‘Yes,’ said Mr J. L. B. Matekoni. ‘You never threw things away. Nowadays, if something goes wrong, you throw it out of the window, just like that.’

‘And people too,’ said Mma Ramotswe. ‘If you suddenly decide you don’t like somebody, you throw them out of the window too. That’s what wives do to their husbands these days.’

Mr J. L. B. Matekoni looked concerned. ‘Out of the window, Mma?’

‘Not really out of the window,’ said Mma Ramotswe. ‘I just use that as an expression, Rra. And it’s not just wives who throw their husbands out of the window when they get bored with them; it’s men too. In fact, there are more wives thrown out of the window than men, I think.’

‘Either way, it’s not very good,’ said Mr J. L. B. Matekoni. ‘Nobody should be thrown out of the window, Mma.’

They had lapsed into silence as they contemplated, in their individual ways, this decline in civility. Mma Ramotswe was not given to taking a gloomy view of things, but she felt nonetheless that there were respects in which she would find it very difficult to explain to her father, the late Obed Ramotswe, what had happened in the years since his death. It was true that Botswana had made great progress and remained a country to be proud of, but still, there were changes that it was hard to see in a positive light. She imagined walking with him through their home village, Mochudi, and showing him the improvements: the numerous public water taps, the improved sewage system, the new businesses that had sprung up. But what would she say when they were passed by a group of schoolchildren and not one of them greeted him, as it was polite, and customary, for children to do when they passed an old man? How would she explain to him that nowadays many children did not greet strangers? She saw him wearing his old hat – the hat that he had worn for year upon year and was so familiar to her, and so beloved. She wondered what he would say when he saw men walking about either with no hat on their heads – even under the midday sun – or with unusual new hats, or even caps with those curious visors in the front, but deliberately worn back-to-front. Where, he would ask, have all these new hats come from, and why did none of these hats seem to have experience, that indefinable quality that hats acquire after they have been worn day after day, in all weather, for year after year?