I had said fuck. ‘You must never ever say that again,’ said my mother. ‘That is the worst thing that you can say.’ She informed me that she had been told that I would have been expelled – the ultimate punishment – from the little school that night, but, because the other boy had already been removed from that seething den of scatological iniquity by his parents, the principal had announced, with regret, that she was not prepared to lose two sets of school fees. And so I was spared. I learned two very important lessons from this. The first was that you must be extremely selective when it comes
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