Tallahassee Spur, Somerset West

Thursday, March 20, 2003

Service: * * *
Food: * * *
Ambience: * * 1/2
Babe Count: * * *

I'm sitting with Heidi. Two and a half months have crept by without any physical contact between the two of us. We've run up hundreds of rands worth of phone bills, and now we're together again. Sigh. She's a babe. And I would walk 500 miles...

Actually... I ran 500 metres for her. At the Joburg International Airport. Damon gave me a lift to the airport yesterday, and it took 90 minutes to beat through the traffic, and I had exactly four minutes to make my Kulula.com flight. And I didn't know the aiport had changed. If you've ever flown Kulula, you'll know that once their boarding gates have closed -- thirty minutes before the flight -- they DO NOT OPEN THEM!

So Damon hits the ejector seat in his new Renault Megane, and my backpack and I hit the tarmac, and I run with the thing over my shoulder. Get to where Kulula's boarding gate used to be, and find a sign pointing me South. Hundreds of metres south. So I start running. And put my backpack on in mid-run. And rip my shoulder.

But it's all in the name of love, and I'm desperate to see Heidi, so I run more. And find the lifts are broken. So run up the three flights of rolling stairways. And get to the boarding gate 40 seconds late. And there's nothing that can be done, save to put me on the British Airways standby list.

Now it's around this point that I should have paused to consider what the universe was telling me. I think it might have been saying, "Uh, Roy... should you REALLY be going to Somerset West right now?" But I wasn't listening. I was trying to get my breath back, and ignoring the pain in my shoulder, and phoning Heidi to tell her I'd be late, and phoning Damon to tell him I missed the flight, and sweating.

And I got my flight.

And seeing Heidi at the Cape Town airport was a real highlight of my year. She's beautiful to me, and she was beaming. Both of us nervous as all hell. After all, this is the second time we're physically together over the course of a five or six month relationship.

So now we're sitting in the Tallahassee Spur in Somerset West, and the affable manager with no eyebrows, Barries, is agreeing to give me the kiddies burger instead of the adult burger. I love burgers, but they're normally way too big for me. Heidi goes for the normal sized burger with the mushroom sauce. I ask for pepper sauce.

And Heidi and I are settling down to being comfortable-ish with each other again. Last night was excellent, and I was able to easily forget my shoulder pain under Heidi's ministrations. But right now it's hurting. And there's no sign as yet that Heidi is shortly going to break up with me because we're incompatible.