I ran away from home at 17. Sedately, surreptitiously, but I ran away nevertheless. I was happy enough at King David, but I never felt completely at home there. The thought of succumbing to the pressure of going straight from completing school to Wits Medical School with (literally) more than half of my class felt stifling. I opted for a cover story on top of a cover story – I enrolled for law at the University of Cape Town, 2 000 kilometres away and in a town I had never visited. The law cover story can best be explained by the old Jewish joke: ‘What is the definition of a lawyer? A nice Jewish boy who can't stand the sight of blood.’ I had other, at that stage secret, plans for my life, thank goodness.

Forty years after I left school, the cool kids organised a King David class reunion. Given that by far the majority of the people who had been in my year now lived overseas, and that some (especially, it seemed to me, the naughtiest boys) had become very religious and even rabbis, the reunion was held not in Johannesburg but in Israel. There was absolutely no chance that I would fork out to travel overseas to a school reunion, least of all in Israel, about which I felt deeply and irrevocably conflicted, given the occupation of Palestine. I did not relish the thought of the competitiveness that a reunion would probably engender – by definition, by having chosen to stay in South Africa, I would be regarded as a failure by some of my classmates – and while I did have some good friends at King David, the thought of enforced chumminess with a group of people with whom I now had little in common over some days in a foreign country filled me with horror. As an academic I go to a lot of conferences and meetings and I cannot bear the forced jollity and strained laughs of colleagues forced together for a meeting and having to pretend to be having a great time together. The issue of the chumminess was brought home to me when I bumped into an old classmate, one of the very few living in Cape Town, at the shops one day.