I Moved Your Cheese
Page 1
“If this book had been available twenty years ago, I would have caught the bus from Pietermaritzburg to Durban. Which is to say: this book will not help you in the long run.”
– Bruce Fordyce, multiple winner of the Comrades ultra-marathon
“I imagine myself laminating this book, so that it doesn’t become dogeared, and reading it on winter’s nights to my grandchildren beside an open fire, and telling them: this is what will happen to you if you don’t finish your law degree.”
– James Weil, senior partner: Fly, Weil, Weil, Weil, Schuster and Weil
“Reading this book made no appreciable difference to my life.”
– John Robbie, former international rugby player, current radio and television personality
“When I finished reading I Moved Your Cheese, I thought about my own life and I realised: Things aren’t so bad after all.”
– anonymous testimonial, Fancourt Golf Estate
“No Amazonian rainforests were harmed in the making of this book.”
– Sting
“Darrel Bristow-Bovey is a very persistent writer.”
– Clare O’Donoghue, editor, Style magazine
“Darrel Bristow-Bovey writes in the stirring and time-honoured tradition of Louis L’Amour and Kilroy.”
– Jeremy Gordin, managing editor, Sunday Independent newspaper
“No!”
– Mike Lipkin, motivational speaker
“I always knew Darrel would write a book, but I could never have guessed it would be about cheese. He never seemed to be that interested in cheese when he was younger. He liked macaroni-and-cheese, of course – what growing boy doesn’t? – but if someone had said to me twenty years ago: ‘Roslyn, what will your son write his first book about?’ I would not have said cheese. I don’t know what I would have said, but not cheese. Ice cream, maybe. He liked ice cream.”
– Roslyn Bristow-Bovey, the author’s mother
“I know I still owe Darrel a beer, but I will not say what you want me to say.”
– Jeremy Maggs, South African presenter, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
“I think there is something wrong with Darrel Bristow-Bovey.”
– Tim Modise, SAfm talk-show host
“I have not read this book.”
– Felicia Mabuza-Suttle, talk-show host
“There is a cold front over Gordonia.”
– Graeme Hart, weatherman
“I found this book so moving that I bought a copy for everyone in my workplace, and I intend giving out copies as Christmas presents to everyone I meet.”
– Marlene Fryer, publisher
“I have on many occasions considered changing my life, but thanks to Darrel I will stay just the way I am till the day I die.”
– Bill, retired
“Not a word in this book is true.”
– Chunko
FORTHCOMING TITLES BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Cheese Got a Ticket to Ride
Please Cheese Me
Cheese Guevara: The Motorcycle Diaries
East of Edam
The Unbearable Lightness of Brie
The Madness of King Gorgonzola
In the Camembert of Strangers
More Haste, Less Cheese
Songs from Cheese Aznavour
Rumplestilton
The Emmental Strikes Back
Return of the Cheddar
Cheeses Died For Our Sins
To Brie or Not to Brie
How Now Brown Gouda
We’ll Always Have Parmesan
Sex, Drugs and Roquefort
Home, Cheese, and Don’t Spare the Horses
You Can Lead a Gouda Water, But You Can’t Make It Float
DARREL BRISTOW-BOVEY
Published by Zebra Press
an imprint of Random House Struik (Pty) Ltd
Reg. No. 1966/003153/07
Wembley Square, First Floor, Solan Road, Gardens, Cape Town 8001
PO Box 1144, Cape Town 8000, South Africa
www.zebrapress.co.za
First published 2001
Publication © Zebra Press 2001
Text © Darrel Bristow-Bovey 2001
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owners.
PUBLISHER: Marlene Fryer
MANAGING EDITOR: Robert Plummer
EDITOR: Martha Evans
COVER AND TEXT DESIGNER: Natascha Adendorff
TYPESETTER: Monique van den Berg
ISBN 978 1 86872 359 1 (print)
ISBN 978 1 77022 308 0 (ePub)
ISBN 978 1 77022 309 7 (PDF)
www.imagesofafrica.co.za
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Contents
Introduction
1 Seeking and Finding
2 Finding Your Egg
3 Finding Your Mate
4 Finding Your Inner Mayan
5 Who Moved My Keys?
6 Being and Nothingness
7 The Body Beautiful
Conclusion
This book is dedicated to all those who made the writing of it possible:
Jack Daniel; Leon the barman; whoever taught Braam van Straaten how to kick; Peter Stuyvesant; Marco Polo (for inventing the pizza, or bringing it back from China, or something of the sort, I forget now). And of course Justine, the little cheese.
Introduction
This is not another self-help book. It really isn’t. I wouldn’t do that to you. Self-help books are damaging to the self-esteem. Self-help books are like diets, or the gym contract some bastard relative gave you for your birthday: they promise to help you, but really they mock you. They build up your expectations, and then they leave you feeling low and craven and flinching at loud noises and sudden movements.
Like diets and gym contracts, self-help books offer the illusion that you can do something to significantly improve yourself – you can become slimmer, wiser, more attractive to air hostesses or that guy who works in the accounts department and rides a motorbike on weekends. You will draw upon yourself good fortune and the golden blessings of a universe that looks on you and is well pleased with what it sees. Self-help books lift you aloft on the wings of hope and then, when you have failed once more, they drop you like a losing lottery ticket, face-down like a piece of buttered toast.
Self-help books, to be brief, are no good, and the reason is plain: they expect you to do all the work. Taken to its logical conclusion, a self-help book would be a collection of blank pages and a pen. (A proposal, incidentally, which sadly found scant favour with my publisher when first I pitched it. I even brought my own sheaf of foolscap and a ballpoint pen which I stole when signing the security register in the downstairs lobby. “Look,” I said persuasively, “I can already give you the manuscript.” Publishers, alas, are made of sterner stuff.)
No matter how quick and easy they promise to be, selfhelp books have the common failing of requiring you to put in some effort. The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, say, may seem to have achieved the astonishing feat of condensing several millennia of accumulated cultural learning into seven convenient bite-sized chunks, like so many KFC nuggets of deep-fried wisdom, but you are still expected to memorise the laws, or at least scribble them down on the back of your hand, and then, I suppose, do something about them. This is the fundamental truth that writers of self-help books overlook: if we were capable or even likely to do these things for ourselves, we wouldn’t need their poxy books.
If you are like me – and deep down I think you are – you aren’t mad keen on working hard to improve yourself. Human beings are a little like Liberia or the Durban beach-front or London’s Millennium Dome: there is not really a lot you can do to make them fundamentally better. By the time you realise there’s a problem, there’s not much else for it but to tear it all down and start over again. Speaking for myself – and I hasten to point out that I am neither the Durban beachfront nor Liberia, although on occasion certain so-called friends have pointed out an alleged physical similarity to the Millennium Dome – that all seems like a little too much trouble.
I am here to tell you that that is okay. Don’t be ashamed; say it with me: We are lazy, we are idle, we are downright inert, and we don’t give a damn. We are the secret truth of society, the bedrock upon which any decent civilisation is built. We are the yawning majority who can’t quite believe that firming up our bellies and becoming nicer human beings really will be worth the kind of effort demanded of us. We have always been here, and we will be here a long time after the fanatical self-improvers have shuffled off to their just rewards.
What’s more, we have nothing of which to be ashamed. We are the best part of this tawdry world. You don’t see us invading neighbouring countries or launching political parties. None of us invented boy bands or cellphones that ring with the theme tune from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. We couldn’t be bothered. We just want the quiet life. We want to eat well, live well, have sex with attractive people, perhaps drive a fast car on the open road while drinking a beer, but we are not prepared to bend the laws of nature to do it. We prefer to slipstream in evolution’s wake.
If it weren’t for us, this world would be a bleaker place. We are, for instance, solely responsible for almost every item of dinner-party conversation worth hearing. The snappy aphorism, the casual item of waspish gossip, the – if you will pardon the expression – bon mot were all invented by people like us: people interested in maximum effect for minimum effort. If it weren’t for us, it would be all personal trainers and striving toward the light and embracing change and similar appalling notions. We are interested in none of that. If it weren’t for us, this world would implode from boredom.
Of course, this is no reason to get complacent. Like the stegosaurus or the fondue set with matching forks (which, let no one tell you different, is not cool and never will be again), if we fail to adapt to the changing times, we are doomed to extinction. We will be banished to the back of the kitchen cupboard; Steven Spielberg will make movies about us. We need to learn to stay attractive to our mates, to stay wealthy and healthy and secretly to thrive, that we might pass our genes to the generations that follow slouching in our shadow.
That is why I have written this book. If you want to take three easy steps to being a fabulous person with a wonderful life, close this book immediately. This is not the book for you (although you should feel free to buy several copies for your friends). This is the self-help book for people who want to take no steps at all. This is the self-help book for people lying on the sofa. This book will tell you how to reap the rewards of being a better person, without having to trouble yourself with the unnecessary burden of actually becoming better.
(It is not even necessary to read this book. Simply buying it and keeping it displayed in a prominent position will make you brighter, happier and more desirable. Our pages have been treated with a revolutionary new formula that allows wisdom, through a process we have patented under the name Osmatix™, to pass directly from the page into the atmosphere, where it can easily be inhaled from a reclining position. In countries of the northern hemisphere where this book is on sale, you can identify Osmatix™ by its mild aroma of cooking oil. In the southern hemisphere it is characterised by the slight odour of stilton.
If you would like to take advantage of this unique opportunity, we have provided a number of blank pages at the back of this book. Besides making the book look thicker on the shelves, these pages will allow you to pretend to be reading – at the beach, perhaps, or on public transport – while in fact giving you the opportunity to rest your eyes and think about last night’s episode of Sex and the City.
Alas, however, if you are planning to share this book with your life-partner or members of your immediate family or your colleagues at work, it is my duty to inform you that Osmatix™ is a highly sophisticated compound. Like a gosling newly hatched, it bonds and imprints itself to the particular chemical properties of whoever first opens this book and breathes its heady scent. The Osmatix™ of this book will work for you, and you alone. Your husband or your secretary will just have to buy their own copy. This obviously is bad news for you, but good news for us. In fact, to members of the publishing industry, the smell of Osmatix™ resembles nothing so much as newly folded money.)
So follow me, brothers and sisters, into a brave – well, bravish – new world. A world, at any rate, in which our cowardice is well hidden. And as we go, remember our mantra. Whisper it to yourself. Print it on a card and keep it prominently displayed on your refrigerator door or the dashboard of your car. Have it tattooed inside your eyelids, so that you can read it while you take your afternoon nap. If you like, you can strip to the waist, take out your drums and chant the mantra to the steady pulse-beat of your throbbing bongos. (Although if you do choose to go the half-naked drumming route, I must ask you to go down to the bottom of the garden and crouch in the shrubbery where decent folk can’t see you.)
Do you have the mantra ready? Do you? Oh. Sorry, I thought I had told you already. Our mantra is: “Anything can be faked.” You can add any ohms and ahs and ululations you might require, but that is the gist of it: anything can be faked.
(Except insincerity, I suppose. It is difficult to fake insincerity. And having bad hair; that is something that can’t be faked. You either have bad hair or you don’t, I’m afraid. But other than these things, the mantra holds pretty much true.)
Are we ready now? Are we? Right, follow me.
1
Seeking and Finding
It is not easy being a lazy person in today’s world. Mind you, this is in fact true of almost every age. The bustling mob has no appreciation of the effort it takes to be idle. It demands patience and application and a stubborn refusal to listen to reason. Only we will ever know what discipline and dedication is required to further our art. It is our burden to bear alone, alas, alas.
Still, today we are assailed ever more ruthlessly with the injunction to make ourselves better – to look better, to tell the truth more often, to drink less, to be one with the angels.
Once when I was younger and more active, I too turned to the world to seek the secret of a more perfect life. I travelled to South America, to Chile and the hot wastes of the Atacama desert, where I heard tell of a wise man who lived in the mountains. I couldn’t miss him, the locals said, pointing to a narrow footpath that led up between the bleached-white rocks into the o’er-looming crags. He was old and bearded and would probably appear on top of a rock and pelt me with mangoes when I got to the really steep part.
“Where does he find mangoes in the middle of the desert?” I asked. The locals lowered their gaze and drew patterns in the sand with their toes.
“The old man of the mountains works in mysterious ways,” they said.
So I packed a knapsack and a waterproof jacket and headed for the hills. It was hot and dry, but that is what you expect of a desert. When I reached the really steep part, I pulled the waterproof jacket over my head. No one likes to be pelted with mangoes. But as I climbed higher and higher up the really steep part, I couldn’t help noticing that the old man of the mountains had not appeared. How was I to find the old man of the mountains, if he wasn’t going to attack me with sun-ripened tropical fruit? And this was the first piece of wisdom the old man of the mountains taught me:
I was expecting the worst, but now that the worst has not arrived, I am disappointed. I am the architect of my own dismay.
Actually, that was
the second piece of wisdom. The first was:
If you are climbing the really steep part of a mountain with a waterproof jacket over your head, you cannot see where you are going and consequently it should come as no surprise if you bark your shin on a rock.
So I removed my waterproof jacket from my head, and as I stood rubbing my shin I saw that before me was a rocky ledge, and sitting there, legs crossed and eyes closed, was a ragged old man with a long ragged beard. I gasped and dropped to his feet, partly from reverence, partly because it had been a long climb in the thin air and none of the locals had wanted to sell me any coca leaves. When the dry heaves stopped, I thought of this important life lesson:
If we are not afraid of tropical fruits falling on our heads, we will be better able to see the riches in front of us.
I wrote it in the sand with my finger, in case I forgot it later.
I wasn’t sure how to approach the old man of the mountains. His eyes were still closed and his breathing was deep and regular, as is common with mountain sages and also didgeridoo players. I reached out a trembling hand and tugged at the hem of his loincloth.
The old man of the mountains gave a little start and a snuffle and opened his eyes. They were molten and golden, like brimming cups of bourbon. He raised his eyes unto the sky and uttered these words: “What the hell?”
“I am your humble pilgrim,” I said, rubbing my hair against his feet.
“How did you get up the really steep part without me hearing you?” demanded the old man of the mountains, kicking me in the head.
I was startled, but not shocked. Ragged old sages can be notoriously prickly. My good friend Chunko once visited a sage in the steaming jungles of Laos who lost his temper after a game of backgammon and beat Chunko about the head and shoulders with a length of bamboo, and also with a brick. “Sometimes,” says Chunko sadly, “sages have to teach you the hard way.”
Meanwhile, I was scrawling another life lesson in the dust with my forefinger: