The Big Read: Never the points shall meet

On Wednesday night, zigzagging my way to the Bafana-Nigeria game with my friend Craig after a satisfactory stop at the Irish pub on Main Road, we heard the crowd cheer as the players took the field.

In a burst of insane optimism we broke into a jog to make sure we didn't miss the action. In the excitement of the moment I forgot I'm the black hole of football action, the Bermuda Triangle of shots on goal. I've never seen a live ball inside a live net. I could take a leisurely carriage ride, play several hands of cribbage and arrive after everyone has gone home and I won't have missed any action.

I don't even really like football, I was just there for an evening out and to annoy the Green Point locals. The only time I ever feel the desire to blow a vuvuzela is in Green Point. Everyone wants their actions to have an effect, and I like the thought of those Green Pointers hearing my horn and snapping their pencils in rage and throwing back their heads to howl about the lawlessness sweeping their suburb. I didn't have a vuvuzela, so I had to make do with walking through the streets after the game rolling an oil drum filled with marbles.

I'm a Sea Pointer, you see, and Green Pointers are our Capulets. It's an ancient animosity, mainly because they're a miserable, snooty bunch, and because they love to complain. They complain all the time. If Cape Town won the bid to be host city for the Olympic Games of Complaining, the people of Green Point would complain all the way through.

Their principal complaint is the Cape Town Stadium, that splendid palace of light perched like a cross-section of a top hat in a lovely urban park between Signal Hill and the sea.

They complain that no one uses it, that it sits empty and abandoned, absorbing ratepayers' money. The only thing the people of Green Point dislike more than the stadium standing empty is when the stadium is used.

Movie shoots, concerts, sports events - they're all an insupportable outrage to the letter-writers of Green Point. The cars! The people from other parts of Cape Town! The sounds of folks enjoying themselves! It's so unfair. Why can't the world stay away and leave them to their traditional recreational interests, like complaining about gay bars?

Like every sensible person, I live in hope the rugby will move to the Cape Town Stadium, not just because Newlands is a cold, creaky, sweary, unwelcoming anachronism and the Cape Town Stadium is a good, clean, well-lit place, attractively designed and accessible to all, but also for the apoplexy it will cause the locals.

There's only one Green Point resident I do not disdain. During the 2010 World Cup I went to the stadium on an Antarctic night to watch England play Algeria. It was awful. Everyone on the pitch was either English or Algerian, except for the guy from Uzbekistan. The game was as goalless as a lecture hall of BA students, as pointless as a soccer ball, and instead of beer someone had harvested the clean, pure urine of 1000 ten-year-old boys, sold the best bits to Lance Armstrong and served me the rest from metal barrels marked "Budweiser".

I had to drink a lot of it to forget how bad it tasted. Finally the torment was over and the Uzbeki prison warder blew his whistle to release us on our own recognisance.

There were metal fence-tunnels outside the stadium to channel the weeping crowd in one of two directions and I found myself in the wrong one. I was being channelled toward grisly Green Point instead of splendid Sea Point. No indeed, this was an indignity too far. Awash with youthful defiance and beer, I climbed the fence. The fence was much higher than me. I was all right going up and going over but coming down was a disappointment. I sprained my ankle and sat there awhile, making piteous whimpering sounds. My companions had vanished, as companions so often do.

As I hobbled through the blurry streets a woman addressed me. Someone should help me, she said. I can't go limping around on my own like a wounded duck, for the night is dark and full of terrors. She insisted I put my arm around her shoulders and we hobbled out of accursed Green Point together, all the way home.

It took a while because of my ankle, and also because I kept wanting to lie down for a little nap. Finally we reached my front door, where the lady of the house was surprised to greet her man arriving two hours late and incoherent, his limbs entangled with a Green Point prostitute. She even refused to accept any money. She deserves better than Green Point.