Oops! She's still drinking glühwein
The broad streets of Grahamstown which are wide enough to swing a span of oxen are littered with old skool hotels named after men called Graham, Henry and Arthur. There are countless cosy English pubs that sell way too much Port and Sherry instead of Waterford and Rust en Vrede. But luckily during the National Arts Festival the restaurants bring out their best wine but annoyingly hike up their prices. And so next minute you’re sitting in front of a roaring fire yakking about Frantz Fanon’s commitment to freedom and human dignity, or youth capacity building in Uganda and you look down at your glass and shudder as you realise like a mindless Britney Spears song, Oops!..I did it again...you’re still drinking glühwein!
I don’t know how it happened as I was doing so well back in Cape Town drinking some of the finest stuff. I think I lost it due to the fact that I saw way too many mime acts and actors wearing masks and talking through their puppets with fake cockney or Parisian accents.
In desperate response I started speaking Russian to strangers in the streets and wherever I went I only ordered glühwein. And for a moment I felt wonderfully common and dangerously youthful as I jostled with Rhodes arts and drama students throwing my head back and laughing at stupid jokes. But then one clear starry night at The Rat & Parrot I discovered students weren’t drinking glühwein nor cane and cream soda, but secretly they were ordering fine bottles of Avontuur Shiraz and Hamilton Russell Pinot Noir and paying by credit card.
I consoled myself with a bottle of Thelema Shiraz and went to watch the premier of my mate’s independently produced film, Palace of Bone. Filmmaker Claire Angelique was the 2010 Standard Bank Young Artist Award-winner for film despite kicking off her creative career as a ballerina. Nowadays she orders vodka orange instead of tea. At breakfast. She is also known to drink Milk Stout in her cornflakes. When we hooked up in Grahamstown we celebrated the success of her film premier with a bottle of Cederberg Shiraz 2008. It was rich and mysterious like a poem by Harry Owen. It was smooth and velvety, like the ribbons on a French burlesque dancer’s corset. It was most certainly beautifully structured like a Bob Dylan song as sung by Nina Simone. You know the song, ‘I shall be released’ (from my adolescent first week Grahamstown crush on glühwein).
