Thank you for holding.

Some minor technical issues have kept me from you.

Sad. But true.

Shattered. Like my trust. Like my heart.

Ok. Ok. Everyone calm down. Like me. I’m on valium. For good reason. The news is probably out already, so I thought I’d just put out a quick press release to clarify matters – we don’t want anything getting *ugly* now do we? It is with great sadness that I confirm James’ disqualification as one of my First Friends. I know I know, he was my primary drinking partner and cohort in all things gossipy and despicable, it must have been quite an indiscretion. Well it was. I wouldn’t throw away something that good for just any old insult. Not for something minor like, say, stealing my boyfriend, or talking behind my back, or even recommending a restaurant that was in actual fact on a par with Ricks Americaine. No I would forgive him all these. But his crime is unforgiveable. Imagine my horror (and really people, put yourselves in my Gina Paolis) when having a crisp glass of BRUT SAUVAGE at Heksie’s house with the Convicted when Kyle walks in from some other appointment…carrying two boxes (not one, two) of Gordon Ramsey wine glasses. My eyes stray to them, I fall in love…but then I see Heksie hugging Kyle. I thought momentarily that I had accidentally taken some scag, because my eyes and my brain were not connecting – Gordon Ramsey glasses? For me, surely? But why is Heksie….he had bought them for her. How could he do that to…….ME? After all the wine we’ve shared? It was like a piece of my liver had died. I am too emotional to continue. But do tune in again tomorrow darlings, when the application form for the newly opened James 2 position is posted. That’s right. I’m interviewing.

Be Still My Beating Greater Intestine

Oooooooh it’s Valentine’s weekend. How exciting. Even if you’re destined to a life alone punctuated only by waddles down to the 7/11 to purchase bully beef in bulk, V day is at least some kind of respite from the monotony of just another month.

V Day also gives me an opportunity to indulge in my favourite culinary delights – namely oysters and champagne. I really am not wild about chocolate. And if I must, it must be imported and I want it Swiss and I won’t budge on that. And I don’t want fillings in it either. That’s like false advertising. Ooh nice light brown gewone chocolate and suddenly – splat – what’s that? Sticky strawberry sweetness? Yuk. Or creamy green minty shit. Or worse, a nut, hiding in there like a land mine. And I don’t want it to represent anything it’s not. Why must the supposed ‘best thing in the world’ – according to some women – be made to look like something it clearly is not?

I don’t want to eat teeny tiny little seashells or dolphins or palm trees. And I certainly don’t want to cram down anything that represents a human organ.

I want chocolate to taste like it’s come from the Alps and look like it came from the set of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Huge flat rectangular and wrapped in gold. With a hidden ticket.

I want you people to tell me if you’re going out for dinner this weekend, specifically tomorrow night and I want to know where. And then on Monday I want you to report back on how awful it was when you looked around sheepishly and saw seven hundred and fifty other two-somes, equally dolled up and awkward eating the same ‘Special Love A La Carte Menu’ concoction rubbish like you’re at a standard 8 Valentine’s Dance.

And then I hope you learn your lesson and next year spend your nest egg on a portable waterfall oyster cooler which you can trundle out for such occasions. Also oyster waterfall cooler good for chilling the Veuve you should be drinking.

I am extending V day somewhat as an excuse to be debauched. Last night Banani, her boyfriend, the Nazi and I went to Barrussos. I had the spinach and feta cannelloni, Banani had a salad and her boyfriend had a Margarita with caramelized onions and something else which I can’t remember. Cheap white wine was drunk along with what the Nazi calls ‘half beers’ – Windhoek Lites and Heinekens. It was a lovely balmy evening, save for the child screaming incessantly in manner of Ericson ringtone.

Have a wonderful weekend of love my cherubs and remember, no glove no love.xxx

Liewe Heksie. Living proof you don’t need to be a man to pleasure a woman with your meat.

 

Last night I went to Liewe Heksie’s house after successfully avoiding The New Pain Frontier which is an open class I promised to go to. Sometimes my job does work in my favour. After botching the class and arriving at my folks’ house with books I borrowed 80 years ago when both my mother and step father were mere twinkles in the bottom of a brandy bottle, only to find that aforementioned books were in fact wedged in the back door at home, I realized my blood/alcohol ratio was far too low on the booze level and so justified my ditzy behavior. Thus I made my way to LH for a meal I have been promised for ages. The reason Heksie has been promising me a meal is tri-fold:

1.     We have been in search of the ultimate steak and red wine experience, but were yet to be satisfied. Or in fact, sober enough to be fair judges.

2.     In our muddied past, I have cooked while Heksie sits smoking and drinking wine on the other side of my bar occasionally chopping things while gesticulating and threatening to slam my face into various household objects. It was high time, in Heksie’s mind that I was allowed to verbally abuse her, and she thought she might throw in some 2 minute noodles for good measure.

3.     We allow each other to escape reality in getting blind drunk, clubbing on school nights, playing hair dresser, dancing around the lounge and having Ab Fab on a loop while howling at the moon and therefore will find any excuse to get together.

Heksie met me at the door and after a token exchange about the newly refurbished energy in her home due to American Psycho’s departure, we retired immediately to the balcony where we consumed great amounts of sauvignon blanc. 

Dinner was quite outstanding, even though I thought it an unfair advantage to have magic on your side, since if Heksie cocked up the potatoes she could just mutter something under her breath and reverse time and start again, which is more than can be said for the rest of us.

Regardless, dinner was medium rare rump steak in red wine and rosemary, set on pesto potato rosti and covered in spring onions and mushrooms with feta and paprika. A garden salad with lime and lemon pepper seasoning was the perfect pairing. Blimey. We could eat the steak easily with normal dining knives so you can just imagine the buttery texture and although Heksie said her paprika was a bit overpowering, mine was just right. We had a nice little Pino to go with it, which we klapped in under half an hour. Thanks Heks, I’ll be sure to recreate the dish and claim all credit as my own.

Music: provided by 5fm

Conversation: Cooking, marriage, new relationships, urban family, Valentine’s day, the past, high school and reasons why we can’t remember any of it, colleagues, being happy, realism vs optimism, our partners and of course, the weekend.

Let’s review my menu of the week – Monday night was fresh tuna kebabs and homemade Napolitano sauce, Tuesday was Baccinis, Wednesday was steak, Thursday will no doubt be sushi as I am seeing Banani. Oh yes and we’ll be having crayfish and champagne on Friday afternoon on my balcony.

I do like the pattern that is forming – the pattern that is, of me not lifting a finger.

Talking To Strangers

Let us follow the classic example set by George Michael all those years ago and share things with strangers.

Feb is fab. It’s the shortest month of the year, it contains Valentine’s Day and is the hottest couple of weeks of the summer season. This year it is also home to Friday the 13^th, the Sax Appeal drive, Budget Day and YDE’s crazy sale. In short it’s all a bit honky tonk. One minute you’re being told it’s dangerous to go outside because of cats and ladders and knives in tea, the next you’re supposed to be on heat and sharing spag bowl in alley ways. One minute you’re being told how to stretch your shrapnel, the next you’re being told if you don’t buy that cropped retro irony doily jersey at 50% off, you’re crotch candy. It’s hot, go outside and make the most of it! It’s hot, stay indoors and protect your skin! It’s confusing, mensa, confusing. So I reckon everyone goes a bit loco in feb. A lil pickled. Baked. Deep fried.

 

And because of this, I’m starting to see a lot of weird shit around. Like a pig outside my front door yesterday. Although, snort, that’s not all that unusual. And it got me thinking, everyone must see really odd, amusing, interesting, depressing, challenging, bizarre stuff all the time and they only occasionally share them with their small circle of friends. Did y’all know I once saw a man cycle down kloof street on his head? It was whack! But now you know! See? I have shared something new with you all today.

I reckon we should enlighten even strangers with our interactions with the bizarre. I think we should tell the world how weird it is. Just, randomly. Start having conversations with everybody and no one in particular. Like a poster outside someone’s house that says:

“This lady makes curry every Thursday night.”

That’s interesting. I wanna know that the crazy with the purple hair and the kaftan with bells makes curry every Thursday. I wanna know if she has Oros with it, because that’s what I would do. And what she watches on the box. Or if she eats it naked with her gardener. I wanna know because one day I might need to use that information. Like I’m at a dinner party and someone says

‘No one cooks the same meal every week”

I can step in and say

“Oh contraire.”

Or we could put up a sign in the road that says:

“Careful of this corner, it doesn’t look blind from this side but yesterday I totally almost got smacked by a Volvo and we all know who would have come out second best.”

It doesn’t even have to be advice or insights. It can just be an observation. Like

“The flowers on this wall bloom at exactly the same time as the Unisa first quarter exams.”

Shazaam. You didn’t know it, you would have made it through life fine without knowing it, but what the hell. It will make you make that hurrumphing old man noise like “Himmf!” as you ponder the dual oddity in

 a. the punctual nature of jasmine and

b. the fact that somebody thought the punctual nature of jasmine was important enough to point out to the general public. It could also be personal news broadcasts. Like I could hang a banner off my balcony each morning announcing my state of mind:

Thursday 12^th: Cheerful, if somewhat sluggish.

Friday 13^th: Upbeat but cautious.

Then people would know. They would go to work and have something a bit kak happen like they spill their coffee or their work gets bombed and they can comfort themselves with thinking “At least I’m not Depro, Dark and Twisty today like the girl who lives at XXXX.”

It’s a way of bringing the world closer together. Making friends without the effort and the personal invasion and the catering. It’s the fact that you know there’s someone else out there, thundering around, thinking of what to make for dinner (curry, it’s Thursday) trying not to have accidents (watch out for the corner) attempting to be upbeat (you’re not alone, feb12th) and trying to make the best of things

It will be a comfort and no doubt an endless source of irritation for others. I love it, have pitched it to my agency and have trademarked the idea.

Keep your eyes peeled for enlightening remarks such as

“This Dustbin Reeks”

“I Think You May Have An Oil Leak” and

“You must try the Kassler Steaks from Spar”

in a neighbourhood near you.

 

Be a dear and hold my handbag while I saw off this shotgun.

If I am ever jailed, it will not be for petty theft, drunk driving or even arson. It will be for assaulting an employee of an infamously badly run letting agent. However as prison blue is not quite my colour and the idea of being surrounded by 1000 women interchangeably named Codlin, Bezuida and Nomad fills me with a fizzing terror, I shall vent my rage in a note to the offending service provider (and we use the last two words verrrrrrry loosely)

Before we begin, it must be known that I am having a particularly foul week and that today I am as vituperate as I have ever been. Ah, a moment’s silence for the violence that will never be.

Dear Letting Agent Owner

I am so glad to find that you are as busy as you are, as under this current harsh economic climate I believe many companies, companies that actually service their customers, that add value to the infrastructure of a city, are quiet, depressed, even liquidating. But you! You are a veritable playschool of activity. I know this because when I tried to phone the maintenance department today to staunch Old Faithful which has erupted in my bathroom, it took two hours, 24 games of solitaire and a lifetime’s worth of tinny Ode to Joy to hear a voice actually belonging to a human being. Do you employ actual humans there, Letting Agent Owner? Or is your company run by headless, wingless, featherless battery chickens? Do they just swing around in their wheelie chairs, flesh sacks incapable of answering their ringing phones?

Perhaps not. Let’s give your company the benefit of the doubt. To my credit I hung on like a beaver, and after being told several thousand times that my call was important (was it, Mr Letting Agent Owner? And if so, how important? Important like salt is important on a tomato or important like having the right tampon for the right day of the flow is important? I’d like you to clarify. I would like your voice prompt to tell me exactly how important my call was, on a scale from one to ten, or in a metaphor involving a bag of groceries) my call was eventually answered by someone who had either just woken up or had in the last five minutes suffered a minor stroke.

Pippa: Pippa hello

Me:       Hi, I’m phoning to find out where, on God’s green earth, the key to my electric gate is. My address is xxxx.

Pippa:     What?

Well. What an interesting question Pippa. So easily interpreted so many ways. Are you asking what a key is or what my address is? Both of those are simply answered, but if you are asking what God’s green earth is we may find ourselves in a hot topical debate, which I’d of course love to participate in, were I not making vast and complicated arrangements to set up camp outside my house BECAUSE I CANNOT GET INSIDE IT.

Me: What do you mean, what?

Pippa: Say again?

Oh give me strength give me strength.

Me: Pippa. I need to determine the whereabouts of the key that lets me into the electric gate at my home at this address xxxx

Pippa: Oh. I don’t know if that gate has a key.

All over the world, dear Letting Agent Owner, little green villages are missing their idiots because you have hired them all.

Me: Trust me it does. I live there and I have enviously been watching other rent-paying tenants come and go, warmly and securely with such devices while I try again in vain to light my dustbin fire with wet kindling and the contents of my briefcase.

Me: Pippa can you please put me in contact with someone who can help me (and someone who has a standard five)

Pippa: Uhm… ok, hang on…

(Several alarming whizzing, buzzing and shrieking noises and I am surprisingly put through to another actual human being)

D: Hiya it’s Daleen

Oh god.

Me: HI Daleen. Just wanting to get hold of the key to the electric gate for residence xxxx.

D: Oh….errrrrr. I dunno where that is?

Me: The key or the residence?

D: Huh?

Me; Do you not know where the key is or where my house is?

D: Uhm, I think you might need to ask the caretaker.

Me: Oh. Well, can you let me know where to find the caretaker?

D: Uhm, he lives in your building.

No! Surely not!

Me: But WHERE DALEEN

D: How must I know?

Never mind, knocking on doors for the rest of eternity is a treat if it gets me off the line with you.

Me: Can you please put me in contact with someone who knows what this man’s name is and where I can find him so that I may in fact access the home I pay for.

D: Uhm. I can let you speak to Cindi

(can you also see the little heart hovering above the i?)

Me: FINE. Whatever it takes.

(squawking ,shrieking and mechanical muttering)

Cindi: Yes?

Yes? Yes to what?

Me: I need to find the caretaker…

Cindi: NOT my department.

Me: But I’ve just been put through to you for this very matter.

Cindi: Not my department.

Ok.

Cindi: If you’re looking for keys the caretaker will have them, that’s the way we operate at this letting agent.

Well my dear, I think many people would disagree with your use of the word operate, but nevertheless.

Cindi: Thank you for calling

Really? Really?

The next day I found a man rooting around in the undergrowth in front of one of the flats in my block.

Me: You aren’t by any chance the caretaker are you?

CT: Yes I am, that is why I am wearing this absurd Mad Cow t-shirt and have a coil of rope around my waist

Me: Oh great. I need the electric gate key for xxxx

CT: Well I don’t have it.

Me: But the letting agent said you did!

The man fixed me with an expression so sardonic I’m not likely every to experience such a look again.

CT: And tell me. At what point exactly in your interaction with the letting agent did you lose all sense of reason and begin to believe them?

There will be blood.

Changing Spots

Aaaah. The new year. A blank canvas. Endless fresh opportunities. Renewal. Second chances. A fizzy feeling of virtue, inner strength and resolutions.

I LOATHE new year – after all, I just got through the last one, and I was finally doing kinda alright with it – hadn’t been arrested, hadn’t burned anything down, hadn’t got married in a porta loo in the Transkei, indelibly inked myself with the Big Five (although that was close) pierced my tongue, again, or persuaded someone else to irrevocably change their lives for the benefit of my own – and then, wham! There it is! A brand new one to deal with.

It’s like on the board game of life, just as I was scrabbling up a decent sized ladder I was momentarily distracted by a great pair of shoes, was slapped across the face by anaconda and before I knew it, was slithering and sliding back to Begin.

Regardless of how I feel about the month of January (and Feb, March, April, May and June, in fact, as I only start to feel in control when Christmas is in sight) the world keeps spinning and there are clearly enough other people thundering around to help the new year commence despite my protestations.

So here I am, on the fifteenth of Jan, sitting at my new desk at my new job with my new art director and my new hair and new body thanks to session one of 2009’s gastro chic, a couple of new friends and a new tan and a newly emptied bank balance and a new sushi restaurant downstairs which I am confident spells the downfall of this year’s financial progress.

I feel new and together and organized and prepared – which in itself is bizarre, as I am not referred to as Chaos for nothing. I have clung to this feeling and shoehorned it into my daily life. I have been running. Slowly. But running. I have been surfing. A lot. (a lot of lying on my board in the water) I have been drinking a lot of water (and whisky) and have been getting a lot of sleep (mainly in the afternoons at my desk.)

Well. I seem to have shoe horned it more into conversation than into real life. It appears what I have been saying and what I have been actually doing aren’t quite cousins. The act of physically interpreting mental desire or will wasn’t something that stayed with me in foundation education.

This was pointed out to me the other day.

I was feeling TRULY virtuous at a pub, drinking my spritzer primly whilst waving smoke away from face and complaining about how stiff I was from my crraaaaaazzzzzyyyyyyy training schedule. I think the Cute Health Boy I was talking to was most impressed – we even spoke briefly about joining up for a run at some UNGODLY hour like 5am (which doesn’t even exist, I might tell you) the next day because both of us were heading home early to floss and apply eye cream and drink 75 litres of spring water and sleep for a year because that’s what responsible adults do. We were tut-tutting at some of the revelers hitting back the shots as we primly turned down canapés and ordered extra water when everyone else was showing Tequila a thing or two.

Cute Health Boy:          So you enjoy the outdoors?

Me:            Oh yeah! Who doesn’t? All that nature…

                  (all those opportunities to drink in the sun)

 

CHB:      Oh well that’s refreshing. Most girls I meet   are just interested in salons and shopping.

 

Me:            How…awkward for you.

                   I personally detest shopping.

 

CHB:    But isn’t that why you’re late? You were saying to Host Girl there was a sale on.

 

Me:            Errr…yeah but it’s just because I thought she might be interested – I didn’t go.

 

CHB:      But then you showed her all the stuff you bought

 

Me:            …For her. All the stuff I bought for her.

 

CHB:      ..and proceeded to jump around in a circle holding a negligee to your face chanting ‘mine mine mine.’

 

Me:            About those outdoors… you’re all built and buff and tan…what do you do?

 

CHB:      I climb.

 

Me:            (me too: ladders)

 

Me:            Wow cool. Scary. Cool. Big arms. Cool.

 

CHB:     Yeah it’s great, but listen I gotta go fetch my sister now, I think these guys are going out later, but I’ll meet you tomorrow at the promenade at 5?

 

Me:            Oooh yes – the Winchester does a special on cocktails at 5!

 

CHB:     5. AM. In the morning. For our run. Remember?

 

Me:            Hahah yeah yeah, course I do, I’m just joshing.

 

Joshing.  Joshing? Almighty God. Had my vocabulary disappeared with my sense of adventure and enjoyment of life? The minute I saw his well toned behind disappear out the door, I thought I’d just join Host Girl and have one last spritzer before I headed – just so I didn’t feel like I had completely undergone an identity transformation. Of course there wasn’t any soda water left on the table so I had a proper glass of wine.

Well, I maintain it was one glass. But it might not have been. Because four hours later I found myself straddling a bar stool like a pony, wearing a cowboy hat, doing body shots out of the bicep curl of some dude called Paddy, shrieking to my mates that I will be ‘eighteen til I die’ and knocking my hair around to Aerosmith.

That was round about the time I got a tap on the shoulder and turned round to see no other than Cute Health Boy.

CHB:           So I take it you won’t make our run tomorrow?

 

Me:            Don’t be ridiculous! Of course I will! I’m only eighteen after all…what makes you think I won’t?

 

CHB:           Because 5am is in an hour’s time.  

 

Me:            whoops.

 

CHB:           Bit of a party girl after all, hmm?

 

Me:            Hey! Enough with the judgy! I just came for ONE drink.

 

CHB:           And stayed for seventeen.

 

Me:            Anyway, if you’re so freaking perfect, why aren’t you at home? Why aren’t you gearing up to hit the tar and be all healthy health health. Huh? Answer me that Mr. Exercise. Mr Virtue. What are you doing here at a club? What are you doing here? Huh?

 

CHB:           Host Girl phoned me to come and fetch you coz you’re too drunk to drive.

 

Me.             Oh.

 

Shit.

Two Thousand And Wine

I’m baaaaaaaack, hold on to your husbands girls.

Word From The Crypt

I have writer’s block. I have career block. I have life block. I have brain block that is slowly travelling to my aorta. My grey matter is the wrong shade of grey – not the healthy pumping iridescent tissue-ey sheen, but rather like an old too-chewed wad of grape bubblegum. As a result of feeling completely useless, I have been reading self help tomes and wailing to myself in the sauna that is my bedroom. This is one of the reasons I have not been communicating with my adoring public. Most of the aforementioned therapy manuals I’ve been choffing say that in order to ‘heal’ I must connect with my inner child. That I must actually find a picture of myself as a small girl and every time I feel like I would be better off working at the post office or growing organic watermelon or knitting knee rugs from hemp and viewing the rest of my life through a cloud of green smoke, I must look to the child photo and ask myself, is this what she would have wanted? Which I think is a bit of a bizarre question to ask this particular snapshot as at two years old with a face full of chocolate, the only thing I look like I need is a damp cloth and a good vomit. Nevertheless, I have been trying to apply this principle to my ever-escalating pulse rate. It could be too early to be judgey about it, but I don’t think it’s working. I think turning two thousand and five hundred this past week has truly skewed my generally sunny disposition. Everything feels out of whack. I see pregnant people EVERYWHERE. Walking around like regular….Does turning 9865 years old lift a nictitating membrane from your eyes that previously shielded you from such horrors? Basically every single person I ever went to an educational institute with is pregnant and/or married. After spending several million dollars on plant life for my balcony, every single last vestige of life has perished. I recently have had to re-work out how to use the washing machine as my housekeeper is on leave. It took me thirty minutes of standing in my underwear staring at it with a glass of champagne in one hand and a spoon that is shaped like a whale in the other. I found Free Willy nestled in an ‘environmentally friendly’ box of washing powder in the clean-stuff cupboard. Who the fuck bought that? Would I know where to find it in the supermarket? Eventually the phone rang and I trailed off defeated. This lack of basic function doesn’t bode particularly well for my future spawn. So how is everyone else coping? I spent five hours FIVE HOURS in and out of Aldo the other day. I eventually didn’t eat at a restaurant the other day because I couldn’t decide what to order. I couldn’t work out which champagne I wanted at the store so I bought one of everything. This, people, is my level of commitment. And yet normal, qualified people whom I know personally are saying ‘I do’ on wine farms all over the world, all the time. Am I a late bloomer? Are domesticity and stability like breasts? Some people get ‘em early and others have to just hang on and stuff their bras in the interim?

As you can see, turning 7890 has truly shaken me to the core. Did I mention I went blonde? Yep. Blonde. I have a head like a lemon sorbet. I am cooking like the chef for the slumbering knights in Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Incidentally I have recently made: Kassler steaks in pineapple jus with roast potatoes and Israeli salad, lemon and paprika chicken with gorgonzola cauliflower, gingerbread men, mince pies, biscotti, savoury mushroom, chicken and veg pancakes, moussaka, I could keep going if the Buitenverwachting hadn’t eradicated any form of memory I had left before I TURNED. Like an old cheese. And not the good kind.  

I am having career wobbles. I saw someone I went to school with on the news the other day. I want to be on the news. Why am I not on the news? Why am I instead sitting on the couch with an Obrigado in one hand and an espresso in the other, regarding on one side a little avalanche of ridiculous shoes and a towering castle of credit card bills on the other?

And then it dawned on me. I am a stereotype. I am a young (insert hollow laughter here) single, writer, living in the city, obsessed with food and fashion, constantly surrounded by gay men, on the never-ending hunt for a cold Sauvignon Blanc and a hot man. I too, was shocked and appalled. In fact, I fell off the couch and put abfab on pause and scrabbled around in the piles of receipts to find Baby Food Interrupted where she was lurking, candy smeared and quite obviously disappointed. She practically narrowed her eyes at me, and if I wasn’t so ashamed I would have been scared and would have thought that I was in fact in the scene from IT where all photos start coming to life. From the look on her face it was like she was saying “Why aren’t you a doctor? Or a diplomat? Or something useful? I didn’t look cute for five years to turn into a vacuous columnist. Damn you and your fickle love of fashion! And you’re quite obviously an alcoholic. Put that glass down. Cancel your plans for tonight. You’re staying at home with me and working out how we can fix your life.” Ok maybe that was too much to actually read from the same expression on a two year old, but it was what I felt.

Just then I heard a familiar voice on the radio – a friend who has become a famous radio DJ, on the cover of a glossy magazine was another acquaintance, on the TV was the woman who started this whole slippery slope. It was like baby Food Interrupted was channeling all my peer fear into my living room, which too would have been frightening if I didn’t rather respect her use of mixed media.

It was a horror show of terrifying proportions. Everyone is married, and sprogging and if they’re not, they’re famous and fabulous and wealthy and I am a fake blonde without a book deal. Yikes.

You will understand that I needed to leave immediately. I thought what might help would be to take a bottle of bubbles up the road to my other useless-hack-writer-friend-who-spends-all-her-time-on-the-phone-and-the-nearest-Vida-and-all-her-money-on-her-hair-and-her-feet so that we might at least die old and unmarried, childless and poverty-stricken, together. Sorry Plum, but it’s not looking good for either of us. I was just emerging from the apartment with the bottle in hand, feeling desperate, when two rather acceptable specimens walked past, also carrying bottles. The one looked at me and said to his friend. “You know it’s going to be a good night when the first person you see is a blonde with champagne.”

I felt magically cured, went inside and drank the champagne myself.

After burying baby FI under a couple of feet of bills, of course.

 

Muff diving: a personal brand identity crisis

 

I have mixed feelings about my true feelings for Vida. Like, it’s not that I don’t know how I feel about Vida. I do. I know very well what I think of Vida. I love their coffee and the thought of never tasting the sweet pepper and feta muffin again makes me consider cutting. I like the music they play and that it’s always busy and the baristas are chirpy and that a double shot latte only costs like 16 rond. 

But I don’t LIKE the fact that I like Vida. I don’t want to like Vida. I want to FAR prefer Seattle, because it fits my personal brand image better. I know that sounds like I’m trying to pull a ME TOO on the content that belongs to MyBrandedLife, but I really do agree with Alex on this one.

I am unashamedly a blinkered consumer. I am constantly on the hunt for stuff that tastes great but doesn’t plump me out (apart from that cool new lippy that puffs up your pout from the brand I can’t remember because all make-up adverting looks exactly the same and is interchangeable) and the music that makes me cool but not trendy because that makes me hard to relate to and therefore ‘not feminine.’ Ok now I’m talking shit, but to be honest, I prefer to think of myself as the kind of person who snubs Vida. Just like I snub Camps Bay. But I realize I am changing.

Because I am AGEING. Like a potato.

Like I thought I hated the Biscuit Mill until I went there on Saturday with my gaggle James and Kyle. I’ve been there before a number of times and always told myself I preferred the Porters Market because it was like more reeeeeeal. I wanted to hate it the Mill this time round so I even wore my irony fringe in a peak so that I would be more progressive and therefore slightly weary of the pre-pubes in lamp skirts around me. But I fucking loved every second of it. Did you know that they let you buy a bottle of champagne and drag it around? They even supply straws. They didn’t last time. They have a French import cheese stand that James and I bought. Everything. From.

They have farmers that are like 22. Farmers who farm trout and cut it for you and give it to you with a big fynbos flower like a corsage because they are so many of them growing in the vineyards where they also grow (?) their own wine. Wine, which, alright, made James, on tasting it, look like he had just eaten cat, but nonetheless.

We trawled from stall to stall eating everything. The tofu man even gave me a lecture about how I needed to change my tofu water every day! Granted, when I told him I could barely manage to water my plants he asked me if their desiccated shrieks kept me up at night, but still! There’s a tofu man! Who was hot and young and green!

So I was completely thrown when I left – that may also have been the large quantity of champagne I had consumed, but I felt at least bewildered by the fact that I had enjoyed the experience. And there were loads of Nigellas there – far more than pre-pubes. I was delighted. And shocked.

So you can imagine that after that experience, I have been thinking a lot about my harsh judgment of brands, places, people and things. And so the other day I thought when I picked up my morning coffee, I would try to see Vida differently. So in I popped – even got parking which was an omen – there was a queue but it moved swiftly and I was complimented on my outfit and I was asked if I wanted my usual muffin and I declined and just as I was coming to peace with being seen as A Regular At Vida Kloof Street, I saw it. aKing – that band, have brought out a limited edition t-shirt range with Levis that commissions ‘top’ SA artists and designers to create the designs.

Now, while this doesn’t sound offensive, exactly, there are a number of things about it that I don’t really dig.

Firstly, I don’t like aKing. I don’t. And that’s ok. I’m allowed not to like a band. I’m allowed to have something that’s not so nice to say about a band I don’t like. I tried to explain this to someone a year or so ago. I was at a show and a fan asked me what I thought because I happened to be reviewing the venue. And I told the fan that I thought the band in question that night was diluted, like Oros at a children’s party.

The fan was outraged, which is also fine, but then I heard that the band had taken serious offence. (We’re not talking about aKing now, ne, another band) Like, they had blown up. Saying things like “who the fk does she think she is, she has no idea what she’s talking about, well she could never do what you do in a million years.” Etc etc ad infinitum. And no, I couldn’t do what you do, young men, because if I did I would play music of an entirely different genre and more importantly, I am not a white middle class boy from Rondebosch. But you see, I can tell you exactly who I think I am, I’m a member of the paying public. If I’m not impressed now, I might possibly be when you clean up your lead section a bit, or I might never be, just like I will never dig on Cradle of Filth. Forget about me, and concentrate on the people who like to talk about you like they know you because you were cool at school and the hot girls hang out with you because you have current hair. And even the people who think your music is like, tit. Whoa, I digress. But my point is, it doesn’t matter how good you are, you have no place in my reality. Just like Diesel has no place in Gerard Darel.  

I also don’t really like Levis. I don’t buy the jeans, I don’t wear the shoes, I certainly don’t pay R300 + for a t-shirt because it’s limited. I bought a t-shirt from Mr. Price two years ago and have never seen another person wear it, yet I saw two people at Rafikis the other night in the same Levis Limited edition shirts. So on the whole, at Vida, I’m thinking, well, despite the disturbingly heavy presence of loafers, this band-aid business doesn’t fit my profile.

I devoted six years of my life to the music industry – and I’m done with fliers and rigs and feedback and people with Wembley complexes. And basically, I don’t want an aKing t-shirt, not even if it’s been created by a ‘top’ SA designer. I grow roses and make mojitos and have conversations about how having an opinion of the Messiah is like asking what one thinks of Jingle Bells.

 

 

So I dragged myself and my latte out and thought well at least there is concrete proof that I don’t gel with Vida – I mean, Seattle is in Exclusive for crying out loud. Much better pairing.

The following day I gave Vida a swerve and pulled into Seattle. I immediately felt more comfortable. Books, tinkly tunes, a bit of Christmas (lacking at Vida, please note) and familiar espresso.

A bit of a queue, but I could handle. Surly baristas – but hang on, that could be angst-ridden introspection.

Then I saw it.

Or them.

There were two very big very menly men loitering at the door. In jump suits. Orange jump suits. Like convicts.

When I say menly men, I don’t mean menly men in the sense that they drink beer and don’t use product and enjoy plain nursery food. It looked like these dudes would eat a deer before they felled it. And perhaps that’s one of the reasons they were missing teeth. Hair like something you’d find scavenging the lower tunnels of the Tube and hands like bricks, these men were like…men who ruled wolf packs that had recently been released into the CBD to be socialized. Or something. These were men to be feared. And on the back of their jumpsuits the word DIVERS could be read.

Divers? On Kloof Street? Had somebody drowned in the gutter? Had a barista fallen face down into a grande? Had someone been sucked into their Victorian toilet bowl? WTF were DIVERS doing here, in Seattle?

And I think it was round about the time that I heard “Two tall lattacinos with wings, two chocolate blueberry muffins with wings” and the one sprung forth to grab his handy carrier that I went into coronary arrest.

Animal men. FILTHY, oil stained, mountains of men. Ordering lattacinos and muffins from my supposed brand fit coffee spot.

From tomorrow I am pre-ordering take out cappuccinos from Pukka. I know the coffee is good, the cups will be unbranded and I shall only have to queue with people who don’t care about street and who have proper jobs that don’t involve guitars or jump suits. And teeth. People who have teeth.