She caught sight of Gramsci and Bronstein scuttling past, and called them over to assist. "Eight legs each!" she enthused. "That must be the trick!"
Gramsci declined politely - he'd observed the ease with which the damselfly had lost a limb in a spiderweb, and had no desire to follow suit. Instead, he suggested, it was time for a nice up of Milo. The Cow shrugged and heaved her bulk onto the couch.
"If schools were any good," she harrumphed, "they'd teach useful things, like duvet wrangling. Not that rubbish they filled our heads with at an impressionable age!"
"Like what?" enquired Bronstein. He'd been spared the horrors of South African "Christian National Education", which was neither Christian nor properly national, and it certainly wasn't education. He soon regretted asking.
"Well, geography, for a start," grumbled the Cow. "We were taught that the population of Botswana was 1.1 person per square kilometre. Which it probably was, in 19-voetsêk, but it's 3.97 now and my brain still has this obsolete fact lodged in it refusing to make way for newer information."
"Ah, yes," chuckled Gramsci. "And the countries and capitals of Africa. When did you last see a country called Rhodesia - capital: Salisbury - or Zaire? They teach you that stuff as if it's eternal, even though your textbook was first published in 1954, and the list of new editions on the back of the title page shows they've had to update it every six weeks as countries kicked out their occupying forces and asserted independence!"
"That's not the worst of it, though..." the Cow muttered darkly. "Back in Std 2 we did this Human Geography nonsense, about different 'population groups'. Remember the worksheets - Coloured people work as shop assistants and postmen, and black people as gardeners and petrol jockeys?"
"And it was always postMEN," Gramsci added. "Women could be seamstresses - if their husbands allowed them to earn money - but a job like delivering post had needed different genitalia."
"What's a petrol jockey?" Bronstein puzzled.
Gramsci sniggered. "Something you could really use here," he insisted. "It would stop those long questions snarling up the A65 outside Ingleton, for a start!"
"They're petrol pump attendants," the Cow added, seeing the confusion on Bronstein's face. "They take your keys, fill your tank, bring you the credit card machine to pay, so you just sit in your car, It's much more efficient."
"And they clean your windscreen and check your oil and water, and your tyre pressure, while the petrol is pumping," added Gramsci. "They can top up your battery, and pump your tyres, too. Just add a few Rand to the tip!"
"So..." Bronstein hesitated. "Would it be the kind of job that parents would say to kids, 'if you don't work hard at school, this is what you'll end up doing?"
Gramsci and the Cow were shocked. "Oh no!" the Cow insisted. "That was the point. That was a black person's job. Only black people could do those jobs. Just like only white people could be foremen on the mines - although all the other workers were black - because black people weren't allowed to handle dynamite."
"Job reservation," added Gramsci, "it's completely daft. By race and gender. That's what school prepared you for. Your pre-ordained slot in the hierarchy."
"So, other than duvet wrangling, what would you have rather learned?" Bronstein's head was spinning.
"Well..." Gramsci mused. "How to replace the lithium battery in digital kitchen scales without deconstructing the entire device, might be useful?" He looked pointedly at the Cow. She flushed angrily. "Or," she added, "how to change the font in MS Word so that it doesn't ignore everything between punctuation marks, leaving your text liberally sprinkled with Helvetica when the publisher won't look at anything that isn't Times!"
"Or Times New Roman, if they're really generous," interjected Gramsci.
Bronstein sighed. He'd always considered the Cow and Gramsci really well educated by comparison. After all, they knew Garibaldi was more than a biscuit...