There was this man I knew once, years ago, who came out on a holiday to Greece. His was a very specialised kind of tourism because, unlike everyone else on the island, he never left his room at all in daylight hours. He studied a book on card tricks for nine hours a day and then went to the taverna downstairs and had a plate of kebabs and a bottle of retsina and went back to bed.
He returned to London after two weeks, white-faced but happy, and has since been sighted at Cheltenham doing the Three-Card Trick or Find The Lady with confidence and apparent success.
Why do I suddenly remember him clearly? Why does this happening of 30 years ago come back to me now?
Well, when somebody about to go out to Cape Town next week asked me to suggest things to do and places to go, I realised how specialised my own holiday had been and how peculiar and unhelpful a lot of the information I could offer would be. I could tell, for example, about the kind of extension flexes you would need and multi-adaptor plugs to get battery charger, laptop and small printer all moving at the same time. I could refer you to Copy Wizard, the wonderful photocopy shop in the Garden Shopping Centre off Orange Street, where their machine will do 60 pages in five minutes. Or the stationery suppliers' where you get big reinforced envelopes, or the couriers who will come to take parcels of pages back to white-faced people in London who are waiting for them (and don't like at all the thought of the person writing them being out in 33 of heat). These are not the need-to-know items for most people on a vacation - unless they, too, are finishing a book under some pressure.
But, there must have been time to do other things too, they say - and of course there was.
We stayed in a very superior small hotel called The Villa Belmont in a part of Cape Town called Oranjezicht. It has 12 rooms and the prices start at £45 per person a night (which includes a breakfast that would see you through the day) and it has its own, four-star restaurant, and a swimming pool where you can lie and look up at Table Mountain through the trees.
I went to three posh places - hotels that hadn't been built three years ago. Nowadays they are growing like enormous, luxury mushrooms as people realise what this place can be like in the month of February. We had: a brunch at the new Cape Grace hotel, all gleaming marble and chrome; a dinner at the Atlantic grill in the Table Bay, also enormous and expensively decorated; a lunch at The Cafe Fish, new waterfront restaurant in the Villa Via Hotel. All of these were great, upmarket, international-style places, the prices about one third of what we would pay here.
Then I went to three less posh places. First was the Harbour Fish Market, 341 Main Road, Seapoint - the menus are on blackboards, it's on the side of a busy road, not the sea, but there's a great holiday feel about it. An individual copper pan of fresh sardines is £1.50, huge grilled sole £4, a bottle of Fleur du Cap, the dearest on their wine-list, £5. Then came the Sandbar, 31 Victoria Road, Camps Bay: Just a noisy, seafront cafe open all hours; cheerful kids serving all kinds of food - Mexican, steaks, fish. A great late lunch at four o'clock one day, watching the crowds go by, cost £4 each including wine.
And then out to Marines Wharf, in Hout Bay Harbour, which is a bit along the coast. If you haven't hired a car, a taxi-ride to get there is very reasonably priced, and you could go and have a swim and a tour of Hout Bay as well. The Marine Wharf is a bit honky-tonk, slightly boardwalk and most definitely touristy. But what are we except tourists? Fantastic fish, house wine at £2 a bottle and great views out on the ocean.
And I also went back to an old favourite place, Hatfields, 129 Hatfield Street Gardens. Still lovely jazz on the player, still magic salads for £1 each. I just hate salads but these are full of cheese and apple and things you'd like. They still have the amazing Ladies' Rump advertised - as a steak - and they say that nobody else except myself thinks that's a bit funny.
So, unlike the man who learned the card tricks, I did get out, not only to chomp but also for drives along the coast and to see Sian Phillips - playing Marlene to packed houses at a dinner theatre before she comes to Dublin next week - and to drive up the hill to where the cable car starts and learn with relief that the winds were too high for it to operate that day. I enjoyed it all and wanted another week, so that's a good sign of a holiday.
So many Irish people go to Cape Town nowadays, you can be sure there are many, many, better experts than me around the place. But if ever you need to know about voltage or batteries or where to get little ink cartridges for the printer, then I'm your woman.