A weekend in Haiti has no ring to it.

After dropping the Brits off at the airport and guiding them through check in - I think they were still drunk - I met the girls for dinner and drinks. Petri is very down as her first attempt at AI failed and she is worried that all her bad behaviour in the past, particularly smoking, has finally caught up with her. I try to cheer Petri up by mentioning that the world has suddenly become very precious about what our bodies need to survive and breed. For hundreds of years, Catholic women have been churning out babies in conditions that would wipe out the hardiest township dogs of today. In some of the poorer parts of Ireland, many of those women lived on Guinness, potatoes and cigarettes with no filters. Admittedly some of the children died but it was very seldom do to with exposure to too much smoke – in or out of the womb.

The mood around the table was very low and the fact that Fay is the only one of us with a Valentines date isn’t helping. Fay and the NGO man are now an item and she has become very scarce. The only reason she’s even with us tonight is because he has flown to Haiti to help with the disaster there. I have to chuckle a bit at these NGO types. They always seem to find a disaster in their field that is thousands of miles away and sounds very heroic and impressive. It’s not so fun to spend your days tromping around Khayelitsia helping Somalians who are getting shot at for trying to be entrepreneurial. No-one gives you the thumbs up on the N2 on the way home for that. But if you jet off to Haiti, then you can really claim to be saving the world. I remember a Christian family from Llandudno telling me that God had called them to evangelise in Hawaii just when the informal settlement was mushrooming over the hill in Hout Bay. Aloha and welcome to bullshit. Freud would have had a lot to say about that.

After throwing back a few Vodkas, Ciggy came up with a great idea to go away for the weekend. We all take out our Blackberrys and start the search for a quick getaway. Petri wants to go to McGregor where she can get hold of some pure Olive leaf extract and try to reverse all the ill effects her partying days have caused. Whether olive leaf extract causes her eggs to attract sperm in a shallow glass laboratory dish is another question entirely. I want Riebeck Casteel because my hormones are on fire and I need to shag something quickly, preferably a man, and I have heard that there is a bar where hunky olive farmers hang out. Ciggy wants to go to Club Mykonos where there is a casino and she can smoke her lungs out and lose all her money. For a financial advisor her gambling habit is a bit worrying. Fay provides no useful input because Haiti doesn’t count and, besides, I don’t know of any bars in Haiti that have a reliably large number of hunky olive farmers as patrons. After arguing for the next hour, Fay finally loses her patience and marshals a game of rock, paper, scissors. My last paper play wins the tournament and our fate is sealed. Riebecks here we cum. At least, I’m hoping to cum. Farmers can be hunky but twenty five minutes of well-choreographed clitoral stimulation is generally the preserve of clued-up city boys who have had plenty of empowered working women hit them over the head and complain about their technique.  

When I return home Nikki and I sit on the steps for a bit and then go back inside so I can take a shower. While lathering my body and scrubbing under my arms I am sure I hear Nikki barking. I turn off the shower and listen. To my horror she is and that can only mean one thing - I’m in shit. She never barks. I grab my towel and run into the passage and find the front door open. I am sure I locked it. I peek outside and see Nikki in a very agitated state, barking at the wall. I notice her leash lying next to her so I slam the door closed and hit the panic button. The bathroom door slams and I’m not sure if the intruders are inside or out. I run to my room and call C for backup. While waiting for C to arrive, I call Ciggy to try and reverse my mounting hysteria and while talking to her, I hit the panic button again for good measure, not remembering that it is connected to my phone line. The phone goes dead. Now I am in a complete state as I recall all the horror films I have ever seen and am convinced that my phone lines have been cut and the bad guys are still in the house. C arrives 7 minutes later to find me under the bed and the security company arrives 2 minutes after that. They go through the house yanking open all cupboards and doors hoping to catch any intruders off guard. C is holding one of my kitchen knives which is making me more worked up as I visualize him sparring with a gun-toting bandit. Once every space capable of holding a human body has been searched I realize that my handbag, cell phone and house keys are all missing and my bedroom window is wide open. Standing with a small bath towel rapped around me, imagining the intruders entering the window 3 meters from the shower it begins to dawn on me how close I came to needing one of Beehive’s rape condoms. C says I must pack a bag and go home with him and then either the testosterone or insanity kicked in. I know if I leave now, I will never have the courage to come back and sleep here alone, so I do the next logical thing and call the Iraqi body guard and he spends the rest of the night outside with a loaded gun.