of Jammie buses, a mate of mine once related how he overheard a sweat-inducing conversation whilst awkwardly jammed between two massive main okes on the bus, “Ja, bru. So I knocked this one oke outside Tin Roof last night for tuning my moustache”. University is a breeze if you have a car, a flat and fat wallet. But chances are, you didn’t consider your future children’s happiness in 1991. In which case, you’d best prepare them for the worst. Go on, you have an entire month in which to break the terrible news to them.
This casts me back to my own Matric year. 2006. I remember my father wanting to know what my plans for the next year were. I thought he was being a bit over-the-top. I couldn’t even crack a Pass for my maths tests, and he wanted to know what I wanted to do the next year. But then I gave it some thought, and came to the startling realisation that I didn’t actually know what I wanted to be when I finally grew up. I had as a youngster entertained some thoughts of going into the medical field, but an aptitude test in the ninth grade put paid to those dreams. I was as likely to become a surgeon as Ngconde Balfour is to become Mr South Africa. Then I read in a newspaper somewhere about the Jacob Zuma rape trial. What caught my eye, amongst other things, was the amount that Kemp J Kemp had written on the invoice that got sent to Zuma every month. I can’t remember how much it was exactly, but it was somewhere in the region of R3 million, R3 MILLION! I suddenly knew what I was going to be when I was big. And don’t think I didn’t research the subject. I watched two seasons of Boston Legal, which taught me two things: 1. All you need to be a lawyer is a sturdy briefcase, a good voice and a very loud pinstripe suit. 2. To be Denny Crane is the most desirable thing in the whole world.
A few years on, I’ve had a rather nasty awakening. If your child is under any illusions about the amount of work legal studies require, get them to read the Corpus Iuris Civilis. Or Hugo de Groot’s De Jure Belli ac Paci. Or perhaps Johannes Voet’s Compendium juris juxta seriem Pandectarum. Even Snyman’s revised Criminal Law ought to sober up your wannabe legal eagle of a sprog. They’ll move to a BCom Marketing like a shot. I now have nothing but deep respect for the Kemp J Kemps of this world. Nothing but extraordinary obstinacy and bloody-mindedness can get a person through a law degree. Here I am with neither of those qualities, stuck halfway through a law degree. I blame Denny Crane for this.
The even sadder thing is, I don’t see myself as an attorney. Let me put it this way, would you have me represent you in a court of law? I doubt it. I’d stand up, crack at a joke at the judge and get disbarred on the spot. And despite what Denny Crane might have us believe, lawyers work extremely hard. Mostly. I’m a bit allergic to terribly hard work.
I hear copywriting’s a ball. You just sit around, writing stuff. Right up my alley, then.
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