What better way to celebrate the end of the recession than with oysters and bubbly (both French and Méthode Cap Classique) at Belthazar at the Cape Town Waterfront yesterday. As mine host Jonathan Steyn insisted in his yoga gear “Champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends” quoting the late British artist Francis Bacon, famous for paintings humans as slabs of meat, so a most appropriate quote for the Cape’s best steakhouse. And the recession really does seem to be lifting “September was our worst month in the past 18 and then someone switched on the tourists in October.”

I can’t enlarge on the sham friends bit as Riesling Revivalist Jörg Pfützner closed down the conversation about the bitchy and ungallant dissing of WINE magazine’s new publishing editor on the Grape communal blog with a comparison of local wine writers to children fighting with plastic swords at a kiddies birthday party. So the current rash of bad temper in the bibulous blogosphere is probably just further celebrations of the 50th anniversary of Asterix and Obelix. In the same way that last year’s epidemic was just a well choreographed publicity storm for the launch of Sour Grapes (Tafelberg, 2008). With Michael Olivier, Aníbal Coutinho and I planning to launch The People’s Guide in Cape Town on the 19th, Johannesburg on the 23rd and Durban the day after, no doubt there will be further bimbo eruptions.