RaDical MiDDle - ColdType

Radical Middle | 159
Then came robert Kirby in the Financial Mail.
I was in Stellenbosch trying to persuade Oudemeester’s
marketing execs that Frontline was a good place for them to
advertise. as usual I wasn’t shaping quite according to plan –
one of them said among other things that advertisers preferred
a fat glossy publication to a slim modest one. When I left them
I went to the Stellenbosch cNa to check whether Frontline was
on display and in the right place – half the time you’d find it
with the gun magazines, if at all. There was a new Financial Mail
and I ran down the index. Begob, a review of Permanent Peace.
I turned it up and found a headline, “Very Sincere”, which
should have rung alarms. So should the byline. robert Kirby is
a satirist whose forte is ripping things up. It was enemy action
for the fM to give him the book, and for a while I was quite
paranoid about that but in hindsight I accepted it as reflecting
the general ridicule of the “solutions” genre.
Kirby outdid himself. I started reading with an open-ended
curiosity and only slowly realised that here was a classic
pillorying under way, with me in the stocks. I imagined that
even as I was standing stupefied at the cNa magazine rack,
the Oudemeester execs I had just left were opening their post
and reading their fMs and thinking “and we nearly took this
guy seriously!” Worse, their counterparts at Southern Life in
cape Town, who I was meant to be seeing on the same mission
two hours later, were doubtless chortling over their luncheon
sandwiches. I chickened out. The pay-phones at the post office
were miraculously in working order. I cancelled on the pretext
of health, which wasn’t as much of a lie as it would have been
a few moments earlier, and crossed the road to the beautifully
renovated coetzenburg Hotel with every intention of drinking
myself into the first genuine stupor I had known since student
days. Biology and economics conspired to foil me, what with
the stomach no longer able to cope with more beer than the
head and the bartender baulking when the pocket arrived at
its customary state. Some time later a friend of mine went to
the fM’s library in search of examples of brutal book reviews