But I Digress ...

by Darrel Bristow-Bovey

  Of all the things I miss from an earlier age – telegrams, say, and drive-ins and dressing for dinner and doctors that make house calls – I think it is the demise of the love letter that most impoverishes our modern lives. My infatuation started early. When I was 12 Shelly Whitfield gave me a love letter. Actually Shelley Whitfield didn’t give it to me – she gave it to Joanna Thurley to give to me. Or was it Marge Golightly? I forget. But I have not forgotten that letter.

  I carried it away, hot in the pocket of my school shirt, burning against my boyish breast, until I could open it behind the scoreboard on the cricket field. Shelley Whitfield must have borrowed her mother’s lipstick as well as raiding her stationery drawer, because the outside of the envelope was patterned with Shelley’s crimson lip-prints. I couldn’t breathe as I held it in my hand. For weeks – ah, who am I kidding? – for years to come I studied that envelope and those lip-prints, examining the pattern of folds and swirls and cracks and valleys immortalised in lipstick. I blushed at the scarlet intimacy. Today, if I close my eyes and sit quietly, I can still remember the mingled scent of lipstick and paper, and it makes the breath catch in my throat.

  I wrote back to Shelley Whitfield as passionately as I could, although that lark of applying lip-prints in boot polish didn’t really have the desired results. Today, if I close my eyes and sit quietly, I can still taste school shoe. It ended of course, as all such passions must end. The differences were too great between us. She liked Bonnie Tyler and I liked Joan Jett and the Blackhearts. Besides, I was too shy ever actually to speak to her. Whenever we bumped into each other at the bicycle racks of a morning and she said “Hello”, as she sometimes did, I would stammer and splutter and ring my bell to cover my confusion. Then I would snap her bra straps and run away. Did I but know it, that would not be the last relationship to end because of a lack of communication.

  But that letter made an indelible impression on me. I cherish all the love letters I have ever sent or received. The love letter is erotic and poignant in a way that e-mails and telephone calls never can be. The love letter is about waiting and longing and delay, about calling up your beloved in your mind like a ghost. And that, really, is the best part, isn’t it? There is a ninth-century Arabic poem by the medieval Zarif Al-Washsa that sighs:

  To love is to kiss, in your mind, a hand or arm

  or to send letters whose spells are stronger than witchcraft.

  Love is nothing but this; when lovers sleep together, love perishes.

  I can’t say I encourage too fanatical an adherence to that last part, but Al-Washsa reminds us of a fine truth. I urge you: send a love letter to the one you love. Write it by hand. Send it today. Moisten the envelope flap with your tears of longing, or joy, or repentance. Bring some of the magic back. Write that letter.

  Survival of the fittest

  STYLE, MARCH 2002

  I BELIEVE IN KEEPING FIT. I do. But the difference between me and the gaggle of earnest citizens in tracksuit pants who go filing into aerobics sessions and spinning classes, or who shuffle through the streets in the early morning hours like a string of crumpled washing looking for a line, togged out in sweatbands and running shoes and the facial expressions of St Sebastian being pierced by arrows, is that I understand what being fit means. I have read my Darwin.

  They survive best, Charles Darwin told us, who are fittest for their environment. He was a canny one, that Darwin. I have given the matter some thought, and for the life of me I cannot imagine the situation in which my urban environment will demand survival skills involving pedalling a stationary bicycle while a frightening-looking stranger blows a whistle at me. Ditto jogging. I can understand that, centuries ago, the ability to run from Durban to Pietermaritzburg could conceivably have given you the edge over your neighbour, who might have to walk from Durban to Pietermaritzburg, but frankly today I just don’t see that being the case. Even with the state of public transport nowadays, you can usually make some sort of plan involving wheels and an engine.

  But I do not shirk my responsibilities. Every day I perform exercises to keep fit for my environment. Wrist rotations keep me limber both for handling a steering wheel and signing credit card slips; programmes of slow and regular breathing prepare me for standing in queues at the supermarket check-out. Ocular stamina training enables me to keep my eyes fixed on the numbers in a public elevator, without ever having to make eye-contact with strangers. I have learnt to drink hard liquor without falling to the ground and hurting myself.

  Still, there are those that cling to their outmoded faith in physical tone and cardiovascular robustness. Take President Bush, for instance. No really, take him. In January the world sniggered to read of his brush with death. Apparently while seated on the sofa, watching football on television, the defender of the free world choked on a pretzel and pitched face-first on the floor. His personal physician later issued a statement blaming not the pretzel but “the president’s overly strenuous work-out regime”. Quite so. Bush may be well conditioned for plodding along a treadmill, but modern man is more likely to find himself sitting on a sofa watching a football match than he is to find himself plodding along a treadmill. For an urban survivalist such as myself that sofa would have offered no peril. And without bragging, I am fairly confident I would have known what to do with that pretzel.

  At least the exercise industry in America recognises the need to diversify fitness training to accommodate the various challenges of the modern world. The Crunch gym chain has long offered aerobics classes in such specialised disciplines as Gospel Moves (should you find yourself in a Rhema church without a clear run for the exit), Recreational Hopscotch (should you be challenged to a duel by a pack of 12-year-old girls) and Circus Sports (should you, uh … oh, I don’t know). Their newest offering is a class in – I’m not making this up – Cardio Striptease.

  The idea behind these exotica, I suppose, is to keep punters interested. The brochure for Cardio Striptease promises “an hour of erotic movement, culminating in a 25-minute stripathon”. Whether or not the spandex actually leaves the body I cannot ascertain, but consider if you dare the vision of a troop of bouncing soccer moms thrusting pelvises and tweaking imaginary nipple caps and twirling leg-warmers above their heads. Now consider the kind of paunchy male villain in shiny shorts queuing up to join the class. Oh, the humanity.

  There are other new ideas in aerobics. Bhangra Dancing offers a fun-filled workout as you master the traditional dance of the Sikhs; Poledancing is Cardio Striptease with, well, a pole. In some gyms poles are provided. Others make poles available at discount prices. Perhaps most alarming is Cycle Karaoke, which is described as “singing while spinning”. I can see how such a class might be useful for eager young actors auditioning for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s new show, set against the timeless backdrop of the Tour de France, but for the rest of us it sounds like something very close to hell. (Mind you, so does Andrew Lloyd Webber’s new show, set against the timeless backdrop of the Tour de France.)

  So keep on training, ye exercise fans, and I’ll keep practising how to sit on the couch and watch TV. If I should find myself having to strip all night to save my life, or dance to the death in a darkened Sikh alleyway, I may regret my decision. I’ll take my chances.

  No brains, please – we’re hippies

  SL, JUNE 2002

  HIPPIES ANNOY ME. Seriously, I can’t bear hippies. I don’t even mean the kind that sit in Knysna beading their moccasins and calling their children organic names like Walnut or Thrush. Them I would shoot on sight if I had good enough eyesight and a long enough barrel to reach Knysna. Nor do I mean the sort that tattoo the Chinese pictograph for “Unclean” on their lower backs and stumble around on Sunday afternoons with beach sand on their bare feet, still humming whatever tune was last playing at their trance party and paying with daddy’s credit card. No, I don’t even mean them.

  These days hippies come in all shapes and sizes. Some wear shoes. Some even have jobs that don’t involve trying to pe
rsuade other people with jobs to hand over cash for some aesthetically displeasing item that has been grown, plucked or woven the night before. There are some hippies that are indistinguishable from normal folk. They look like us, they dress like us, they wash their hair with the same frequency, but sooner or later they give themselves away.

  Hippies, in my book, are all those annoying critters out there who spout anti-human hogwash. I don’t mean anti-people, mind. Hippies are keen on people. Not as keen as on whales, squirrels, seaweed and whatever small or large animal a macrobiotic creature might be (and if you know, please don’t tell me), but keen nonetheless. No, I mean anti-human. Because the hippy inclination is to sniff at the very things that make us human.

  Hippies rabbit on about love and harmony and oneness with all living things. Hogwash, I say (which is a hygienic process entirely wasted on our tasty friends the swine, and altogether more appropriate for hippies of the Cape Town variety). It is not human nature to seek oneness with all living things. Humans survived because we found a way to make sure our interests took priority over the interests of other living things. We eat ’em. We wear ’em. We milk them, whether they like it or not. We hitch ploughs to them and when they harm us, like tapeworms or germs or white ants in our floorboards, we figure out ways to kill them.

  If we couldn’t do those things, we wouldn’t be here. If the little furry mammals that we once were had had a genetic predisposition to trying to live in harmony with all living creatures, a sabre-toothed tiger would be writing this column for an audience of woolly mammoths. And that just wouldn’t work. Woolly mammoths don’t have opposable thumbs. How would you turn the pages? You’re not going to pay good money just to stare at the cover all month.

  We’re never going to live in harmony with all living creatures, or even with each other. We’re not made that way. We are made to seek advantage for ourselves and our families. I am not suggesting that wars are good and kicking animals is fine. I am saying that we must recognise what we are, and the best we can do is find practical ways to curb ourselves, rather than nonsense platitudes.

  Fighting for peace is not always a contradiction in terms. We did it in 1939. We did it because we had to. And it worked. The hippies sang sappy songs decrying the Cold War and the nuclear race, but that worked too. The generals, it turns out, were right. There wasn’t a Third World War between Russia and the West, and there will not be one. There is a message there: peace – even the limited peace of which we are capable – is not achieved by blowing each other kisses. It is achieved by enforcing treaties and no-fly-zones and inspections of nuclear facilities. It is achieved through boring, ugly things like politics. It’s not pretty, and it’s not hippy, but that’s who we are.

  Academy of flirting

  CAPE TIMES, 12 JULY 2002

  I AM ALWAYS LOOKING for ways to make money. It is a family characteristic. Mad Uncle Roy spent some months in various international courts trying to enforce his patent on the wheel, and Grampa Ned depleted the family fortune trying to popularise ferret-racing as a professional sport (“Cheaper than a dog; more fun than a horse” was his motto, though sadly not anyone else’s).

  Our ideas, admittedly, are not always good, but this time I have a winner. I am going to start a School of Flirting in Cape Town. That’s right, a School of Flirting. Or perhaps I will call it an Academy of Flirting. Academies are sexier than schools.

  My academy will teach people to flirt. Flirting is an art, and like all arts it exists to make life more bearable. It adds sparkle to your day, pep to your stride. Unexpected flirting is like a shot of tequila, except afterwards it doesn’t cause you to shudder and make an unattractive face. At least, not if you’ve done it right. Flirting need not lead to anything – most often it doesn’t. Usually it is not intended to. It is simply a slight dance to distant music, a pas de deux of possibility that leaves both parties feeling better about themselves and about the potential of life to surprise us. (I hope I need not add that flirting does not involve surprising your colleagues with hearty hugs and kisses. At all times when flirting, and indeed when doing anything intimate, it is important to keep the image of Peter Marais far from your mind.)

  Cape Town urgently needs an Academy of Flirting. Flirting is not big in Cape Town. There are plenty of kids in short skirts and tight T-shirts with saucy messages on the front, but that is not flirting. There are plenty of drunken businessmen wearing blue shirts and yellow ties and red faces willing to buy you drinks at pseudo-Irish bars on week nights, but that is not flirting either.

  Flirting is an adult thing, and it doesn’t leer. It lies not in what is said, but in the spaces between. It is in that fine electric field that springs up between flirter and flirtee. (In the successful flirt, of course, flirter and flirtee take turns to change positions. If you know what I mean.)

  The difficulty for my academy will be finding suitably qualified instructors. David Niven, say, or the younger Lauren Bacall. Personally, I am dead useless at flirting. When I try to flirt, I spend so much time thinking about what I should have just done that I forget what I should do next. A friend once tried to teach me. She had just returned from New York, where she had attended a Flirting Seminar. They have such things in New York. Frankly, they need them. New Yorkers are even worse at flirting than Capetonians. The difference is that New Yorkers are bad flirts because they are very busy. Capetonians are bad flirts because they don’t really like people.

  My friend ran me through the flirting rudiments: the eye contact, the slight pause before speaking, the twinkling eye. I tried it, but my eyes bulged like Homer Simpson’s, and the slight pause before speaking made me resemble a Serbian war criminal listening to the translation in his earphones before deciding how to plead. “Why are you rolling your eyes?” demanded my friend.

  “I’m trying to make them twinkle,” I said.

  “You’re frightening me,” she said. “It’s horrible. Stop it.”

  “I can’t!” I cried. “Once you start twinkling, you can’t just stop!”

  So do come to my academy, dear reader. But don’t take that seat in the back row, left corner. That’s where I’ll be sitting.

  Nature is not our friend

  SL, AUGUST 2002

  NOW DON’T GET me wrong: I am not opposed to nature, precisely. That would be a foolish position to take. Nature has much to recommend it. Rainbows, for instance, are popular among those of a romantic bent, and who among us does not smile to hear the sound of the breeze stirring the high leaves of the sheltering tree, or the chirruping of the sentimental songbird? Ah, yes, these are lovely things, all part of nature’s rich bounty. And you might add others: the o’er looming mountains, say, or the majestic clouds, or the delicate whorls of the wayside flower, or the playful leaping of our finny friends the dolphins.

  I’m just saying that we can get a little carried away with nature. Nature is all very well in its place, but its place is over there, outside the city limits. Unless you are one of those irredeemable losers who packed up their checked flannel shirts in a cardboard suitcase and moved to the Knysna forest to make shoes out of bark, or you are reading this while cast away on a desert island in the wide salty wastes of the south Atlantic (in which case, my congratulations to whoever is in charge of this magazine’s subscription services. That delivery-in-a-bottle idea is really paying off), you almost certainly live in the city. Or if not the city exactly, then some place like Port Elizabeth or Bloemfontein. And that means that you reap the benefits of civilisation, which is to say, the triumph of humanity over nature.

  As much as city dwellers whine about the noise and the grime and the traffic, it is better than the alternative. The alternative was droughts and floods and sabre-toothed tigers and Apache raiding parties that carried off the womenfolk, and your uncle Jethro approaching you carrying a mallet and a pair of pliers if you complained about toothache. The city is the home of modern medicine and hot running water and lengthened life expectancy and meals that you don’t have to hunt
and shoot and pluck yourself. Plus, you go live in a cave on a mountainside and then try to get lucky with the ladies on a Saturday night. See how far you get.

  But human beings are an ungrateful mob. Even as we lie in our hot baths or eat cornflakes with milk that still hasn’t curdled even though it was extracted from the cow more than six hours ago, still there is a tendency to sneer at science and civilisation. People today will buy anything, provided it can somehow be implied that it has nothing to do with modern science.

  The other day – as I was passing through my local pharmacy, something I like to do to keep up to date with the latest developments in self-medication – I noticed an advertisement for a herbal supplement. “Nature’s caffeine!” declared the advertisement. Think about that for a moment. Where do these people imagine caffeine comes from? Do they think coffee is some kind of synthetic drug cooked up by a bunch of mad scientists in Berlin? It doesn’t seem to matter. People see the word natural and they assume it must be better for you than something that doesn’t have the word natural attached. If the cigarette companies had clear thinking PR departments, they would long ago have sold themselves as “Tobacco! Nature’s Nicorette patch!”

  Recently I had a dose of the flu and popped into the chemist to stock up on those products that I love so: pills and fizzy things that make you sleep and not hurt so much. Clutching these precious fruits of civilisation, I was making my way to my car when I bumped into someone I knew. She clucked and tutted at my purchases. “That stuff is bad for you,” she sighed. “You should get a natural remedy.”