“In my next life,” I hear a young boy declaring, “I’ll be a Spitfire.”
“Say what?”
It’s his oupa asking. The two of them are sitting at a small table in a coffee shop in town. Oupa is nursing a cappuccino, which sticks to his moustache, and the youngster a pannekoek and milkshake.
“A Spitfire, Oupa,” he repeats, “a fighter plane.”
“It’s amachine, jong. You must be a living thing.”
“But Oupa, you said
