Cavendish Square is a strange place. A place of clichés. At a table near me sit two young women – obviously varsity friends from the snatches of conversation drifting across to me – discussing Stellenbosch and reminiscing over their wine. They get so caught up in their catch-up that they completely forget to look at the menu and send the waiter away to give them more time to decide. I find myself wondering if they’re wives. The place is full of women in designer outfits, some with small children. Ladies who lunch. Sometimes several generations all at once. In between them, the occasional guy dressed for work: a geek here, a business suit there.

I feel a little like a cliché myself today. Dressed in business gear, sitting in a restaurant in a fancy mall, with my laptop and smartphone, as I grab a salad between meetings. I feel like a bit of a fraud, too. This isn’t me anymore. Perhaps it never was. The meetings are useful and interesting but the corporate-esque life of scattered meetings and restaurant lunches is so far from the life I have been living. I guess the life I’d like to be living would involve as many meetings (probably more) but the dusty, less-developed world I long for would have less offices, less business dress and probably no restaurants at all. I already defy a lot of this reality. I took a train this morning instead of driving a fancy, gas-guzzling car. The diary sitting on the table is a random, note-book/diary that I bought for 3000 won in a stationery shop in Korea. The pen beside it came from a hotel in Durban.

The train trip this morning was slow and long but lovely. South Africa’s public transport system is not great. A train from Strand to Cape Town takes over an hour and a half – roughly the time it used to take me to travel almost clear across Korea (Daegu to Seoul) on the high-speed train. And the train carriages are far from luxurious. At some point the South African government is going to have to invest heavily in the country’s public transport infrastructure. The views make up for it though. As the train comes in towards Cape Town, the iconic bulk of table mountain rises above the city bowl, each rock clear and crisp against the blue morning sky. It is beautiful. Living in Cape Town – at least on warm summer days like today – is a little like living in a real-life postcard. Not that everything is happy and perfectly functional, but the setting, the context is so very pretty.

The bill arrives and I am momentarily amused by the irony as I pull out my R20 wallet. This isn’t my life and not one I particularly want – management, a fancy car and a corner office never did appeal – but it is fun to dip into it from time to time, to enjoy the little luxuries and remember why public transport and hard work and complicated problems are infinitely preferable for me.