IHAVE a shameful confession to make. Until the other day, I had never been to the Mount Nelson Hotel in Cape Town. This brought disgrace upon my family and, when drunk, my mother would call me a pitiful excuse for a white man.

I have tried explaining to her that things are different now but she remains adamant that my churlish indifference towards our cultural traditions is the sole reason the darkies are in power today.

Everything changed when I heard that the hotel is a firm favourite of communications minister Siphiwe Nyanda. This is where the East German trained general stays, at R5 000 a night, whenever he needs a break from work, or, as some would put it, whenever parliament is in session.

The honourable member has yet to spend a night in his official Cape Town residence because it lacks a view of migrating wildebeest stampeding majestically across rolling plains.

Keeping up with the Nyandas is not for the fainthearted. However, it must be done, if only for the sake of appearances and to stop my mother from blaming me for single-handedly devaluing the currency of my once-mighty race. So the other morning I brought Brenda breakfast in bed as a precursor to springing the news that I would be taking her to a famous five-star hotel. Right away, she suspected me of having poisoned the food and made me eat every last scrap. Works every time.

I told her that a night at the Mount Nelson would be like a second honeymoon. She said in that case, she wasn’t going. I promised not to bring the power tools or make her play a Bosnian milkmaid to my Slobodan Milosevic and she reluctantly gave in.

The Mount Nelson, or, as it is known by members of the bottom-sniffing classes, the Nellie, is not for those who prance about in T-shirts bearing idealistically doomed messages like: “Eat The Rich” or “A Better Life For All” or anything from the Cuban revolution.

In fact, show any signs whatsoever of siding with the economically enslaved and you will be discreetly escorted to an elegant courtyard in the east wing where a firing squad will be waiting. On the positive side, the rifles are fitted with silencers to avoid disturbing the more sensitive guests. And, of course, the lavender is lovely at this time of year.

Brenda insisted we travel in separate cars. I thought she wanted to play an erotically charged game in which we would pretend to meet as strangers in the lounge before discreetly slipping upstairs and plunging breathlessly into a night of unbridled passion. Hardly. She said it was because they wouldn’t let us in if they saw my car.

Nobody exactly rushed to carry my bags when I arrived. Perhaps they thought I was a new porter. No, that couldn’t be it. I wasn’t wearing a pith helmet.

Brenda was waiting impatiently in the lobby. “Hurry up,” she barked. “I want a drink.”

Sitting at a table overlooking the sweeping lawns, sweeping views and sweeping staff, a waiter blacker than a black cat down a coal mine in the middle of a moonless night glided up to us and said: “Welcome to Planet .”

He seemed like a man I should get to know, so I jumped right in. “Earth?” I said. Not a flicker. “Bar, sir,” he said. “Welcome to Planet Champagne Bar.”

I ordered a My Lai and the waiter gently corrected me. “I think you mean Mai Thai, sir. My Lai is a village in Vietnam where American troops massacred several hundred civilians on March 16, 1968.”

There is nothing worse than a waiter who makes you feel intellectually inferior. This happens to me a lot. I swore at him in Afrikaans and he replied in French. I had nothing else. “Fine,” I said. “Just bring me a beer.”

“We have 162 varieties, sir. Which will it be?”

With my working class roots brutally exposed, I changed seats and moved upwind to escape the smell of filthy lucre wafting from the tables of tanned industrialists and their inflatable lovers.

After trying everything on the cocktail list, I tried walking. It didn’t go so good. Brenda decided to have a little lie-down in her chair. While waiting for the paralysis in my legs to abate, I amused myself by analysing the guests.

The sloppiest people are generally the richest. That greasy-haired junkie with the sunken eyes? He’s one of the kids who started Google. The chairman of Wal-Mart? Over there by the gazebo, in his pyjamas throwing up over the iceberg roses.

The especially nondescript guests — the ones you wouldn't be able to pick out in a line-up even if they had spent the weekend licking your face – are the ones who work for the agencies. CIA, MI6, KGB, a sprinkling of Mossad assassins sunning themselves by the pool. They were all there. Or not. Hard to say.

Brenda awoke with a snippet of useless information. “Did you know that Churchill filed his reports from here during the war?” Julius Malema is a better carpenter than I am a historian. I had no idea what she was talking about. I went to school with a Churchill, but what reports would he have been filing? And why from here? For that matter, which war? It was all too much for me and I signalled the waiter. Apparently he is also fluent in sign language.

Dinner that evening was in the Cape Colony restaurant, a defiantly presumptuous room that, after a round or two of preprandial beverages, makes foreign domination and economic imperialism seem like frightfully good ideas.

One entire wall is decorated with a mural featuring British soldiers gazing heroically towards Devil’s Peak as turbaned waiters smile benevolently at a baboon waiting for high tea to be served, while on the verdant lawns ladies twirl their parasols and giggle coquettishly as the dandies prance about on their silky steeds. At least, I think it was a baboon. It might have been one of General Koos de la Rey’s hairy-assed guerrillas.

Room dividers display elegantly fading photographs of the likes of that bawdy old slut, Queen Victoria, and Lord Baden-Powell, a distinguished fellow who started a paramilitary organisation for young homosexuals gripped with an unhealthy interest in the outdoors.

After several bottles of champagne, I ordered an elephant gun so that I might hunt foxes in the grounds. The maitre’d insisted there were no foxes. Or elephant guns. “You call this a hotel?” I shouted. Brenda knocked her champagne over and people began leaving.

I stood on my chair, raised my gin and tonic and shouted: “God shave the Queen!” Then Brenda and I helped each other outside to watch the sun set on the British Empire for the very last time.

Source: Sunday Times