Julie has been talking about it for 2 weeks. Clearly the Sunday brunch at the Winchester Mansions Hotel in Sea point is quite remarkable. Huge mussels, prawns with sweet chilli sauce, French cheese, English breakfast, carvery, croissants, pistachio ice cream and a lot of Champagne.
We book it for Sunday 22nd of July and Julie drives round picking everyone up. Andrew, Ronald, Ed and me are later joined by Bruce Gordon and Isabel. We arrive at 11:15 and eat and drink slow (portuguese way). I am tired and quiet for the first couple of hours but with the food, coffee and Champagne the mood starts to lift. By now the situation is inverted as the problem is when will I shut up?
The minister for arts and culture arrives and sits next to us in this colonial hotel. I hear he hates contemporary art in favour of music, film and theater. He joins in a photograph of Ronald, Andrew and Ed without knowing.
The waitress whispers on Andrews ear that the Champagne is by the glass. After Andrew tells us the news we look at each other and decide to go for it. Everyone seems to be on the same wavelength and we eat and drink slowly for four hours. After everyone has left apart from a rich old boy in the company of a relatively younger lassie, we decide to make a move into the bar, sitting outside facing the sea for the next couple of hours till the cold prompted by the sunset forces us to leave.
On the taxi back to Long a pure moment of surrealism happens. Ronald asks where the expression ‘howzit?’ comes from and Ed replies: ‘Its a cricket term!’. Andrew, who allegedly is a certified cricket umpire says in a quite voice: ‘In cricket we say Howzat not howzit’. Ed’s come back re-instates that Howzit is a cricket expression and again Andrew calmy tries to put the situation right. ‘In cricket is howzat’ he says. Third time around and Ed repeats that the origin of howzit is found in Cricket, but by then Andrew has lost his cool. After all why challenge a South African theoretician in terms of Cricket knowledge. How dare you Ed young!
By this time Ronald and I are in stitches. We cannot stop laughing at the Cricket and Linguistics argument and I can see the taxi driver is puzzled, just by the wrinkles on the back of his head. We jump out of the taxi outside the jo’burg bar and the argument spills for a while longer. By now, and probably as the only means of survival, we believe that howzit is nothing to do with Cricket and is merely short for how is it. Ronald states hes had his first belly laugh as his rib cage is getting sore.
That’s brunch at the Winchester by the way, and the result of 50 glasses of bubbly, double gins and two little carafes.
