Long Street shuffle

The thing about Long Street, the best damn street in Cape Town, is that it tries to be tacky but somehow it always turns out cool. Every square foot of it, from the lacy ironwork of the Victorian facades, through the sidewalk cafes -- big as the Long Street Cafe, with its airy ceiling fans and Fifties wooden furniture, small as the sandwich bar slices the width of a shop door, with two tiny tables huddled on the pavement -- the black widowed porn shops, the backpackers' lodges with sharkdiving adverts, the lush life bars and street-smart clubs, the style stores, book labyrinths, mannequin fantasies, half-recognised languages and secondhand faces, the purple hearts of psychedelia, goths and hipsters, fashionistas, the flash, the trash ... to the old Turkish bath house at the top of the street where it is finally forked by the roads of the rushing city and lost in concrete.

The picture is of the button emporium's SUV, suitably decorated.