Another Saturday Night

I don't know who these people are but they come up if you google 'Tower of beer glasses' and this amused me.

It is a strange thing that since turning A) turning 30 and B) losing my husband to the Northern Hemisphere I’m spending an increasing amount of time in bars.  I say bars, but it is really bar (singular) The Pot & Barrel.  For some reason that den of iniquity just keeps calling me back.  On Saturday night I took my sister there.

Here were the main points of the evening:

1)   We were asked if ‘we’ i.e. my sister and I were a couple.  Note to self do not wear a blazer out in PMB, it may be stylish in London, here it is perceived as ‘handsome’.

2)   Two very skinny individuals had a barney on the dance floor.  The aggressor threw his drink down defiantly on the floor (with a Rumplestiltskin like stamp of the foot) and then rugby tackled his opponent into the roaring fireplace, which is A) stupidly placed in the centre of the dance floor and B) luckily surrounded by glass.  After they singed their foreheads on molten hot fire-glass the two rolled around over broken glass before being separated.  Despite their svelte racing snake figures both lads took 5 onlookers apiece to separate them.

3)   An amusing Capetonian called Andy tried to build a tower of beer bottles on the bar and then rested a tin plate filled with beer on them.  This was going well until he tried to drink out of tin plate and stuck his chin in it causing the tower to come crashing down.  Andy, it transpired, was in town to play a social double’s tennis tournament with a friend the following day.  As he had A) not played tennis since age 8 and B) was very drunk, the outlook was not good.  However he did buy us a fortifying Jagermeister and pose as my ‘Professional Tennis Player’ husband later on when a very sad, strange, drunk little man called Patrick cast the Glad eye upon me.

4)   Random strangers will call on you for High-5’s and boosts.  These should be applied with caution lest you unintentionally split open someone’s finger.  A case in point - Simon the Farmer and Raymond Reynolds (Raymond had been living in Holland for 10 years and so introduced himself with his full name, which as he rightly pointed out would allow us to connect later in a professional manner on Linked-In).  Anyway I high-5’d Raymond Reynolds will the full force of my Michelle Obama arms and then Simon the Farmer High-5’d Mr. Reynolds.  It was a case of power too much as Simon managed to split open Raymond’s finger (an existing wound, covered by a very small plaster).  From this I learnt that Simon the Farmer and I are equally scared of blood (we both shot each other a look that said Oh-my-fuck-what-about-Aids).  We also learnt that:

5)    South African barkeeps do not keep plasters behind the bar.  I find this deeply negligent considering just how much broken glass a bar can produce.

So to surmise my evening out comprised of being mistaken for a lesbian, witnessing a punch-up on the dance floor, dodging a tower of falling glass/beer, adopting a tennis-playing quasi-husband, High-5ing strangers and avoiding bloodshed.

All in all a regular night out in the Burrah.