Chapter One - The Clothes of Others
MMA RAMOTSWE, owner of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency (as featured
in a two-page article in the Botswana Daily News, under the headline “A
Lady Who Definitely Knows How to Find Things Out”), had strong views
on the things that she owned. Personal possessions, she thought, should
be simple, well made, and not too expensive. Mma Ramotswe was
generous in all those circumstances where generosity was required—but
she was never keen to pay one hundred pula for something that could be
obtained elsewhere for eighty pula, or to get rid of any item that, although
getting on a bit, still served its purpose well enough. And that, she
thought, was the most important consideration of all—whether
something worked. A possession did not have to be fashionable; it did not
have to be the very latest thing; what mattered was that it did what it was
supposed to do, and did this in the way expected of it. In that respect,
there was not much difference between things and people: what she
looked for in people was the quality of doing what they were meant to do,
and doing it without too much fuss, noise, or complaint. She also felt that
if something was doing its job then you should hold on to it and cherish
it, rather than discarding it in favour of something new. Her white van,
for instance, was now rather old and inclined to rattle, but it never failed
to start—except after a rain storm, which was rare enough in a dry
country like Botswana—and it got her from place to place—except when
she ran out of fuel, or when it broke down, which it did from time to time,
but not too often.
She applied the same philosophy to her shoes and clothing. It was
true that she was always trying to persuade her husband, Mr. J.L.B.
Matekoni, to get rid of his old shirts and jackets, but that was because he,
like all men, or certainly the majority of men, tended to hold on to his
clothes for far too long. His shoes were an example of that failing: he
usually extracted at least four years’ service out of his oil-stained working
boots, his veldschoen. He recognised her distaste for these shoes by
removing them when he came back from the garage each evening, but he
was adamant that any other footwear, including the new waterproof, oilresistant
work boots he had seen featured in a mail order catalogue,
would be a pointless extravagance.
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