I Am What I Am, John Barrowman [smart ebook reader .txt] 📗

One morning, when the cleaning crew came into our condo and we were heading out, I told them that we had lots of extra fruit that I didn’t want to go to waste and please to help themselves. The next day, their supervisor pulled me aside and chastised me quite severely, saying, ‘If you give them extra food, they’ll come to expect it.’

Once our trip took us out of Cape Town itself and into the hills and the countryside, the racial divide didn’t seem as wide – or maybe the best that I can say is that the racial gulf wasn’t so visible. I loved wandering in the markets and bartering for souvenirs. Scott might tell you I was lousy at bartering, but that would only be because he doesn’t understand its nuances.

I swerved the car off the road one morning when we were heading to Table Mountain, a shiny beaded basket tempting me from a stall at the side of the road. The woman wanted $30 for it.12 I paid her $20. Did I mention it was beaded? I could afford the $20 and she might otherwise have had to stand in the heat and the dust all day for another customer13 like me to come along.

I also loved all the knick-knacks made from tin cans that the African children would sell. I bartered similarly for them. I bought a cool-looking Citroën car from a young boy made out of recycled Glade aerosol cans. It’s one of my favourite souvenirs, and sits on a side table in the dining room in Sully.

Later that week, Gav, Stu, Scott and I decided to book a day trip to swim with the sharks.14 The boat and its small group of passengers zipped out into the ocean, where anyone who wanted to could be lowered into a heavy, steel protective cage and then dropped underwater, where he or she came face-to-face with Jaws.

We all decided to sit up on the top deck of the boat and see how this whole thing played out, with a few other passengers going first, before we committed ourselves either way. I wanted to see how safe the ‘cage keeps the sharks out’ theory really was.

It didn’t take long for us to realize that there was no way we were going down into the ocean in that cage. Not because the sharks came up really, really close, but because in order to get the sharks to come up really, really close, the tour operator and his buddy had to drop pounds of thick, raw chunks o’ chum on top of the cage. Everyone who came up after the experience was covered in bloody bits of fish flesh and looked like rejects from Brian De Palma’s Carrie. We all stayed put and we had much better views sitting on the boat deck, watching the sharks have a nibble at the other passengers. One poor woman freaked out so much when the chum hit her head and the sharks started to dive-bomb the cage that she had to be hauled out of the water, screaming hysterically. After an hour of this shark snacking, we were all hungry and bored. The movie was way more exciting.

We spent a much less messy day when we took the cable car up to the flat top of Table Mountain, which frames the city of Cape Town. The trip was fairly uneventful and the views stunning – until we had to be evacuated back down the mountain at top speed when the winds changed dramatically, the temperatures dropped from balmy to bloody freezing in a matter of minutes, and a huge band of heavy clouds cut right through the middle of the mountain.

The final leg of this holiday was our tour of the Stellenbosch wineries, where I fell in love with blended wines of every concoction: Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot; and their Pinotage … to name two favourites. When we returned to London, Scott and I had wine packed in every nook and cranny of our luggage – but absolutely no more than our maximum customs allotment each.15

Before we left Cape Town for the wineries, I rented a helicopter to take all of us on an aerial tour of the Western Cape, including viewing the wildlife on the beaches and the marshes along the Atlantic coastline.

Those of you who know me well know I have a deep and enduring love/hate relationship with flying, but I have a passion for planes and anything that defies gravity. The helicopter, however, is not my favourite flying machine.16 Nevertheless, the aerial tour came highly recommended and I thought it would be something we’d all enjoy.

Initially, the helicopter cruised at a very low height, and the panorama of the miles and miles of Cape coastline was stunning. For a quick detour, the pilot took us inland a little, over the townships that are, in fact, man-made slums and shanty towns. This part of the tour broke my heart to see, and I didn’t feel right flying above people’s homes and gawking into them. We asked the pilot to go back over the water, which he did, sometimes only by a matter of a few feet as he swooped in and out of the wake, sending flocks of birds into a frenzy ahead of us.

Before we had to head back to the airport, the pilot asked us if we’d like to experience a torque turn. Now, if you’ve ever flown in a helicopter, you’ll know it’s a very noisy machine and, even with headphones on, it can be difficult to hear clearly. I thought he’d asked if we’d like to see the ‘stork run’; I thought it was another bird swoop, so I said with great enthusiasm, ‘Absolutely!’

I discovered when I looked into it later that a ‘torque turn’ is actually one of the most dangerous tricks you can do in a helicopter. Although it was commonplace during the Vietnam War, most armed forces have since