A double culture and Coke, even when under the weather
Some of my happiest and least obnoxious experiences of being off my face have been in Scotland with South Africans or in South Africa with Scots.
The Churchill Arms pub in London. Picture: Jim Freeman
Nazi air force boss Herman Göring is quoted as saying: “Whenever I hear the word ‘culture’, I unsafe my Browning”. We are often told that a petri dish in a laboratory has more culture than most Australians.
That would seem to be on the boorish end of the spectrum. I, however, am a mix of Afrikaans and Scottish genes which – I am very pleased to say – makes me an extremely cultured person who is glad he is not having this conversation with the fat field marshal.
One of the determinants of a highly developed culture is language and, in this regard, Afrikaans must rank right up there with the best. Any group of people who can use poespas to describe a fuss or vloermoer for a temper tantrum deserves to be accorded the same respect as the Ancient Greeks.
I was just as pleased recently to learn that we Scots are also an extremely cultured folk and not only of the Rabbie Burns “wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim’rous beastie” ilk. No, we’re much more linguistically sophisticated than that.
While Inuits (Eskimos) have more than 50 words for snow, the Scots have more than 70 for being drunk (jaikit/stocious/LillianGished).
That’s really surprising; I would have thought there were a lot more, what with having Boris Johnson as a neighbour.
Be assured that I have proudly lived up to my mixed heritage just about wherever I’ve travelled in the world. I’ve been banjaxed in Botswana, mullicated in Morocco and created any number of poespasse when barmen have called “last round” or uttered the foreign equivalent of “no more for you, pal”.
Only once has my culture not been recognised for what it is: that was in Tbilisi on the first day of a media trip.
Our group minder, who I swear must have been KGB muscle in a previous life, introduced our group to the Georgian brandy known as chacha after lunch in the city’s poshest restaurant.
Chacha brandy. Picture: Jim Freeman
The two of us were still going strong several hours later – chacha is slugged rather than sipped in the land of Stalin – when he said (I think admiringly): “Jim, you drink like a Russian!”
Don’t worry, I didn’t have a vloermoer.
Some of my happiest and least obnoxious experiences of being off my face (reekin’/rat-arsed/fu) have been in Scotland with South Africans or in South Africa with Scots.
The South African diaspora to the so-called United Kingdom meant that the crowd watching the November 2008 game between the Springboks and Scotland at Murrayfield was split roughly equally.
It was later estimated that there were more than 35,000 South Africans in Edinburgh that weekend. Our section of the crowd did its bit in belting out Nkosi Sikelel’ iafrika in freezing conditions then joined our hosts to raise the stadium roof with Flower of Scotland.
After the game (which the Boks won narrowly), we gathered at the Murrayfield Arms before walking back into town to start a pub crawl on the Grassmarket, a square just below Edinburgh Castle comprising about a dozen pubs.
The atmosphere throughout was amazing and we ended our booze sortie at a pub on the Cannongate called The Three Sisters but known to locals as The Six Tits.
As we stood outside with our final pints of McEwans, an icy drizzle began to fall and the night temperature turned truly Baltic. Two of our group who’d spent the afternoon and evening clad only in slip-slops, springbok loincloths and with large South African flags knotted around their necks burst bravely into song …
“It was sunshine in Durban when we left, when we left. “It was sunshine in Durban when we left!”
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