Tony Jackman pays tribute to the late Mark Swift, poet, journalist, romantic, womaniser, drinker, colleague and friend

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, after decades of research and years of trials, the manufacturers of whites, blacks, coloureds, coconuts, Indians, plurals, tricamerals, old-style liberals, diehard Nats, Oranians, black diamonds — basically of anyone you know or have ever known — have invented a whole new race which, with immediate effect, replaces all races that have gone before, rendering them null and void.

Should anybody under 25 be reading this, here is the lesson you should of been taught at school, using the title’ve a famous song from My Fair Lady, which as you know came out a year or so before that other great musical, The Sound Have Music.

We traversed the entire country, and always the night stop, my sister and I each in our own hotel bedrooms, hearing the dinner gong as a man in a uniform wandered up and down the corridors tinkling a xylophone. I’d have to wear a white shirt, tie and jacket and we’d go down for the first sitting, soup – consommé, cream of tomato or celery – then poached fish with sauce, and more ofen than not roast leg of lamb or beef with three veg and gravy.

Instead of having Rijk do a jack-in-a-box act and hate every minute of the evening, the speeches were succinct and despatched with while having aperitifs in the foyer before we filed in to the hotel’s The Square restaurant to dine. Thereafter, the only time you heard Rijk’s thoughts on any of his wines, and how they matched the five courses, was when you stopped at his table, or he at yours, for some one-on-one reflections on wine, food and life.

Far more interesting to watch was Jade, who seemed to be more of a potential chef than some of her fellow contestants, although the real reason we wanted her to stick around was in the hope she’d give in and explain to us how she managed to get a Dutch accent while growing up at the Cape. Sarel looked like some oke who had wandered off from his braai and on to the set of a cooking show and thought, “Ja, okay, I’ll do that instead of fixing the bakkie today”. Who knew he’d be able to turn out a gorgeous little cupcake? And would he ever be allowed back at the braai by his mates?

It’s a bit like having lunch with the Dowager Countess of Downton Abbey. You wonder if the staff must get into huddles of confusion and consternation somewhere in the wings as they try desperately not to embarrass her ladyship while she’s entertaining guests for lunch.

It’s all Alice’s fault, apparently, or maybe Humpty Dumpty’s. More correctly, we can blame Lewis Carroll, who in Through The Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There (150 years ago, in 1872) invented the notion of a portmanteau, which in recent years has sprung into fashionability with the hybridisation of the names of Hollywood stars.

Isn’t life strange? You wait forever for your favourite bands and singers to visit South Africa – and they do. Only they wait 50 years before getting around to it and when they finally get here they’re utterly overshadowed by somebody called Lady Gaga, who (you are told) clads herself in meat and whose only redeeming feature seems to be that she is not Justin Bieber.

Other than Alex, who was elegantly turned out in pink and blue and yellow and oh, I could go on and on, it was easy to tell which ones were the wine judges. They all had teeth stained with the red-black detritis of a thousand wines. It was like being at the closing night dinner of a vampire convention. You flinched if one of them came near.