I’m an Adonis! (Whatever that may be)

I’ve been called lots of things in my time (some, better left unsaid, by annoyed girlfriends), but Adonis is a new one on me. So when my father called me this morning and said, ‘I believe you’re something of an Adonis,’ I thought I’d misheard.

‘No, I haven’t been to Agulhas lately,’ I replied. (My father has a holiday house there, so it wasn’t unthinkable that that’s what he’d said.)

‘No, no. Adonis,’ he said.

‘A doane what?’ I asked.

After he’d shouted the word at me three times and I still hadn’t understood it, I just laughed and said, ‘Oh, ja.’ My father’s blood pressure isn’t stable at the best of times and I don’t want to be the one who tips him over the edge.

My housemate, Muriel, is a writer, so I thought I’d run the mystery word by her.

‘I’m apparently something of an Adonis,’ I said.

Her reaction was a bit alarming. She narrowed her eyes at me and said, ‘If you start getting all big-headed and stuff, you’re in for such a fat slap.’

This is what happens when you’re just a shy and ‘self-effacing’ (according to Muriel) winemaker and then you agree to appear nude in a calendar. There you are, minding your own business and making wine, when along comes You magazine and calls you (and I quote) ‘pure Adonis’. (For more, see page 18 of the 9 April issue.)

Not having been helped at all by anyone around me, I had to use Wiki to find out who Adonis actually is. He’s a vegetation god, which I obviously really like; he is also annually renewed, which ties in perfectly with winemaking, so that’s good too. He’s ‘ever-youthful’, and I suppose often being mistaken for a teenager explains that one; and, hey, ‘his name is often applied in modern times to handsome youths’! I can feel my head swelling already.

Link for teenager reference: http://salma-gundi.blogspot.com/2008/12/i-am-broke-and-apparently-look-old.html