Ever feel like a monkey on a typewriter?

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By HERMAN LATEGAN

Oi vey, my heart is broken. One of my favourite old watering holes, The Junction Hotel in Salt River, has collapsed. Winter weather, slum lords and now one of the city’s most beautiful old period buildings is no more. The poor people who squatted there are now being moved to some god-forsaken shanty town. The blue building was over 100 years old, situated near the Salt River circle, opposite the Locomotive Hotel.

In my heyday as alcoholic par excellence, I used to go drinking there with dock workers, railway workers, mechanics, old coloured aunties, who all worked for Rex Trueform and the prostitutes and transvestites of the area. The women used to smoke cigarettes with shiny filters called Satin Silk, or something like that. The men smoked Gunston, unfiltered.

It was trashy as hell, but colourful and warm, already falling apart twenty years ago. Just like the people who hung around the dark corners, smooching to Elvis Presley’s “Return to Sender”.

There was a jukebox, with only Elvis Presley records, a pool table, with sexy young men in overalls or dirty torn jeans smoking like locomotive chimneys. People got vrot, dronk verdriet, fell in love, out of love and once or twice there was a flash of a knife in a dark alley next to the hotel.

Sunday lunches were particularly wonderful, as you could get huge amounts of grub for something like R15. Roasts, veggies, you name it. Mash potato as well, with yellow, sweet carrots and tinned peas.

And now Cape Town has lost yet again another historical landmark, a building with so many stories to tell, where lives were lived fully and, I suspect, some ended. In any case, gone with the icy, wet Cape Town winter wind. Gone.

* Herman Lategan is a veteran hack who escaped the corporate world recently for the freedom and vagaries of freelance writing. Grubstreet hooked up with him through the friendly, colleagial world of blogging and convinced him to do a guest post every now and again, when he has the time. I love his turn of phrase and quirky view of the world and am sure you will to.

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