Stupid. It can hurt.

 It’s hard to enough to admit you’re fat. Or ugly. Or have no taste. Or that you listen to Nickleback when there’s nobody else around.

It’s so much harder to admit you’re stupid. Because at the heart of it, in a world where fad diets, cosmetic surgery, gym contracts and models Photoshopped within an inch of their lives are thrust upon us at every turn, our greatest fear remains that of being the idiot. There’s just no pill or scalpel or software for stupid.

I’d had a bit of a stupid week, but Thursday almost finished me off.

It began with a three-kay walk through the drizzle before work. I’d taken my car to the panelbeaters for an insurance assessment. I’d removed all the stealable things first, including an extremely efficient umbrella. Within minutes, my beautifully-coiffed hair looked like it had been farted onto my head.

After two kays I popped in to Origin for a flat white to cheer myself up. The woman behind the counter was trying not to laugh. I didn’t tip her. It was the worst Origin coffee I've had, and I've had a good many. In the short walk onward to the agency, I managed to spill most of it down the front of my white shirt.

I find that, when a day bolts out of the gate by putting one stupid foot in front of the other, the hours that follow seldom improve. Worse, the universe tends to enjoy rewarding stupidity with accident.

So my day fast became one of paper-cuts and mutually misunderstood emails. Then there was the mishap at the basin in the gents which left me looking as if I’d pissed myself, and a twenty-minute session with my cellphone provider that took me down a telephonic rabbit-hole which involved having to pressing sundry digits every five minutes, and ended in an answering machine.

I left a message that was both illuminating and stimulating on the answering machine, and had hardly hung up when I received a pleading call from the mentally flatulent husband of the Psychotic Bitch who had caused sixty thousand rand’s worth of damage to my car. He wanted to tell me that his insurance had lapsed – which of course would mean that the R4,000 excess would be for my account – and that he was not in a financial position to make a contribution. He was sure, he said, that I would understand. I replied that while I was not surprised, I did not understand in the slightest, and nor did I understand why he and his misbegotten ilk were allowed to walk among us.

Later, it turned out that the giant and scruffily-bearded lesbian who had offered me a lift back to my car had come down with a little sniffle and was home in bed. I had warned him that those kinds of things would happen if he went ahead with his planned purchase of a Forester, but he ignored me and bought the thing anyway. So I had to forego the ride in his new Lesbaru and headed back up the hill to the panel shop on foot.

I drove home in terror, expecting at any moment some relation of Psychotic Bitch to flatten me with his eighteen-wheeler, or a herd of bison to come stampeding at me down Constantia Neck, or the rumoured divine being finally to reveal himself by reaching down from the sky and pinching my head off – plink, just like that. Even a flock of pterodactyls fighting their way out of my underpants would not have surprised me.

What I didn’t expect was a mole rat masquerading as a stray hamster.

Christ. Do you even get stray hamsters? I should have considered this more carefully at the time. 

Anyway, pleased and amazed that I had survived the trip home, I inched up the driveway and took my first breath in twenty kilometres. I secured what remains of my car with the handbrake, and further secured it with a beep of its double-blind Bluetooth-enabled frequency-hopping nano-whizwang immobiliser, because that’s what you have to do in South Africa even if it’s your car and your garage. And then I ran inside and lunged for a corkscrew and swallowed half a bottle of wine as if it had been Kool-Aid. 

There were two reasons for this – one, I felt I deserved it, and two, my dear wife (who believes that anyone who might enjoy a small whisky or a little glass of wine after work is on a one-way path to rehab) was out and could have returned at any moment.

My phone rang just as the wine had begun to clear my arteries and synapses of insurance companies, snarky baristas and failed hairstyles. It was said wife, whose car’s battery had died while waiting for one of our progeny to finish dance class. Luckily I hadn’t done away with the whole bottle of Bouchard Finlayson, because other than leaving two of my three favourite females in a parking lot for the night, I had no option but to drive there to jump-start her. Her car, I should say.

And then stupid came back.

I couldn’t find the battery in my Audi, even with the help of the token torch that doubles up as an iPhone these days.

There was no clue in any of the four hundred pages of the owner’s manual, other than an arcane sketch of mechanical bits that may well have been copied from whatever it is that powers the Tardis. I’ve just this minute stepped outside into the (very) cold light of day to pop the bonnet, and nope, no battery in sight. I suppose it might have fallen out when Psychotic Bitch drove into me last weekend.

So we secured the Honda and went home to have dinner and set fire to each other.

And that’s when Michelle saw the stray hamster. Poor little creature, fumbling around the driveway as if recently hit on the head, simply begging to be rescued and fed and warmed up in a bed of our own dead hamster’s wood shavings. I have a soft spot for animals. I’ve never met a stupid one, for instance, or one that has in a moment of minor brain trauma driven its car into someone else’s. So I decided to pick the little thing up while Michelle looked for something to put it in.

Let me assure you that nothing pisses off a wild Cape mole-rat more than being mistaken for a hamster.

The little thing went instantly apeshit.

It tore into my hand with all the fury of Oprah in an Italian fashion store. It sunk its sharp yellow fangs into one finger after the next as I tried to shake the raging beast off – imagine trying to get rid of a stubborn piece of sticky-tape, only more painful. Finally with my other hand I grabbed it by the scruff, and with a deft twisting motion managed to dislodge its denticles from my thumb. It squawked and squealed and thrashed about until I dropped it into an old cake-tin offered up by my wide-eyed youngest daughter, who had kindly lined the tin with wood-shavings while I was hopping about shrieking profanities and bleeding in the driveway.

I got a proper look at the miscreant for the first time as it hissed and fuffed and bolted around the perimeter of the tin. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything as ugly as a Cape mole-rat before. Its pinprick black eyes are sunken in patches of white fur, which gives it a decidedly insane countenance. Its teeth are long and vicious and far from Bugs Bunny cute. It has a nose like a pig’s, were the pig to run into an oncoming meat-grinder first.

“Daddy, that’s not a hamster,” my daughter said. My girls are smart beyond their years. “No shit, baby girl,” I said and flung the furry little abomination over the garden wall, silently hoping that one of Psychotic Woman’s relatives would drive past just then.

Shots, then. Rabies, tetanus, meningitis, arthritis... They gave me just about everything they had on the shelf. I asked for gonorrhoea too, as I felt I had been truly fucked over by the creature I’d set out to rescue, but the nurse said no.

I should have asked her for something to take care of the stupid, but stupidly, I forgot to.