The liver can't be this evil...

for me to have done it two nights in a row? It was Steph's birthday yesterday and to celebrate I took her and five of our friends out for dinner to a dingy little restaurant in a suburb called Melville, on the arty-farty side of town. The place is called the Ant Cafe (no website and, in fact, no phone number either, so you can't make a booking unless you physically go there) and, at best, I can describe it only as being a space between two buildings (basically an alley) that some nutter has seen and said "I can use that space and turn it into a dingy eatery". And he has done just that. A glass shopfront leading from the street belies what you get inside. If the Joburg City Council had to ever walk into the place, they'd shut it down in an instant, not because it's dirty (it's actually quite clean for an alley) but because of the design and structure of the roof. The nutter has taken a hammer and chisel, knocked a few holes about a foot in diameter (at more or less the same height) down the length of the adjacent buildings and stuck some gum poles (some of which are joined in the middle by planks and nails) in the holes. To secure the poles, he's jammed firewood logs around them, making each of the holes look like there's a porcupine sticking its arse out and is joined to the porcupine on the opposite wall by the gum pole. None of the tables matches another, except to say that they are all equally rickety on their legs. What makes it a place-to-be-seen kinda place, I believe, is the little log fire in the middle of the back wall. Being winter here, logs were crackling away, and the whole place was as toasty as a pizza oven. Anyway...it was a pleasant eating experience. The food is purely Italian, pizzas, pastas and the like, all with the right amount of garlic and herbs. Today, I'm working from home. Four beers, four glasses of red wine and two double Johnny Walker (black's) don't mix well and I'm about to go looking for a couple of Anadins to silence the gumboot dancers in my head. I hope the rest of you are having a nice, quiet, day...{groan}...