Our first full day

Cape Town, South Africa

Needless to say we all slept like logs our first night – a combination of no sleep, alcohol and spent adrenaline. The house is very familiar to four of us, and completely unfamiliar to the other four, so breakfast, such as it was, was a combination of patient tutoring of those who had yet to understand where anything was! Fortunately they’re all pretty quick learners so they soon got the hang of things! The plan for the day was pretty straight forward – the ladies were going to drop in at the local outdoor market and browse the offerings there, whilst the chaps popped into Cell C to buy a couple of local SIM cards so we could contact one another whilst we were here. Afterwards we all convoyed down to the harbour market to browse a bit more and make use of the food hall for brunch. This proved to be a real success and we all had a great time choosing which of the many offerings on show to plump for. Karol, Karen, Richard and Martha chose a middle eastern wrap, Geoff had a selection of Chinese food whilst Phil went for the big healthy breakfast with peri peri chicken, which he topped off with a healthy bright green, cucumber based smoothie – delicious or what? There were also a few purchases made and I got another smaller grandad shirt. Then it was back to the house to catch a few rays before heading off to Lawrence’s for a late lunch. You see the day before the girls had bought a whole fillet of beef from Pick n Pay for R369 – about £20 at current exchange rates. We had planned to braai this for Sunday lunch, but L & A had insisted that we go to them armed with said fillet, salad and a couple of bottles of wine. So this is what we did. Amanda had invited Sheila along too so there were 11 of us in all, and we had a great time! This was probably helped by us opening a couple of bottles of fizz (to celebrate Adam and Rachel’s engagement the day before) to get us going, and following it up with lots of wine, including one of Lawrence’s Van Loveren 3 litre specials. There was a bit of a fuss over going to the loo; Lawrence had decided that he was sick of people trying all eight light switches on the panel to find which one switched on the loo light, so had made an ingenious mask which covered all the switches other than the necessary one. It had a hole cut out of the centre to guide your finger – ingenious other than the fact that it was (he says) a picture of his naked bum! I don’t need to go into detail about where the hole was, and I’m going to gloss over the shena****ns with some Bovril and the light switch, which I’ll leave to your imagination…….nuff said! The plan was to play beetle drive, but we chatted so much that Sheila missed out as she had to leave at 6.30. We still hadn’t eaten by this time, although Lawrence had cooked some sausage finished off with lemon juice, and Tabasco sauce – delicious! We eventually sat down at about 7 and made our way through the deliciously tender steak, green salad and some oven roasted potatoes and onions. We then hit the beetles! Two teams were chosen, with Richard, Jenny, Geoff, Amanda and me taking on the rest. Lawrence brought out the forfeit shots – limoncello, coffee patron, apple schnapps and Jaegermeister, and we got going. There were supposed to be points awarded for artistically drawn beetles but this soon went out of the window as the competitive juices ran. Our team ran out easy winners with all the others taking forfeits in each of the rounds. It was probably at this point that I insulted Richard’s jumper – a pale coloured knit with dark horizontal stripes. I said he looked like a French onion seller. Before we knew it, he and Lawrence were each posing in their respective striped jumpers, sporting matching ‘French’ caps and holding a big bag of onions! It was one of those times when if somebody said ‘boo’ everyone would burst out laughing – my jaw ached from smiling so much (yes, I know, I’m not used to it, yada, yada…) Home Heroes came and removed us just after 9 and took us home to avoid further embarrassment.