A Life in the Day: Darrel Bristow-Bovey, writer and globetrotter
The South African wordsmith typically doesn’t spend more than two months in the same place.
Darrel Bristow-Bovey is unquestionably one of the finest lifestyle columnists South Africa has produced. But when his newspaper and magazine writing career was on the skids in 2003, he veered into an equally successful screenwriting career. Subsequently he’s written for multiple TV shows, among them a long-running South African soap opera, as well as feature films for Netflix. An eight-episode series called White Lies, that ran on South African television, in some territories in Europe, as well as in Australia, the United States and Israel, is the first local show for which he served as executive producer as well as wrote every word.
Last year Bristow-Bovey’s sixth book was published. Finding Endurance: Shackleton, My Father and a World Without End blends memoir and personal observation with a lyrical retelling of the Ernest Shackleton Antarctic expedition on the Endurance, a subject with which he has long been captivated.
In Cape Town and the Karoo village of Barrydale, an approximate three-hour drive from Cape Town – where he and his wife, Jo, have a house – Bristow-Bovey has just completed the first draft of the pilot episode for a new cosy crime series for South African and British television.
Shortly he and Jo, a lawyer who works remotely, will leave Cape Town for Normandy. Then it’s on to a walking holiday in Umbria, and then to check on the house they’re building in the Peloponnese.
“WHEN I’m in South Africa, it feels like a pause in life. I always get very sort of twitchy and dismal here; it feels like a dulling of the senses. I think it’s Cape Town. It would be impossible to live in Jo’burg because it’s a difficult place to live, but I lived there for seven or eight years and I feel – have always felt – slightly more alive there than in Cape Town. Maybe it’s the altitude up there that makes you feel a bit more alive. There’s a sort of an edge of adrenaline; people are more connected with people.
‘One of the things I really miss about the world is there used to be in the daily papers a Tonight supplement. And you’d get the Tonight and you’d open it up and you’d go, hmm . . . what’s happening this week? And it’s all there. I don’t know where to look now. There’s no Tonight section. That’s the thing that I most miss about a more elegant world.’
I go to Barrydale a lot. For me, Barrydale is the place to rest. I’m not spending money, I can read and get consolidated. But I’m not excited there in the same way that I am in a new place. If we’re in a new city, I’ll spend quite a lot of time not working. For the most part, it’s squeezing in bits of work here and there in intense bursts. In Cape Town, there’s nothing else to do but work. It’s possibly also why I’m a bit miserable, because I spend a lot of time thinking I should be working and also not working but with no other excuse.
But the ideal is, I wake up at 6.30 in summer, 7 in winter, and then for an hour do Morning Pages and stretches. I’ve been doing stretches for about 20 years; it takes about two minutes. I used to have a bad back. The Morning Pages helps me be less stressed about the writing. It’s trying to dismantle the destructive thought patterns before they happen. In order to do my Morning Pages, I have my first coffee with the Morning Pages.
‘I don’t have an addictive personality; I find it very hard to form habits.’
In a phase when I’m meditating, I’ll do that as well. I’d like to do that all the time but I don’t always manage. And then two hours of work, if I can. And then break for lunch. And then during the lunch I’ll read, watch something. And then two hours in the afternoon. And if I can do that, then that’s a good workday. Four hours a day is the maximum anyone can work with their head. You may be at your desk, but you’re doing other stuff.
Wherever I am, I try to find a walking route. The morning walk is especially important for me if I’m working on a project, because I’ll have stopped work the previous night and then, in the morning walk, I’ll get new ideas. If you’re walking a route that you know, then you’re getting the movement, you’re getting the rhythm, you’re getting the light, you’re getting the air. But a large part of your mind is not scanning the environment.
The three weeks that I spent in Barrydale writing the book, I’d always come back from those morning walks with a sentence or two, or a connection, or an idea. And really all of the good stuff happened in those morning walks. Then I’d spend the rest of the day just writing it down. The walks aren’t too long; it’s like a twenty-minute walk. And then an evening walk is nice just to round off the day. Jo and I will generally walk together in the afternoon. I try to walk 12 000 steps a day. If I’m in Athens, I’ll get it right every day. But not in Cape Town.
Whenever I come to Cape Town, all my good habits fall away. I don’t walk as much as I normally do, I don’t read as much as I normally do, I don’t notice as much as I normally do. I’m less interested in life. I start eating chocolates, I start eating breakfast. I always put on three kilograms. By the time I leave Cape Town I need to get out of here because I have to start eating well again.
I started walking in 2003 when I lost my columns, which is round about the same time I started writing a journal. It wasn’t a coincidence, I wouldn’t think, because that was one of the great crisis moments of my life. At that moment I start doing that, I’m obviously kind of flailing around for some way of making sense of my life, and controlling fear and depression and all of that stuff. I was super fat then: by 2004 I weighed a hundred kilograms. It was just eating and drinking and doing no exercise. I did no exercise up until that point.
The reason I started the Daily Delights was to train myself to look for the things that make me happy, because the more you look for delight, the more you see it, and the more the world is delightful. I worry about my memory. I used to have a very good memory but now I don’t know if there’s just more to remember. All of my most vivid memories are from earlier in life.
For me, Daily Delights works as a memory. I can go back and, even with a sentence, I can remember where I was, and the smell, so that it’s not lost. Especially with all the travelling, there are so many experiences that it just feels it can get lost unless you bed it in, nail it to a board.
‘To halt any kind of a slide, I’m constantly comparing how I’m feeling now to how I was feeling then. Two weeks ago? I’m a bit worse. A month ago? Definitely worse than a month ago. How about a year ago?’
Journalling is what happened in my day; it’s like my diary. It’s really to try and change the experience of time. Well, first of all, it’s to live each day twice, so that it becomes a separate and discrete entity in itself – and so that it kind of feels twice as long – so it doesn’t all blend into the flow of life. It’s about making each day its own unit so that you can sort of stack up these units. If life is going either very well or very badly, I tend not to do it, so it seems to be the boring in-between bits. But I always come back to it.
I can eat the same thing all the time. Food only becomes meaningful to me when I’m scared or anxious or feeling insecure. I used to eat breakfast but then I lost 20 kilograms. When I’m in Barrydale on my own, I’ll have Woolworths schnitzels every night. I buy them here and drive them up. Maybe a bit of avo, bit of Nando’s barbecue sauce, some cheese. On a normal day I try and eat between 5 and 6. I probably like to eat dinner so early because growing up in Durban, the sun went down so early. Jo likes to eat a little later, so generally it’s, like, 7.
I like to watch a lot of old movies. I have to get Jo in the right mood to get her to watch an old movie. It was my mistake because early on, I showed her old movies that I hadn’t seen and they weren’t great. I should have shown her ones that I knew were good. We have mini festivals where I select the movies. So last year we had movies involving trains, we had a ‘Venice’ film festival, a ‘Big’ film festival – films with the word ‘big’ in the title. We had about 15 in the Big festival. Once I can give her a theme, she’ll watch anything.
‘My ideal version of socialising would be to be in a room where people are talking over there but I’m over here, and nobody expects me to have to say anything or have the right reply. I can just be over here reading or doing a jigsaw puzzle or something, and I can chip in if I have something to say. That’s my ideal.’
When we were six weeks in Argentina, we were listening to a podcast series, Karina Longworth’s movie podcast, You Must Remember This. That season was called ‘Erotic 80s’. Every movie she discussed, we would watch, so for me now Argentina is completely imprinted with the movies of the 80s.
In other places, I feel less pressure to be anyone. There isn’t really a social contract that I have to live up to or that I’m failing in any way. There’s no real blueprint as to how I’m supposed to be as a person. I don’t ever have to wonder, oh, should I have stopped and chatted to that person? Or say hello and ask what the weather is like to the doorman in the building. So it’s a little bit like being invisible. And I’m always most comfortable being invisible – as long as people are looking, which is a contradiction in terms.”
From Dom’s archive
This was originally published in 2014 in Barrydale Online (a site that has since closed down, albeit not because of the publication of this column I’m glad to report)
“Ok”, Mike said, presiding over the assembled five diners from the perch of a barstool behind the cash register. “You can’t all have pizza as I don’t have enough dough and I don’t have enough cheese.” Thus began another in a series of wacky evenings during my eight-day stay in the Route 62 town of Barrydale.
I had gone there to do an introductory permaculture course at a farm 15 kays away, and each evening I’d return with gumboots caked in clay and dirt under my nails to experience the town’s culinary scene.
Monday was The Jam Tarts Restaurant, Wednesday was locals’ night at Clarke of the Karoo, Thursday was Mez and the remaining nights my resident dining room at the Karoo Art Hotel. Except for Friday, when I decided to pop into A Place in Time run by Mike and his wife Bev, former Capetonians who went to Barrydale and set up shop selling antiques on the one end and meals on the other.
Before his relocation, Mike had never made pizza let alone run a restaurant, he said, as he got to work next to my table kneading his way through the remaining dough supply.
After a communal who-was-gonna-get-pizza negotiation, there was a compromise on size so we could all have some: Hardy of Hardy’s “where East meets West” Restaurant (Hardy is German and his wife Chinese), Hardy’s manager, George, and I opted for mediums; while Kate and her son shared a large. Kate had recently left Knysna to open a guesthouse in Barrydale and, with her son, visiting for the weekend from Cape Town, had nipped in for a bite before heading back across the road to the Dung Beetle Bar to finish a chess game.
At Clarke of the Karoo two nights before on Wednesday, I met Trish and Pierre of the nearby Warmwaterberg Spa, and chatted on my way out to Carol of Barrydale Hand Weavers. On Thursday we all bumped into each other at Mez. On Friday after dinner at Mike’s place, as I entered the Karoo Art Hotel to return to my room, Gurshwin at the front desk said: “Dominique, Carol is in the restaurant having dinner and she said you must come join them”. At the table of five were Jam Tarts Terri and Joan whom I’d met on Monday.
At the hotel, Derek the chef came in 45 minutes early for me each morning to make breakfast before I dashed off to dig trenches and plant vegetables. We’d have a menu indaba each evening so that he could get cracking right away upon arrival in the morning – one evening after a session in the bar with a couple from Cape Town who refused our rejection of repeat rounds of drinks. Derek has many culinary talents but chief among them is his roosterkoek-making ability. I almost proposed they were so good.
At Mez, apart from bumping into Trish and Pierre and Carol, I saw my high school art teacher, Jill Joubert, who was in town to lead a puppet-making workshop (the people of the Handspring Puppet Company of War Horse fame reside in Barrydale, with whom she collaborates). With her was Michelle, the owner of Mez, and a man named Ed.
After I joined them, I discovered Ed was a chicken specialist who now consults to people looking to raise chickens in urban setups. That day I had learned about caring for chickens and their role on a farm. After a brief marvel at this synchronous turn, Michelle presented me with dessert: Turkish-inspired, rose-coloured ice cream topped with caramelised crunchy bits. After that it became tricky to concentrate on Ed’s supplementary chicken tutorial, entertaining and useful to my course activities as it was.
Despite a week of hopping from one eatery to the next, I couldn’t leave town without a pre-departure milkshake in a Consol jar at newly opened Diesel & Crème. That is a spot for some tough decision-making: chocolate brownie or red velvet with pieces of brownie in the former and chunks of cake in the latter. There aren’t adequate words to describe that milkshake, at least not in my verbal repertoire. Suffice it to say that the next time I’m in Barrydale, that will be my first stop, not my last.