Its All A Load of Old Blarney.....

Now, night life in Durban doesn't have a patch on Glasgow, but I think I may have sunk to an all time low with THE BLARNEY BROTHERS at.....wait for it.....the German Club. I know, an odd combination, but despite being warned that the Blarney Brother's were in their 70's and needed more intervals than Tom Jones, I decided to go with an open mind. My open mind evaporated the minute I let Hermann drink and volunteered to drive home. This is NOT the sort of evening that you want to experience sober.

Here follows a quick run down on the criteria for song choice:

1) No song to have been a hit post 1979
2) All songs to have actions (does anyone reading this actually remember the Superman move?)
3) Chorus must be interspersed with 'a hoo hoo'
4) Shamrock shaped guitar riffs (a la the Shadows) are an absolute necessity

Also witnessed during the course of the evening:

1) Ladies of a certain age dirty dancing their way up a table - its just not polite to try and hump someone while they are attempting to drink their beer!
2) A congo line of determined Boers 'Marching to Pretoria'
3) Not to leave the next war out - 300 Germans singing their hearts out for Dame Vera Lynn
4) The Birdie Song oder Die Ente Tantzen - and I thought that only the Brits were daft enough?
5) 300 Germans singing Irish rugby songs as if their hearts would break should they not find themselves imminently on Irish soil once more.

All I can say was that it was horrifying but strangely compelling at the same time. And towards the end of the evening I may even have been guilty of joining in with the YMCA, and of singing Flower O' Scotland very loudly (including the FU which went down like a lead balloon - it was a church fundraiser oops).

All in all, I'm not entirely sure what this evening has taught me on the anthropological make up of modern South Africa. The 300 German/Irish/South Africans sang 'Give Me Hope Joanna' and 'Marched to Pretoria' with equal amounts of enthusiasm. Maybe the answer is that bad music and beer know no boundaries. There is only one burning question left outstanding though: surely the Blarney Brothers should be first on the Home Affairs hit list?