Lock it up

With Cleo still steadfastly interested in the videos of Milkshake - I reminded her, this morning, of her old friends the Wonder Pets and Curious George, only to hear her respond that George sometimes plays mean tricks - let's take the theme of rock bands on tour a step further. There are, no doubt, literally dozens of cliches and overused images connected to the lifestyles of bands on the road (furniture cast into swimming pools; slow-eyed, starstruck female fans in rumpled beds, under sheets; medium shots of the band, on the tarmac, about to board the plane...), but one of the most enduring seems to involve the raided minibar, or liquor cabinet. This morning, on the third consecutive day of rain in Cape Town, I checked my e-mail, cast an eye at the ballscores, read the paper, and then Googled "lock up liquor rock band" - and was greeted with 478,000 hits.

Joplin, Moon, Bonham, Cobain: you know their names, and you most likely know their vices: gravitational pulls that could not have been thwarted, in all probability, by a simple lock. But hotels tried, especially after the revelry that Moon initiated in a Flint, Michigan Holiday Inn, where his five-tiered birthday cake was soon the very epicenter of a food fight that was eventually drenched in the output of various fire extinguishers. And what hotelier, really, wouldn't fear the sight of an enthusiastically boyish Robert Plant, about to set the Sunset Strip on fire:

Lock the liquor cabinets, boys: let them do their worst, but let's not add fuel to the fire.

In South Africa, though, one finds a different kind of lock. On the refrigerator and the freezer in our lovely rented home, you'll find two small locks, each with an accompanying key. A further sign of the omnipresent fear of home invasions - a parallel to the three panic buttons, and the crisp alarm system, and the high gate? No: or not quite. Rather, as Patrick Flanery explains, in his recent novel Absolution, they're there to thwart any domestic servants - cleaners, or gardeners, say - who might be tempted to help themselves to... what? A piece of cheese? A glass of milk? You can imagine the details; the whole, regardless, is clear: another trace of the endemic inequality that still shoots through this society.

Only here, however, for two months - on tour, you might say - we can partly ignore the deeper complexities of life in South Africa. So we leave the locks unlocked, decorate the front of the fridge with dainty ballerina magnets, grab a yogurt, and sit down in front of another showing of Milkshakes' videos.