Nothing beats the smell of coffee and brand new book

I don’t know about you. As for me, I have silly reasons for hanging around bookstores. If you have been to CNA to buy a book, well not much happens there. But if you are buying at Exclusive Books, the smell of rich coffee would blow you dizzy. That’s if you are in Hyde Park or Sandton (Mandela Square). The Exclusive Books in Rosebank has gone through “not so cool” changes. The coffee shop is no longer there. The bookshop has moved into a smaller space not far from where it used to be.

It is always a pleasant feeling knowing that in Mandela Square, you can still grab a book from the shelf, find a couch, dig in between the pages whilst sipping the smell of coffee. It is not like I drink coffee when I am there. I sip through the nostrils instead. It is for those reasons that I wish my living room was near the African non-fiction section inside Exclusive Books.

Then what follows is that excitement you get while rushing home. But go gently on your accelerator or else Chris Ngcobo’s JMPD contingent will pounce on you. I mean how can you afford paying a spot fine of R200 (bribe), or a ticket bill of a R500 in the next coming months when you have just blown your last R300 in a bookstore a few minutes earlier? So an act of crawling on the M1 South at 80 km/h means that with the small change in your pocket, there is an incident-free chance that you will get a bottle of Four Cousins at the grocery store. I know what you are thinking... Fusi drinks a R39.99 wine. Well, try it and you will know that “kgoze” (rose’) goes down well while your eyes glide between the pages of a great new book. Ooh, the smell of wine and fresh pages… Mama yoh!

Then you get home. And you have to come up with tactics to keep the distractions to your book-and-wine moment at bay. For me it is a difficult task. Luckily I find that particular channels such as Mzansi Music sort of come in handy; they keep somebody distracted. But then there is an owner of the house. He is pushing 31 months this November. When it comes to the issue of me “reading and sipping” in peace, my son had better be sleeping! I mean it.

If it were not for his antics of violently dispossessing me of the books in my hands, I would not have delivered a brand new copy (Confessions of an Economic Hitman) to a likeable brother called Segopisho Mothibi in Klerksdorp this August. A long story involving some silly childhood friend of mine called Matela Mthwalo who unilaterally drove all the way from Potch to Lekoa to “lend” me a book that did not belong to him.

Things came to a head after about two months of reading the book – and wriggling as I followed line after line about the murderous greed of Western governments. Son had pulled his usual stunt and, as I finished blinking, Segopisho’s property was without the front cover! I was ranting about this disappointing incident on facebook the other day when Segopisho coolly informed me that the defaced book actually belonged to him, not to that swindler called Matela!
Truth is, I love my friend a lot. And the same goes for my son. But I don’t appreciate how they gang up on me, forcing me to buy new copies to build bridges with Segopisho Mothibi while I could be feathering my own nest of book collection, and sipping free coffee through my nostrils.