an alliterative weekend away in worcester.

i had a perfectly lovely time this weekend at the golden valley hotel and casino in worcester.
ke? what the hell were you doing there? i hear you say. (yes, sometimes your voice is in my head (and christopher walken’s) but not in a creepy-please-see-a-doctor-kind-of-way, promise.)

worcester is a little afrikaanse dorp about an hour’s beautiful drive through the mountains out of cape town and on the other side of the hugenot tunnel. there’s lots of snow on the mountains and it’s really pretty, even for a fucking old cynic like me.

anyway, it was my first time there that wasn’t just me passing through in a blur and a wee wee stop at the ultra city, and i noticed there’s one thing the casino in worcester doesn’t have a shortage of. moustaches. they have a lot of them. even the women have them.

after an amazing dinner and some johnnie walker blacks we had a little gamble. i played poker, or rather, it played me. i won two hundred and sixty rand and then proceeded to put it all back in again like a dumbass. i suppose worcester needs the money more than i do, moustache grooming products don’t come cheap.

then came the high point of the evening. we went to the bar to listen to the live band. i use the term band in its loosest form. the ‘act’ involved a lady with her hair pulled back tightly in a scrunchie, singing her lungs out, next to a guy person who was murdering an electric guitar.

i tried to catch some of the lyrics and write them down, because you can’t make this shit up, but having been forced to smoke dope in the toilets with ‘surfer chick’ through high school afrikaans lessons at ‘camps bay i’m so high school’, and because by this stage i was best friends with the top half of a bottle of johnnie walker black label, i struggled to get them all down. but this one was my favourite:

LYRICS SUNG BY GUY PERSON AND LADY MAN IN BLACK SCRUNCHIE:
La la la something, something….
….die mooiste poppie,
in die korste rokkie…
la la la la la la la la la
something, something… vir myyyyyyyyy….

when they finished i clapped and clapped, it was awesome. you don’t find bands like this in the city, and you should.

i couldn’t help thinking before we went off for another nightcap – with a different roll of the dice, and just the tiniest shift of the planets, i could have been born in worcester. i mean, what if? would i still be a writer? would I have a moustache? would i be the one on the stage with my brotheruncle, wearing a scrunchie and singing about a kort, kort rokkie or my meisie se vleisie?

could have happened.