If one weekend you find yourself packing up a tent in the pouring rain and lightning at 1 am and fleeing from the school camp-out quite drunk and sopping wet, with two small, soaked, cold, disappointed children trailing behind you, it is perfectly understandable that the next weekend you might require to be more anonymous.
If during the week following the camp-out, a parent sees you in the school parking lot and heads straight towards you to say, quite categorically, and probably very accurately, that you were one of only two who left that night, quite drunk and sopping wet – that everyone else made it through; you again, could be excused for seeking out solitude the next weekend, in a different part of the city.
Maybe your NBFF called you a traitor for secretly and hurriedly leaving the camp-out in the middle of the night, while he slept peacefully, dry and calm, through the worst tropical storm in history, thanks to being exhausted from line dancing, having silent pneumonia and finishing the other half of the bottle of Jameson.
Maybe when you got home your husband looked at you with a mixture of horror, pity and I-told-you-not-to-go as you sloped into the house trying to act sober and not that wet with the two sad midgets behind you. If this has happened then you frankly deserve a whole pack of pink tickets to allow yourself to do as many anonymous things as you like.
Perhaps you also admitted to your closest friends that you prepared mentally for the camp-out by going to the gynaecologist for a pap smear the week before so that all activities in the following weeks (possibly months) in comparison, would seem super-awesome. Then you definitely need some time out. Because you don't deserve their puzzled looks and the loneliness you feel when they tell you that this has never occurred to them as a thing to do. Neither has it occurred to them, they say, to drive past a hospital on the way to a school camp-out, so as to put yourself in a relieved, loving and convivial mood, in that the hospital was not your true destination for the evening.
When stuff like this happens I usually take myself to a part of Durban where I feel most safe because no one knows me. I go to where people from my normal residential part of the city say, 'be careful' when you say you are going there. I blatantly take my cellphone to take pictures of the murals and the bridges, and plenty of cash to buy take-away mielies and as many bits of plastic fabric for using at pottery, puri patha and zips as I would like to. There the crowds of people, none of whom I know, will metaphorically say, 'there there, it will be much better next year'.