OUT TO LUNCH

My apologies for my absence last week which a few of you noticed and kindly commented on through social media. I had hoped to knock out a column among the chaos of visiting UK relatives but it proved difficult for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which was patchy connectivity.

Fortunately, the editor smiled kindly on my plight and gave me the week off.

Earlier this year I invited my sister and her husband to pay us a visit at my expense because I no longer have any desire to visit the country of my birth under the current communist regime. ___STEADY_PAYWALL___

Apart from the crap weather, I was also worried about having my precious cell phone snatched from my hand in London by some balaclava clad hoodlum riding an electric scooter or getting stabbed on the Circle Line by a recently arrived mentally unhinged migrant with a grudge. Not to mention the problem of having expensive tickets for a West End show like ‘Paddington’ with tickets available priced between R730 (restricted view no doubt) and R5220 and finding my way to the theatre blocked by body pierced, blue haired idiots waving Palestinian flags.

Then there’s the cost of food in London. A loyal reader told me that she had an unforgettable toasted sandwich with her daughter in law and a glass of water and a coke and it came to forty quid.

That’s just under a thousand in our funny money. So my desire to not visit Blighty is as much a matter of utter disgust at how the country of my birth looks these days as a financial consideration.

As it turns out, it was far cheaper to fly my sis and hubby here and pay for their trip than it would be for Mrs B and I to fly to the UK and pay for the same amount of hospitality.

Having said that, it does become wearisome when your relatives, at the end of a splendid meal, point out that the plate of king prawns they ordered plus drinks cost less than £15 a head. That’s including a generous tip incidentally. However, doing that conversion gives one a good idea as to why our Western Cape eateries prove so popular with tourists. Two weeks ago I lunched at the Fat Butcher in Stellenbosch (warmly recommended) and my guest and I were the only two English speakers in that section of the restaurant.

I hadn’t seen my sis for more than six years and this was an important family get together, particularly as tempus is busy fugitting and we have no idea if we will ever see one another again.

Sis and husband started their vacation in Madikwe where they had booked accommodation back in January at Madikwe River Lodge. Only a month ahead of their trip did they discover that Madikwe River Lodge had been destroyed by flooding back in February and was closed for business. They only discovered this when their air charter company alerted them to the fact that they would have no accommodation once they had arrived.

Madikwe River Lodge hadn’t bothered to contact them and Bookings.com deducted their final payment shortly before they were due to fly.

In fairness, Bookings.com later returned all payments but a quick check of Trip Advisor comments reveals that a number of disappointed foreign tourists weren’t so fortunate.

What could have been a disastrous start to a South African vacation was averted when they transferred to the Last Word Madikwe and arrived to see three of the big five before they had even checked in. They arrived in Cape Town four days later bubbling over with game viewing stories (including a rare black rhino sighting) and with lots of photos. One of them with a lioness with her head stuck up the rear end of a deceased elephant which my sister deleted because she didn’t want to spook the grandchildren.

Forgive my ramblings but the clear message I got from sis and husband was that we are doing very well when it comes to hospitality in SA. They couldn’t have raved more about the food, the service, the bush experience and the friendliness at Last Word and the same applied to their brief stay in the V&A Waterfront before joining us for a very windy five days at The Hibernian Towers in Strand.

They enthused about the quality of the food having claimed to have never had a bad meal in SA, they were complimentary about the service but mostly they raved about how friendly everybody was. They also commented about the super state of the roads in Somerset West and how litter free everywhere appeared to be.

It’s very encouraging when foreign visitors arrive and remind you that you live in a pretty good imitation of paradise.

I had booked a large apartment for five nights at the Hibernian Towers in Strand anticipating an early morning beach walk for us all and a lot of time chugging wine and catching up with family news while sitting on the twelfth floor balcony with an ocean view.

Forget about it. The wind howled the whole time and when we walked to lunch at De Brasserie we had to rope together in the style of an Antarctic expedition in case one of us got blown out to sea.

None of this dampened the spirits of my guests though and they continued to enthuse about the fabulous quality of the service and food, meticulously comparing our rather extravagant lunch at De Brasserie (bottle of Veuve Clicquot Brut included) with the meagre fare you might get for £35 a head if you were lucky at a gastropub in the UK. As the saying goes, they were as happy as pigs in shit.

Last Monday we needed an urgent break from gale force winds so we took them to Vergelegen Estate. This is a regular and much loved haunt of mine and Monday is a day pensioners get in for free. I pointed this out to my sis and asked, out of interest, what a National Trust property would charge. Chartwell in Kent, which was Winston Churchill’s home for forty years, costs R556 a head and a further R115 to park your car. Plus you get fed all sorts of DEI crap about how racist and colonialist the owners were and how they approved of slave trading.

Thankfully, there’s none of that wokist nonsense at Vergelegen….just gorgeous gardens, immense camphor trees, owls and great food and wines. The rels were suitably charmed.

This brief, and very possibly final, family get together convinced me that life isn’t too bad down here on the southern tip of Africa even though we are ruled by an incompetent and dishonest bunch of thieving politicians. But so is the UK and at least you can get a decent lunch here for less than £15 a head.

What’s not to like?

*******

My esteemed editor wrote an excellent column last week where he generously referred to Max (Not in my name) du Preez as a “public intellectual”. Not wishing to weigh in on this argument with my own opinion I decided to run a poll on X (formerly Twitter) asking the question with the responses: ‘Not a chance’,

‘Defintely’ and ‘Prefer not to say’.

The results with 310 participants were as follows:

Not a chance - 87.1%

Definitely - 2.3%

Prefer not to say - 10.6%

Extrapolated this means that 1500 000 people in SA could mistake Max for an ‘intellectual’. Might be worth starting a political party Max.

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