touch down

So back to reality.

Although ‘reality’ isn’t exactly ‘normality’ at the moment.

In the past week I’ve:
- Been on TV. (sporting a particularly lethal case of bad hair – backpacking can cause irreversible damage to your locks, FYI)
- Done two radio slots - both where I was asked about the ‘boozing’ aspect of my book (Yes. We were a bunch of insufferable boozers. But we also had a jolly good time doing it)
- Done two photo shoots, where the makeup artist opted to do my eyebrows.

This is an important new level to my general grooming regime, you understand. Simply because I haven’t touched my eyebrows before. (Hang on, my mates waxed my eyebrow when I was 14. It was a particularly boring prep session so we waxed the bugger off. Radical.)
But generally, I sport nice, bushy set of duo-brows, it’s my vibe and, frankly, it’s hot in Portugal.

She trimmed them. Actually she first shaped them with this nifty eyebrow razor thingie, then she cut them with a pair of scissors - gave them a haircut.

So the publicity aspect of the book has been quite an interesting ride so far, and I’m laying off the tranquilisers. For the first TV interview, I asked the Dove if she had 8000 horse tranquilisers handy, as I was hanguva nervous. (I took Biral, that herbal anti-anxiety stuff, which comes highly recommended.)

Now it’s getting easier and feeling more natural. Sometimes I want to run back to South America and go into hiding, but other times I realise this is how it is and I might as well try to have fun doing it. It’s a strange mindfuck.

Anyway, I reintegrated into Joburg on Friday by going to Tokyo Star in Greenside for a mate’s birthday. Where’ve I been? Not sure how new the establishment is, but it’s fabulous. The Tokyo in Melville was always a good bet, but it seems to me these days that Greenside is the new Melville.

Everything was going fine – I saw everybody I know basically - drinks were flowing, they were playing fine 80s mass market classics, and chitchat was refreshingly shallow. Then Chester, Poen and I admitted to each other through the medium of a fat rant, that getting bumped every five seconds is more of a bitch than anything else.

Perhaps we used to be the people that after 5 Hand Grenades – in fact, we were those people - that were bumping into anything standing upright, but now, not so much. And standing near the queues for the bar, only means that you lose your sense of humour that much quicker than if you were, say, 25.

Jesus, I’m starting to rethink where I get out for a stint of socialisation and possible Friday night binge drinking - based solely on the bump factor. The fact that people constantly try to bump passed you, no matter how festive the place, is going to have me yearning for an airport departure lounge that comes with chairs you don’t have to fight for.

Even the binge drinking is a hassle. Maybe it’s just getting back into the daily grind for two weeks that’s been exhausting, but seriously.

On the other side of the coin, I have been doing some wonderfully romantic dinners and censored activities with my boyfriend - tee hee, it’s great!

Poen is another kind of delighted, because her boyfriend is a game ranger, and mine used to be one. So she has someone else to experience Khaki Fever with.
Personally, I’m finding the idea of Land Rovers, camouflaged gaming gear and the fact that Chester knows more about animals than anyone I’ve ever met, unbelievably sexy.

I mean for God’s sake, he knows more about snakes than I do. I’m been stumped. This coming from a woman who knows that a Boomslang has a haemotoxic venom, strikes in a sidewards moment, and has keeled scales.

Poen has insisted that my next move is to take up birding. Serious. That’s what she did, and has suggested that I get with the programme too. I find this nothing short of hilarious. Me with a set of binoculars and a copy of Newman’s Birds Of Southern Africa? The image of ‘birding’ makes me chuckle like Jack Nicholson in The Shining.

But I’m up for it, me turn down a challenge? Never.