SIGN WITH AN E

I have had the kind of week that one wishes as a template for a lifetime. The kind that, in memory, merges into one continuous and lovely experience of food, wine, friends, work, sleep, talk, dreams. And most of this in sobriety.

Specific chronologies elude me, but I know that somewhere in the week I went to what is famed as the best steakhouse in Cape Town, The Nelson’s Eye. I had a flamed pepper fillet steak, which was very good indeed, although it didn’t quite live up to The Hussar’s Hollandse Biefstuk (pepper studded brandy flambeed fillet). Still, I was pleased that my apprehensions about potential ponciness were unfounded. The Nelson’s Eye is definitely not poncy. It is a steakhouse of the bustling, wooden table variety. Unfortunately the prices don’t match, but it was a grand evening, and leftovers made it into several good titbits the following days.
Wine: Goede Hoop Shiraz 2004.

There was an afternoon of Springfield Wild Yeast Chardonnay and pistachio nuts followed by dinner party with friends that yielded the most tender, falling-off-the-bone lamb shanks, and a very fine chocolate mousse. I enjoyed the Arabella Shiraz, though others scoffed at it and called it chunky.

Yesterday, lunch at a country wine estate with a mother and her son. I forgot about the red tide and had pan-fried prawns, and I survived. Later that evening I ate ciabatta with pastrami and gherkins and drank a glass of 1998 Rust en Vrede Cabernet Sauvignon before falling into a deep and contented sleep.

But let me not give the wrong impression. It hasn’t all been high-flying. There have been rice cakes, and popcorn, and wine for little more than a pack of cigarettes. And neither has it all been play. There has been work, and very good work too. And why should life be any different? Someone once told me that real work requires a sacrifice of “life”. I disagree. I would like to make it the work of my life to find pleasure everywhere I can, especially in work. It is a luxury, I know, but you can be sure I am aware of just how lucky I am.

I return home after some hours of preparation for a class on the current “health” hysteria. The main text is an article by Michael Pollan (“Unhappy Meals“), in which he chronicles the rise of this thing called Nutritionism. Not to be confused with nutrition, Nutritionism is the ideology – or, collection of unquestioned assumptions – that science is the route to good health. In other words, that we base our food choices on so-called nutrients (proteins, carbs, fats, vitamins, antixodants) rather than on context, desire and taste.

He reiterates the little known fact that while many of us glug olive oil in the belief that the Mediterranean diet is the healthiest because of some statistics about lower rates of coronary disease amongst European peasants, we’re all missing the point because it’s not only about what you eat, but how you live. So, the reason the inhabitants of those picturesque Greek fishing villages live long, strong lives and grow into old people whose creased faces are full of character and history is not only because they eat lots of olive oil, but because they labour. If you did 12 hours of hard work in the sun every day, you could probably eat what the hell you like.

The main point is simply: eat food. Not things that boast all sorts of health and nutritional benefits. Choose the thing that proclaims the least about what it does for you and you are on the right track.

I am pleased to say that dinner this evening would not have upset my new friend Michael Pollan. It involved a baby chicken that yesterday had been braised with bacon, olives, mushrooms and vermouth. On the packet was nothing of free range or grain-fed. Just “baby chicken”. Likewise the bacon, which was so timid that it did not even declare that it had been smoked in oak for three days.

One of the ways I am lucky in life is to know a butcher. Not the kind who stands behind the meat counter at Pick’n Pay, or who owns a quaint (expensive) butchery on Kloof Street, but the kind who lives on a farm with wife and children, and who gets up at 4 in the morning on Saturdays to travel to the big city to sell his produce to a bunch of organic-freakish people (the kind who will ask, “Is it organic?”, not even knowing why they care). He makes his own duck-liver pate. His wife makes relishes and jams. His sons fry eggs and bacon for weekend shoppers. I, selling wine by the glass at the next stall, watch them work and stroke my Romantic fantasies about the simple life, in the country. And I go home laden with farm produce, some bought, some gifted.

Of course nothing is simple about their life. And neither about what they produce.
The simplicity is a mythology, but how we love stories, and how they shape how we think. I can live a city life of multivitamins and lime cordial in my vodka, but come Saturday and an afternoon next to my butcher at the organic market, and I fancy myself someone who wouldn’t, when it comes to the crunch, “settle” for supermarket chicken any other day of the week.

How laughable it is to recognise one’s own contradictions. Yet these are the things that give some impetus to life. What I ate tonight was left over from a dinner cooked for a philosopher last night, and attended by a sailor who is sometimes a sociologist. The three of us come from (apparently) radically different disciplines, but we could quickly agree on the fact that life often has its own agenda, no matter how you approach it. All that remains is whether or not we subscribe to metaphors of defeat. Americans consign their lack of restraint to the “French Paradox” (how can you eat cheese and chocolate and drink red wine and still not be fat?), which, at once defeatist and xenophobic, also upholds the Frenchman as the mysteriously sensual philosopher. Then again, who can resist the charm of Sartre and De Beavoir making lives and history over red wine at Cafe Les Deux Margots?

And I will know no mad land
More lustful than my head.

You can never go wrong with Simon and Garfunkel. If I could find their America I would go back in a second.

‘Let us be lovers, we’ll marry our fortunes together
I’ve got some real estate here in my bag
So we bought a pack of cigarettes and Mrs. Wagner’s pies
And we walked off to look for America.’

A little over two weeks ago I was taking leave of this strange landscape with a mixture of relief at going home and regret at leaving something I hadn’t had enough time to explore.

The landscape I came back to proved stranger than the one I was leaving, mostly because I was trapped in – or tripped into – one of those true resistential episodes where it is not enough that one thing goes wrong; all things conspire to get in your way. Planes are delayed. Luggage is lost. Cars die. Money runs out. Work looms. People disappear. And the appeal of being stuck in a shitty hotel room far away from it all suddenly becomes massive.

In conversation last night I was talking about how I sometimes envy the people whose lives I normally consider to be boring. The ones who follow (and choose to follow) a humdrum pattern of to work, to home, to table, to sleep and have the luxury of not too much thought in between. It is a luxury because taking stock of your life is an exhausting exercise, particularly when the stocktake shows negative returns.

But in the fashion of all things falling at once, when they rise – and from the bottom, they can only rise – it is the most tremendous overhaul, like my car ‘s engine, which now purrs. Humdrum is safe and its security should not be mocked. But damn, I would choose the rollercoaster ride any day. How else can you watch yourself become yourself?

When things are as they should be, it is the music that lets you know.

You know you will be fine when you don’t avoid the songs that speak of too much, and even more when you seek them out and let them speak.

There is great beauty in the economy of language that only finds expression in the intersection of music and words.

In the air tonight, Nina Simone:
Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood.

Life is so curious with all its strangely timed curses and rewards.