Abandon your plans if you want to get a life

Imagine that opposite this page there were to appear an advertisement under the headline ‘Free Return Tickets to Cape Town’, worded something like this: ‘Hundreds of free flights to any destination served by South African Airways! Write to us with your preferred itinerary and a brief explanation of why you would like to visit the place you have chosen.’

Suppose you chose Cape Town. You would dispatch your entry more in hope than anticipation, suspicious that there must be a catch. But suppose there was no catch, and you won. Would you not be delighted? Of course you would. Yet I have just come from Johannesburg airport along with another 35 people, all of whom – to a man, woman and child – had been raging, shouting, howling, and in more than one case crying, because they had been made a better offer than the one I’ve just described. All we were asked for in return was to postpone our departure to the same flight on the following day.