Moving house, I purchased cardboard boxes in a small shop. I was the first customer in line and while waiting for my size 7 boxes to be folded, I struck up an easy conversation with the older white woman behind me. Her flat, southern suburbs, South African English was familiar to the ear. Pleasant convo about everything and nothing, like the spike in the price of petrol or the next round of load-shedding. Nice Sunday morning banter.

Suddenly, a white woman with a distinctively foreign English accent rushed in, spoke over us and loudly demanded the attention of the young man folding my boxes. I sighed, “here we go again”, that problem of black invisibility one encounters so often at service stations. I tell her firmly this is rude; there is a line, in case she did not notice. The interrupter made some flimsy excuse, with a quick sorry...