I’m 15-going-on-16.

In the morning room of my boarding school in the Cape Town city centre watching dust motes dance in the sun pouring through high sash-windows – I’m so sadly angry to be stuck there on a Saturday when our family home is only 10 minutes away in Rondebosch.

They’ve allowed me and other term-long inmates to put on the radio and some DJ is chattering on about new songs.

He says the next thing we’re going to hear is incredible, so we’re sort of paying attention when those first insistent sax strains of Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street” transform a tinny transistor radio into something else.

By the time it gets to the second verse (because I’m a lyrics girl), I’m smitten:

“Way down the street there’s a light in his place, he opens the door, he’s got that look on his face, and he asks you where you’ve been, you tell him who you’ve seen, and you talk about anything.”

And that’s how it was.

  48-going-on-15