It was some time around the year 2000 that the powers that be yoked together five towns to make the Breede River Winelands Municipality. Not because those towns had any particular affinity one with the other, but simply as a measure of bureaucratic convenience. I think that it has yet to be proved that this step resulted in any measurable improvement in bureaucratic efficiency.

I don’t know that there was any serious consultation between the authorities and the towns before the merger; I would like to think not. Be that as it may, the five towns each had their own distinctive character, such as it was. And each still does, much the same character as it was then, allowing for the lapse of nine or so years and the odd dash of make-up. The following impressions are partly tongue-in-cheek and are necessarily somewhat superficial since I have lived in only one of the five towns, and that for a mere nine years.

Ashton is…well, yes, it is, isn’t it? Shame. It’s that place where the train stops, were they can the fruit, and where there are those huge grain elevators; how much grain do they hold, I wonder?

Bonnivale is splendidly situated overlooking the Breede River, and has a large cheese factory, now Italian-owned. For the rest, it seems rather a raffish little place, as though it has lost its way towards an imperfectly remembered destination.

McGregor seems to be intoxicated by its own quaintness – which, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. All the old houses are restored to within an inch (OK 2.54cm) of their lives; all the new houses are more or less sedulous copies of the old houses except when they’re constructed in terms of some greenish fad like adobe or cob. I’ve seen the town described as a film set (which implies, of course, that is consists of façade only). When we first visited McGregor in the mid-80s the local inhabitants stoned our car. These days you can often drive up the main street and not see a soul, leading to the impression that the town is uninhabited; this impression is not dispelled by actually meeting the inhabitants since, while they all have addresses in McGregor, most of them actually to live in one of the balmier squats of Cloudcuckooland.

Montagu was famous for being laid-back and for being friendly. It is still so laid-back its feet are in the air, and it’s just as friendly as it ever was. Come flood, come fire, Montagu will always cheerfully muddle through; but preferably tomorrow or (even better) next week.

Then there is Robertson. When we first came here, Robertson reminded me of an elderly Victorian lady, just on the shabby side of genteel congealed in her whalebone stays and her dignity. She surveyed her surroundings through a cracked lorgnette, and what she saw usually provoked a complacent smirk. Robertson is now tottering into the twentieth century but the ineffable sense of superiority lingers. Superiority to what, one wonders?

I should add that the above impressions do not reflect in any way on the farmers who live around those towns. The majority of them are, of course, the salt of the earth.