Friday night: Alex Sudheim
The water in the bath has turned cold, clammy and grey. I’m blissfully asleep when violent explosions rip through the silent night.
In an instant I’m on my feet, skidding dangerously in the slimy tub and sending swampy waves slopping over the edge. Clinging to the towel rail, I peer out the window. The sky is ablaze with pretty glitter, acrid smoke, and from the buildings rises a thin chorus of ritual human cheer. Dogs yelp and holler, while the ships in the harbour emit dull, mournful bellows that awaken the Indian mynahs into indignant susurration.
This is how the first day of the last year of the second millennium broke for me – boy was I celebrating in style.
My number one new year’s resolution being “Finally Learn How To Party”, I head into town to check out where it’s at. But all the crackling euphoria occasioned by this arbitrary chronological moment leaves me feeling inadequate and weary, so I just nurse a coffee in the Playhouse bar feeling boring and alienated.
Among the tide of festive goodwill, my surly demeanour seems to contain a fretful wisp of its own strange magic, and soon I’m engaged in pleasantly anti-social conversation with a beautiful ballerina from one of the shows. We both agree the New Year thing is a sucker’s paradise, so I engage the full seductive force of cynicism and invite her back to my place for the solitary abuse of nicotine and alcohol.
So Alex wakes up then, on January 1 at approximately 1pm, a naked dancer twisted in the sheets beside him, an empty whisky-bottle rolling about on his floor. Could be worse.
Might this bode well for the year? Might the stars have written several more surprise plot-twists into his otherwise rather inauspicious script? Seizing upon this hot flush of optimism, I suggest celebration of the annus novus in opulent Durban fashion by dining upon delicacies from the ocean at one of the city’s finest seafood restaurants.
One wouldn’t think so by looking at it, but The Starfish & Coffee on Addington beach produces the most tasty and unpretentious fish, mollusc and shellfish dishes this side of the Cte d’Azur.
Despite the tacky furniture, plastic dcor and hordes of holidaymakers, the joint delivers the goods when lusty garlic-smothered fish cravings need urgent satiation. Supine in the miasma of moist tropical heat, sucking down ice-cold beers, munching on grilled steenbras and watching the Indian ocean’s warm waves swish upon the sand, I at last no longer feel deficient for not having joined the madding crowd on New Year’s Eve.
The sun finally sinking, the bar of the Roma Revolving Restaurant, hovering 34 stories above the city, provides a perfect setting for some languid sundowners. Slowly orbiting the city at the speed of a drugged somnambulist while watching Durban sedately slip into slumber, its possible to unwind so far as to completely lose the thread.
But then there’s a whole year ahead to get all wound up again.