JOHANNESBURG - About 10 years ago, the powers that were (and mostly still are) at Independent Newspapers decided to transfer me from being managing editor of The Sunday Independent to being ME of something called the Independent News Network (INN), and to put the deputy editor of INN into my slot.
In other words, we would be swopped. This event was (and is) of no significance whatsoever, other than that this very likable fellow called Ronald Suresh Roberts - you know, the chap who wrote a book about the former president - this Roberts, who did not like me because, well, I am not very likable, decided that my lateral arabesque was a demotion and that he ought to point this out to me in no uncertain manner.
He therefore sent me what was supposed to be a mocking and vengeful e-mail. The aim of this was to pierce me to the quick and to push my bedraggled and vulnerable soul over the edge into a veritable slough of despond.
As it turned out, the move sideways to INN was one of the best things that ever happened to me journalistically-speaking, because it freed me to go on the Zuma trail, which ended in turn in that magnificent JZ biography that everyone (except Paul Trewhela and Mandy what's-her-name at the M&G) loves so much. My book is not, I concede, as much of a comic masterpiece as RSR's book about Mbeki, but I verily believe it has sold more copies; and we all know what Rabbi Samuel Johnson said: "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money".
Anyway, all this having been the case, when I saw this week that Suresh was having a spot of bother with the Sunday Times (see here), when I saw those horrible, illiberal, untransformed people were trying to leave him with not so much as the proverbial pot in which to micturate and not a stool upon which to squat (and, sic transit gloria mundi, he was once the holder of, so to speak, a full chair in the local writing room - or at least the local coffee shop!) - it did cross my mind to write something nasty.
"Don't you even bloody well think about it," said SW(a)MBO, she-who-must-be-obeyed, aka my gorgeous wife.