Wine, teargas and the prophetic eye

I quote columnist, Sir William Connor who died the day I was born: “What shall I talk to you about today? I shall talk to you about wine first and then teargas and then the prophetic eye. And if you are not interested in any of these subjects please leave this column immediately.”

So, first the wine. My friend Sushi Sean reckons the Woolworths Longmarket Chenin Blanc 2010 is the bomb. “For R25 you can get elegantly wasted, provided you drink the entire bottle on your own. And if you buy two bottles of the stuff for R50 expect to get well and truly klapped!” I’m no fan of Chenin. It makes me think of Yzerfontein estate agents smelling of You’re the Fire, that ‘80s Yardley skin incense. I prefer my wine perky, like a 17-year-old Ukrainian stripper from the House of Rasputin.

When Sushi Sean gets drunk on his favourite Chenin he asks important questions like: “Have you ever come across a colour-blind friendly website?” Then answers his own questions in low conspiratorial whispers as if about to reveal Peter Tosh’s assassins: “Did you know the United Nations website is the only colour-blind friendly website I could find. It says on their website, can you believe it, if you are colour-blind click here.”

If you too like Sushi Sean are colourblind, I guess by now you know you can forget about being a skipper, and if you have aspirations of being an electrician you’re truly screwed. “Red and green? It should be blue and yellow!” shouts Sushi Sean. “Everyone goes on about their disabilities, but what about us?” I pat his back, nod knowingly as I savour my Pierre Mignon.

The thing is, with Champagne you can never go wrong and I drink beer only when I am in Maputo. As dear George Bernard Shaw chirped: “I am only a beer teetotaller, not a Champagne teetotaller.” My friend Quanita calls sparkling wine shampoo, as in, “This Badsberg Vin Doux, it’s very sweet, but it would make great wedding shampoo!”

I have no tales of teargas but there were burning cars last week off Lansdowne Road at Site B in Khayelitsha as I drove through to Malibongwe’s for their Thursday cocktail night and spit braai with DJ Thulani rocking the house. The House is Lookout Hill, a giant crème caramel concrete slab of a space. It’s here where there are Greek amphitheatres, large boardrooms and, more importantly, Malibongwe Restaurant where the dress code is: “Presentable”. Malibongwe is run by the charming Ntsiki Ndzishe. But the charm stops short at the drinks. I ordered a vodka orange and was served vodka with purple Energade. It looked like meths. But the consolation was that in their Greek amphitheatre, while drinking purple vodka, I learnt to dance urban kasi style with a group of young men in skinny jeans. I wasn’t sure if Anele, the main dude who gave me his number, was for real when he wrote down: “Grope name, Simunge/lust minute dance group.”

But I knew something was up when he started quoting The Great Gatsby saying fanciful things like: “I hate careless people. That’s why I like you.” And for a moment I thought he loved me until he said: “I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires.” It was then that my prophetic eye awoke and: “I knew that first I had to get myself definitely out of that tangle (past the teargas and the burning cars) back home.”