Carnivorous Cow flinched as a rather large splash from the pool diluted her whisky - and attempted to answer Lolly's sensible questions. All around, looks of comfortable nostalgia settled on faces, and even the chief Braaier abandoned his post to reminisce.
It was a rather odd group. Several had been undergraduates more or less coterminously at the "university" geographically closest to the gathering, though only two had known each other at the time. Of those, a couple had had postgraduate experience at UCT. Others knew UCT only as the source of all those unwanted student cars clogging up the parking bays at Rhodes Memorial, or the "owner" of the scary blue buses that nearly wiped them out on their morning jogs, or the site of the Two Oceans finish line.
"You're so lucky working there," sighed one. "All those gorgeous young students to ogle all day..."
"Yes," interjected another, "but then you also have all those professors, with those ghastly bodies that shouldn't be allowed out in public! It's enough to make you lose your appetite!" She shovelled another forkliftful of peppadew chips into her mouth.
Carnivorous Cow thought about that. It was true, there were some really aesthetically pleasing students, but there were others who seemed to delight in defying the tyrrany of beauty. And staff, well - these ranged from people whose religion obviously forbade intimate contact with shampoo, to those who could tell you their weight in micrograms, before and after the sip of espresso they allowed to slip between their lips - carefully rationed, so as not to spoil their BurgerSanlam training schedule.
There were those who celebrated the view that paying attention to one's body detracted from nourishing one's mind, and Carnivorous Cow couldn't help but feel saddened by that. She wasn't sure how shortened life-expectancy benefitted the mind, except perhaps to focus it more sharply at the point at which the doctor chose to quantify that.
She looked across at the guy from the movie production company. "Perhaps you're luckiest," she ventured, "reality never comes intruding into your working life!" He smiled, enigmatically. "Perhaps," he conceded, "but it's so nice to be with people who actually *eat* the food you provide for them!"
At which point the braai was declared ready, and conversation was set aside momentarily. Lolly sidled closer to the Cow. "Maybe," she murmured shyly, "I *do* need another AIDS talk, if there are going to be so many delectable bodies lying around..."