{"id":49,"date":"2003-03-19T17:57:00","date_gmt":"2003-03-19T23:57:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/?p=49"},"modified":"2003-03-19T17:57:00","modified_gmt":"2003-03-19T23:57:00","slug":"tallahassee-spur-somerset-west","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/tallahassee-spur-somerset-west\/","title":{"rendered":"Tallahassee Spur, Somerset West"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2 class=\"date-header\">Thursday, March 20, 2003<\/h2>\n<p><i>Service: * * *<br \/>\n<br \/>Food: * * *<br \/>\n<br \/>Ambience: * * 1\/2<br \/>\n<br \/>Babe Count: * * *<\/i><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m sitting with Heidi. Two and a half months have crept by without any physical contact between the two of us. We&#8217;ve run up hundreds of rands worth of phone bills, and now we&#8217;re together again. Sigh. She&#8217;s a babe. And I would walk 500 miles&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mysite.mweb.co.za\/residents\/rb000004\/web_20-3-2003.gif?resize=260%2C288\" alt=\"Barries, the manager, sees me drawing, and comes over to take a look. He asks who I'm drawing, and I point out the babe across the way. I make him promise not to tell the girl's boyfriend about the drawing, cos I don't feel like being beaten up for misrepresenting his babe. Barries laughs and calls a few waitresses to look too.\" style=\"float: left;\" border=\"1\" height=\"288\" hspace=\"5\" vspace=\"5\" width=\"260\" \/>Actually&#8230; I ran 500 metres for her. At the Joburg International Airport. Damon gave me a lift to the airport yesterday, and it took 90 minutes to beat through the traffic, and I had exactly four minutes to make my Kulula.com flight. And I didn&#8217;t know the aiport had changed. If you&#8217;ve ever flown Kulula, you&#8217;ll know that once their boarding gates have closed &#8212; thirty minutes before the flight &#8212; they DO NOT OPEN THEM!<\/p>\n<p>So Damon hits the ejector seat in his new Renault Megane, and my backpack and I hit the tarmac, and I run with the thing over my shoulder. Get to where Kulula&#8217;s boarding gate used to be, and find a sign pointing me South. Hundreds of metres south. So I start running. And put my backpack on in mid-run. And rip my shoulder.<\/p>\n<p>But it&#8217;s all in the name of love, and I&#8217;m desperate to see Heidi, so I run more. And find the lifts are broken. So run up the three flights of rolling stairways. And get to the boarding gate 40 seconds late. And there&#8217;s nothing that can be done, save to put me on the British Airways standby list.<\/p>\n<p>Now it&#8217;s around this point that I should have paused to consider what the universe was telling me. I think it might have been saying, &#8220;Uh, Roy&#8230; should you REALLY be going to Somerset West right now?&#8221; But I wasn&#8217;t listening. I was trying to get my breath back, and ignoring the pain in my shoulder, and phoning Heidi to tell her I&#8217;d be late, and phoning Damon to tell him I missed the flight, and sweating.<\/p>\n<p>And I got my flight.<\/p>\n<p>And seeing Heidi at the Cape Town airport was a real highlight of my year. She&#8217;s beautiful to me, and she was beaming. Both of us nervous as all hell. After all, this is the second time we&#8217;re physically together over the course of a five or six month relationship.<\/p>\n<p>So now we&#8217;re sitting in the Tallahassee Spur in Somerset West, and the affable manager with no eyebrows, Barries, is agreeing to give me the kiddies burger instead of the adult burger. I love burgers, but they&#8217;re normally way too big for me. Heidi goes for the normal sized burger with the mushroom sauce. I ask for pepper sauce.<\/p>\n<p>And Heidi and I are settling down to being comfortable-ish with each other again. Last night was excellent, and I was able to easily forget my shoulder pain under Heidi&#8217;s ministrations. But right now it&#8217;s hurting. And there&#8217;s no sign as yet that Heidi is shortly going to break up with me because we&#8217;re incompatible. <\/p>\n<div class=\"blogger-post-footer\">Roy Blumenthal is a writer, director, artist, and <a href=\"http:\/\/snipurl.com\/visualfacilitator\">visual facilitator<\/a>. Hire him to make pictures of your meetings or workshops.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Thursday, March 20, 2003 Service: * * * Food: * * * Ambience: * * 1\/2 Babe Count: * * * I&#8217;m sitting with Heidi. Two and a half months have crept by without any physical contact between the two &hellip;<\/p>\n<p class=\"read-more\"> <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/tallahassee-spur-somerset-west\/\"> <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Tallahassee Spur, Somerset West<\/span> Read More &raquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-49","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p521FP-N","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}