– Opinion –
With yesterday being a Saturday, there was only one thing to do – carry on with my cleaning frenzy to keep the cleaning envy at bay! No time for such completely frivolous activities as reading and resting, the autumn clean needed to continue!
I had been eyeballing the bar for a while now and decided that it was time to get in there and see what evil things had been procreating since I last gave it a clean-out (which was somewhere just before Jan van Riebeeck landed at the Cape!)
HP (Husband Person) hovered around like a helicopter with whirring blades as I started to unpack everything. But when he asked me if three different bottles of craft gin was “really necessary” I asked him if he was “really necessary” and sent him off to go do “boy people things” in the garage. (I of course didn’t tell him I found a fourth bottle of craft gin when I unpacked further, but it’s very difficult to try and explain the benefits of these magnificently beautiful gins to someone who thinks that a G & T should just be good old Gordon’s with regular Schweppes tonic. Sigh deeply!)
There were some seriously dodgy old liqueurs and things under the bar that got their marching orders very quickly. This included a bottle of Black Sambuca that looked like it was spawning some of Satan’s offspring so that had to go. But I did find two wooden boxes lurking in the far corner of the bar behind the bar fridge – you know the part that you never touch because you can’t really reach. And to my absolute joy, each contained a bottle of delicious red wine – one being a 1987 bottle of Rust en Vrede Cabernet Sauvignon. I could barely contain my excitement!
Next up was the sorting of the glasses. Sweet baby ducklings – what on earth possesses me to come home from every wine tasting with a branded tasting glass in hand that I am never ever, ever (did I mention the word ‘ever’?) going to use again! There were millions of them – all trying to smile at me and insist they were useful, when all they were actually doing was using up space! So they got their marching orders too!
And as much as I cleared out many, many glasses there are also many, many more that remained. Heck we could throw a party for ‘eleventy’ seventy million people and probably still have a few spare glasses! But on the plus side they are now all bright and very, very sparkly clean, ready for a small “post-lockdown” gathering. (Admittedly I did have to hold a mass funeral for the fifty or so dead moths I found lurking in some of the glasses, but I did keep the mourners to under 50 guests.)
I also uncovered so many useless things that needed to stay for sentimental reasons – like silver goblets with inscriptions that you cannot really read because “ain’t nobody” got the time to sit and polish them with Silvo! But on the plus side they now have more space in which to be useless.
So the million dollar question now is – if the 33-year-old bottle of wine survives to the end of lockdown (without needing to be used for medicinal purposes) is there anyone out there who wants to help me test it?
Missed some of the other Corona Chronicles? Check them out here:
Corona Chronicles: Witty Joburg resident documents past five days of social distancing
Corona Chronicles: Lockdown makes Joburger confront gridlocked passage and a lipstick dilemma
Corona Chonicles: Are mops considered an ‘essential’ item?
Corona Chronicles: Chicken or beef?
Corona Chronicles: Worry over wine stock after husband accidentally breaks three bottles
Corona Chronicles: All dressed up and off to the shops she goes
Corona Chronicles: Does reading a book and drinking a gin while lying in the sun count as housework?
Corona Chronicles: Lockdown’s become a puzzle
Corona Chronicles: New dress sense during lockdown
Corona Chronicles: How to manage household chores during lockdown
Corona Chronicles: Attempt to re-create Mozambican holiday doesn’t go to plan
Corona Chronicles: Lockdown eating habits
Corona Chronicles: Thank goodness of homemade pizzas and braais that work
Corona Chronicles: A plan to overcome ‘cleaning envy’
