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I don’t know if Darren Scott really did invent the Suitcase. I haven’t thought of Suitcases in a long time, but now that I have, they’re a whooshing Proustian flashback to Johannesburg and the media world of the early 2000s: a shot of Jack Daniels in one glass, a shot of passion fruit cordial in another. You down the Jack, followed as rapidly as you like by the passion fruit, although I personally favoured a softly-softly approach of moistening my lips first with a hummingbird-sip of the passion fruit, then the dirty business of the Jack, then half of the rest of the passion fruit. You couldn’t have the whole passion fruit, because if you were drinking them with, for instance, Darren Scott, that amount of sugar in a single evening would be very bad for your health.

The legend was that Darren Scott invented the Suitcase one night at the original News Café in Randburg. I asked him about it a few times, while we were drinking Suitcases. Once he proudly confirmed it. Once he bemusedly denied it. Once he mocked me for even asking, and we started insulting each other about different things entirely. That was Darren Scott, and that was also the experience of drinking Suitcases.

Darren and I were never precisely friends but I liked being around him. He looked and dressed like that chirpy guy from the IT department at your husband’s work who everyone agrees could have been a comedian if he wanted, and that was part of his success, and also it was who he was, but also it was a deep camouflage. He had a streak of something like genius that sometimes found its perfect medium of expression, but not always, and he had a related streak of the self-destructive. That’s always a pity, but without them, he would actually have been that chirpy guy from the IT department, which would have been a bigger pity.

I didn’t know him as a radio personality – I met him through the sports chat shows he produced on M-Net that made sport in the 2000s feel so much more fun than it feels now: Extra Cover and Boots & All and the much missed, much beloved, genuinely funny and irreverent Super Saturday, with Neil Andrews and Mike Haysman and Jeremy Fredericks. Darren had me on Super Saturday several times, at a time when no one else would have me on their shows, including the occasion Dan Nicholl and I launched the official Potchefstroom bid to host the Olympic Games. Afterwards he told me that I jiggled my foot too much and that I lacked the common touch.

I don’t know if Darren Scott invented the Suitcase but there are perilously few people left in this world to whom legends still cling, and who so perfectly recall a moment in time, with all its good and bad, so I offer this story. In the early 2000s the television lifestyle show Top Billing invited me to a weekend away in a private game lodge in the Sabi Sands. That was the sort of thing that happened in the early 2000s. A number of other people were present: I remember PJ Powers and Makahya Ntini and Kuli Roberts and Gareth Cliff and Marius Roberts and Gladiator Ice, who was the blonde gladiator from Gladiators. It was, I may have mentioned, the early 2000s, and this was a very particular slice of it. Darren Scott was also there.

It hadn’t yet occurred to the managers of this game lodge what a mistake it had been to provide an open bar for the weekend, but the thought must have dawned by the time we went that first evening for a game drive into lion country. The attendees were spread over several vehicles. On ours, Darren and Gladiator Ice were on the back bench, and I was somewhere near the front. Darren had a half-full bottle of Jack Daniels in one hand and a half-full bottle of passion fruit in the other. “Glasses are just middlemen,” he said.

In certain moods, Darren brought a great effulgence of energy, of laughter, of life to any gathering, and while I wouldn’t say the noise and hooting and carry-on from the back seat was always louder than from everyone else, I would say it went on longer, and without flagging.

The game guide had never seen anything quite like it. “If we’re not quiet, we won’t see any wildlife,” he said for the fourth time, almost tearfully.

“I think the wildlife is on the vehicle already,” said Gareth.

We chugged our way through the majesty of the wild, a small uncivilized pocket of laughing bad behaviour, until eventually, somehow, the ruckus ended. There was a sudden silence, into which flooded the sounds of the bush and the cough and growl of the engine as we jounced and clattered in the forlorn pursuit of that which had long since fled before us or hidden in the long grass.

“I’ve never seen nothing on a drive before,” said the game guide in a broken voice.

Half an hour or so later we arrived back at the lodge and piled out and looked to the back seat, where Gladiator Ice sat in untroubled isolation, sipping, I want to remember, a Bacardi Breezer.

“Where’s Darren?” we said.

“He got out,” she said.

“What do you mean, he got out?”

“He was quite agile.”

“Off a moving vehicle? In lion country?”

“Maybe he needed the toilet.”

It was the hour of sundowners and all around us the bush was coming to life with the padding of predators and the frightened scuttle of their prey. I looked at the lodge manager and I could see he was thinking about whether it was really true that all publicity is good publicity, and whether or not he relished the idea of telling the story for the rest of his life of how he had Darren Scott over for the weekend and let him get eaten.

Other vehicles were summoned and we went in search of the lost Scott. A great deal of conversation was taken up with enthusiastic debate over your best survival method on the veld. “You should lie down and play dead,” someone suggested, but then we couldn’t remember if that worked for lions or if it was only when you’re being attacked by a bear. What if you were being attacked by a bear and a lion at the same time? Either way, we couldn’t imagine Darren lying down and playing dead. Darren was pretty fearless, in a cocky, not always wise sort of way. We started speculating about how fast he could run.

It was already dark when we found him illuminated in the beam of a torch, six feet off the ground, wedged in the V of an acacia tree. He was asleep, but one hand tightly clutched an empty of bottle of Jack, and the other an empty bottle of passion fruit cordial. We shouted and threw stones at him but he did not stir. Finally one of the game guides, nervously leaving the vehicle in the dark, started pulling on his foot to wake him up. Darren was like a jungle cat himself. From deep sleep he snapped awake, just long enough to kick the game guide in the face and shout, “No one’s taking my Suitcase!”

My dear friends

On a streetcorner in the old Vilnius Ghetto, on the block where I was staying, there’s a bronze statue of Leonard Cohen, wearing a bronze hat and bronze box-shouldered suit, looking intense in his brazen, lady-seducing way. He doesn’t have a pedestal but stands admirably two-footed on the paving stones like anyone else, and each time I pass I touch my own invisible hat brim in greeting, but on my last morning I saw he wore a woolen blue-checked scarf wound around his bronze neck.

“It’s a tradition,” a local told me. She was pouring a Ukrainian cherry liqueur into a tall glass and demonstrating how to drink it without using your hands. “When autumn is over and winter arrives, Leonard gets a scarf. If you are uncertain whether it’s winter, don’t look at the thermometer, look at Leonard.”

“Does the scarf stay all through the winter?”

“If someone is cold and needs a scarf, they can take his and someone else will replace it. In spring, his scarf comes off. If you want to know whether spring is here, don’t look at the trees or the birds, look at Leonard.”

(This isn’t a letter about statues, but I do like the Lithuanian approach to statues. Elsewhere in Vilnius there’s a bronze bust of Frank Zappa. Leonard Cohen was at least of Litvak descent, but Frank Zappa had no connection to Lithuania at all, so what is he doing there? After the fall of the Soviet Union, or perhaps we should say after the temporary contraction of the Russian Empire, a local sculptor named Saulius Paukstys left Lithuania for the first time. His destination: America. He duly returned and told all his friends down at the coffee shop what a time he’d had. The skyscrapers! The cars and wide-open spaces! The art and the cheeseburgers and the blue jeans! And he’d met Frank Zappa! Yes, Frank Zappa! They’d hung out and discussed art and freedom! He hadn’t been a Frank Zappa fan before the trip, and to be honest Frank Zappa’s music was still a little noodly and obscure to him, but still! Frank Zappa!

Everyone was very impressed. More than impressed, they were stirred. The world was open now, and everything was possible. A man from Vilnius, a schmo and a schlepper just like them, could get on a flight and go to America and mingle with so celestial a body as Frank Zappa! Anything, my friends, in this new world anything is possible!

It’s unclear how the real story emerged. Perhaps a jealous rival did some investigating, or perhaps it was simply that Saulius Paukstys – dedicated in the way of all artists to the pursuit of truth and beauty, beauty and truth – was so tormented by his conscience that he finally threw down his chisel, ran to the coffee shop and confessed of his own volition that while he had indeed been to America, he had not in fact met Frank Zappa at all.

But the thing is, this didn’t much change the way people felt. No doubt Saulius came in for his share of ribbing, and perhaps he had to stand more than his share of rounds of kavos puodeliai, but if anything, the artistic community of Vilnius embraced the story even harder. Creative freedom is what they craved, and what says creative freedom more than a good story? Anyone can meet Frank Zappa, not everyone can enjoyably make something up.

“So Saulius made the sculpture of Frank Zappa?”

“No, another sculptor made the statue of Frank Zappa.”

“Because he liked Frank Zappa?”

“Because he liked the story.”

“And why did the city agree to put up the statue?”

“They also liked the story. Lithuanians like a funny story.”)

I spent a couple of days in Vilnius then caught the train back to Latvia. Autumn had come to Riga while I was gone. When we first arrived near the beginning of October the parks were a sea of green, but the Baltic autumn is gold glittering in darkness: the leaves of the linden trees blazed against their wet black trunks like the gilded domes of the Orthodox cathedral; they fell brightly across the sidewalks like golden coins. The night of Halloween was all yellow candlelight glowing through orange pumpkins in darkened doorways, firelight in their eyes.

Autumn is lovely in Riga, but winter comes behind it, heavy-shouldered, with a heavy tread, seeking whom it may devour. “In Latvia, we say that winter comes from the East,” said the barista at Ezisa Kofisops. “Like Russia.”

In the Baltics, they know all about Russia. In the past year, Riga has renamed the street on which the Russian embassy stands. It used to be Antonias Street; now the Russian Ambassador’s business card lists his street address as “Independent Ukraine Street”. In Vilnius, the Russian embassy now stands on “Ukrainian Heroes Street”.

“Even if Ukraine falls this winter,” said the barista at Ezisa Kofisops, handing me my coffee, “we know the West will protect us.” He twisted the corner of his mouth. “That is Latvian sense of humour,” he said.

We kept talking about winter. I told him that my winter started in August, in South Africa, and that since then I’ve been in various stages of autumn, in Normandy and Greece and now in the Baltics. I told him that I had an operation in August that I thought would be minor – that was minor – but that I haven’t been quite right since. I’m physically fine, I told him, but I’ve scarcely written a word. I haven’t written any letters. I’ve neglected my friends and ignored my enemies. I’ve hardly checked the news or cared what anyone else is caring about, let alone cared about it myself. All I’ve wanted to do is sit on the right side of a locked door and read books and talk to the only person I want to talk to and watch old movies. I haven’t been unhappy, I told him – just the opposite, I’ve been very happy, but that species of happiness worries me because it’s a hiding from the world, it’s a slow snow-muffed slide into silence.

“It is only winter,” he said. “When it is spring, you will wake up.”

The next day, in the Janis Roze bookstore on Krisjana Barola street, I came upon the book “Wintering” by Katherine May. In winter, she says, nature knows to conserve its resources. The trees and the squirrels and the grass know to hunker and be patient and build their strength for when seasons change and life speeds up again. The trees and the squirrels and the grass know this, and so should we. Winter, she says, isn’t only the weather outside, it’s any time when we feel fallow, sidelined, cut off, blocked from progress, cast into the role of outsider in our own lives. It’s part of the lifecycle, it comes round to us all. The wisdom of nature is to recognize the season and live through it, to trust that the seasons will turn again, as they always do, that everything is always changing and always staying the same.

At the end of the week, I’ll be going back to Cape Town. It will be summer, there will be sunshine and braai smoke and Christmas. Christmas holidays is an odd time for Capetonians – we always think that’s when we’ll stop working and do things and see people, and it’s always when we find that we don’t have time to do all the things and see all the people that we’ve been putting off till summer. I hope my winter will be just about over when I get back, but seasons are peculiar things. Still, I’ll be around. Hope to see some of you then.

Much love

Darrel

Riga, November, 2024

My dear friends

At the beginning of last year, in the bright, blue-skied Athenian winter, I spent a week with Natalie Dormer, talking about her character. Natalie Dormer is an English actress who was in the Hunger Games movies and Penny Dreadful and played my favourite character in Game of Thrones, and almost exactly a year earlier she had read the scripts of a crime series I’d written and agreed to play the lead, triggering whoops and huzzahs in my rented cottage in the Stygian depths of a Devon winter, followed swiftly by the opening of bottles of terrible Prosecco scrounged from the Co-Op in Buckfastleigh.

Five years before, Jo and I had mapped out the series in two sleepless, hallucinatory days during the ferocity of a July heatwave in Istanbul, in a flat in Cihangir with a broken air-conditioner and a view across the rooftops of Cukurcuma to the Pera Tower and the Golden Horn. For the next five years I wrote the damn thing in different countries between other projects, in drafts upon drafts, in fits and starts, in cycles of enthusiasm and sloughs of despond, pitching it in phone calls and Zoom meetings and in person in London. I noodled around Cape Town, staring up at blocks of flats, thinking, “That’s where Edie lives”, or wading into the sea murmuring “This would be a good place to drown.” On more than one occasion I was reconciled to the thought that it would never be made, but now all of a sudden it was January in Athens, and shooting was scheduled for the Cape Town autumn, and I was talking to Natalie about her character.

I have never met anyone who reads (and re-reads and re-reads) a script as carefully and scrupulously as she does, nor who treats it with as much respect. She would want to discuss a specific sequence of sibilants and plosives in her speech in episode 2 that sound fine on a page but are difficult to utter out loud when running down stairs, or debate the difference in register between sarcasm and irony, or query whether I might adjust the rhythm of a particular sentence in episode 6 so that the emphasis more easily falls on the second syllable of the seventeenth word. She would challenge me on chronology and wrangle about back-story; once we spoke for four hours about whether her character would be more likely to jog or to swim. We both agreed: she would have nothing but disdain for yoga. Does any of this sound as though I am complaining? I am not. It was astonishing, it was wonderful: for a writer it was like receiving a gift.

Most of our conversations – long, meandering chats in pursuit of nothing in particular but sharing life views and experiences, aligning our sensibilities – circled around Edie, her character. Everyone (agents, managers, executives) who had read the scripts agreed that it was very brave of a star like Natalie to accept the role of Edie, because traditionally stars prefer roles where they’re likeable, and the consensus was that for at least the first half of the series, Edie’s does not set out to be especially likeable: she’s abrasive and insulting, defended and defensive, uncomfortable with intimacy, rejecting before she can be rejected, using humour as both a tentative invitation to intimacy and as an escape route to distance.

Personally I never found Edie unlikable – I thought she was vastly misunderstood, although admittedly she does seem to go out of her way to make things worse for herself – and Natalie didn’t think she was unlikable either, but we spent much time discussing exactly why Edie is like that, where it would have come from, why she can’t just wise up and let people like her. Then one afternoon, as we were discussing a traumatic event in Natalie’s own life, one of those events you can’t make a joke about, I made a joke about it and she looked at me and I saw a light go on in her sea-blue eyes. “Oh!” she said. “Edie’s you!”

Of course, I persuaded her that she was wrong. If there’s one thing I know about Hollywood stars, it’s that they’re not flattered by the thought of bringing to life the inner world of the schlub writer whose job it is to make them bigger, not reduce them to his dimensions. And truthfully, Edie isn’t me – they’re all me, in various ways – all the characters in White Lies, none of them wholly heroes or villains but all somewhere awkwardly in-between, trying their sorry best in different ways, who have for one reason or another erected walls against the threats they perceive in the world, built safe spaces in which they can’t bring themselves to stay, constructed the self-defeating fronts they present even to the people trying to love them. Anyway, we’re all of us so complicated, how can any single character on a screen or a page be any of us? Each of us is a scattered sky of broken stars and dust.

But still, as I watched one of the later episodes at the first preview screenings last week, I found myself blushing unexpectedly at moments no-one would else would have noticed, as though I had suddenly stood up naked in front of the screen. I’m sometimes asked about the difference between writing prose and writing for the screen, and often the easy reply is about how intimate and revealing prose is, how close the “I’ of the page is to the “I” of the writer but how there’s no “I” on the screen, how it’s an impersonal medium, mediated through commerce and compromise and through other artists and their own ideas. But sometimes, under the right circumstances, the most personal writing hides in plainest sight, pretending to be something very different, dressed as someone else who doesn’t look like you at all.

White Lies is a crime show – there’s a murder in Bishopscourt, and I’m pretty confident you won’t work out whodunnit (and if you do work it out, and can show your reasoning to me in advance, then a bottle of champagne’s on me – let’s make it two bottles, if I can drink it with you) – but really it’s also something else. It’s a series of discoveries, made by fumbling over five years following the light of a waxing moon, about the various ways we trap ourselves. By the end of episode eight, I think it’s also about the breaking dawn, the rising hope, of starting to discover how we can escape.

White Lies is already in parts of Europe, and we’re currently signing the deals that will take it to the rest of Europe and the UK and to one of the prestige American streamers, but it premieres in South Africa on M-Net on Thursday night, 7^th March, at 8pm. I know there’s a good chance you won’t watch it – we South Africans take a peculiar pride in not watching locally made television, and given our history, I can’t really blame us – but if you do, I’d love to hear from you. I think it’s a good show, and I’d love to know how you like it, or why you don’t, or just to shoot the breeze about whodunnits and crime and TV. And if you get the killer right, there’s some good champagne in it for you too – we’re a long way from that Co-Op in Buckfastleigh.

With much love

Darrel

Cape Town

March 2024

My dear friends

I was writing a much longer letter, but it’s the end of the year and we’re all tired and in desperate need of doing things that don’t involve screens, so instead I am writing now just to wish you the best of the rest of the year, the joy of your friends and even of your family, the ease of the warm air and of whatever time and quiet you manage to gather up for yourself.

But let me beg just enough time and indulgence to say: there is much in 2023 for which I am grateful, but for none of it quite so fiercely as I am to you for embracing a book that I wasn’t necessarily expecting to find a home outside my heart. Finding Endurance has sold out its print runs three times in South Africa so far, and the same number again internationally, and I am astonished by that, but it doesn’t matter a fraction as much as the messages and mails I’ve received from you about it. The book meant a lot to me, and there is an invisible something in it, a silence between the words, for which I don’t feel responsible, containing something I can’t quite explain, and I never for a moment expected anyone else to feel it too. Life is lonely and connection flickers at best, a candle in the draught that comes in between the cracks, but I have never felt quite so un-lonely as I did when reading your messages.

In Georgia earlier this year I met a good Russian man who asked me, with a very Russian intensity, “What do you most hope for your book?” I thought about it seriously and replied, “A very small miracle.” Thank you for that miracle.

I will write again more fully in the new year – for now, I wish you a Happy Hannukah, a merry Christmas, a new year of delight. I wish you a multiplicity of very small miracles, and I send my love to all of you.

Darrel

Coming in from the cold

My dear friends Hello! Remember me? I’ve been diligently honouring my promise not to spam and pester you with mails, and frankly I’ve been doing a pretty sound job of it, but now the time has come to knock again on your door with my hair freshly combed and my shoes newly shined, like a traveling sewing-machine salesman, or a Mormon on his mission. You see, something happened last year that made me miserable, but even while I was miserable, I was aware of being happier than I have ever been: I wrote a book.   I have started several books since my previous book – one was commissioned, took shape and even had a cover. There were various reasons that I never finished any of them: I lost faith in the book I was writing, I lost faith in the act of writing, in readers, in myself – but once I started this book I didn’t pause and didn’t really do anything else until it was finished. Twenty-three years ago I met a Chinese fortune-teller in the saloon car of the Orient Express, traveling down the jungled peninsula between Bangkok and Singapore, who told me, among other things: “You will be successful when you learn to do one thing at a time.” That was twenty-three years ago, and only now, writing this book, have I had my first glimpse of what he was talking about, and I start to understand what he might have meant by “successful”. In March last year Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance was discovered at the bottom of the Antarctic ocean, 107 years after it sank. I have been an Endurance fanatic, a Shacklehead, since I was young, ever since my father first told me that he had sailed south with Shackleton, and the discovery thrilled and shook me and opened up a deep joy and also a deep yearning that I didn’t quite understand. In April last year I started my research – I read books and combed archives, I called up experts, I spent time on a polar icebreaker. I am shy and avoid interviewing people but I interviewed people – ice-pilots and helicopter mechanics and poets and Captain Knowledge Bengu of the SA Agulhas 2. I read journals and diaries, published and unpublished. I submerged myself in cold water and pondered whether I’m an optimist or a pessimist or whether I’m possibly at some vanishing distant focal point where the two things become the same thing.  I wanted to write about Ernest Shackleton, who set out on the eve of World War One to walk across the Antarctic continent, whose ship was seized by the ice of the Weddell Sea and crushed, and how – castaway on the thin frozen skin of the sea over the abyss, he set out to bring his men home. I also wanted to write about my dad, and what “home” means and the meaning of success and of failure, and about human beings, the human race, and how in the face of catastrophe we can all carry on, and how there is joy in endurance, and endurance in joy. I started writing in Cape Town and took myself to Barrydale for a month to keep writing. I wrote in Paris and while walking with friends through the Dordogne valley and in a seaside village on the coast of Turkey, stuffing paper napkins in my ears to block out the music on the rooftop of my pension.  I wrote in Athens and in Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego and on three Greek islands – Sifnos and Hydra and Poros – in small hotel rooms with broken air-conditioning and on sunloungers under pine trees and battered wooden tables with flaking blue paint, lost in a world of ice, outside in the summer heat. Leonard Cohen, in his preface to a Chinese reprint of his novel, Beautiful Losers, remembered that he wrote it sitting in the sun in the back garden of his house on Hydra: “It was a blazing hot summer. I never covered my head. What you have in your hands is more of a sunstroke than a book.” My experience of writing wasn’t as Leonard Cohen as that – I was somewhat uncoolly traveling with my mother-in-law and her friend, showing them the Saronic Gulf on the most poorly timed summer holiday ever conceived – and I did cover my head while sitting outside, but as I wrote it I did feel sunstroked. It seemed at first that there was no way to make it all cohere – Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance, and Knowledge Bengu from KwaMashu who found her, and Peter Pan and Captain Scott and the Ancient Mariner, and my father and mother and my divorce and the meaning of home, and man-eating seals and Ursula le Guin and fish with white blood and Homer’s Odyssey and the world ending and the world not ending.  Each word that I wrote, I trudged blindly forward into a kind of white blizzard, hauling through snow to my sodden knees, with no expectation of arriving where I was trying to go. “What saves you is to take a step,” wrote Antoine Saint-Exupery, and he might have written about survival in the ice, or about writing a book, or about how to leave home and start again, “And then another step. It is always the same step, but you have to take it.” I suppose, in various ways, the book is ultimately a book about faith.  I finished writing it in a wretched flat in Arctic Street, in Kentish Town in London. I was a week overdue, and I had to finish that day because my publishers were throwing a party in Covent Garden that night and not even I am so shameless as to drink my publishers’ free cocktails without submitting. I hovered over the “send” button. I wasn’t ready to part with it. The previous months had been a tyranny, a torture; I had worried and doubted, I had never before confronted with quite such force how very small and inadequate I am. It was the worst; I didn’t want it to end.  Somewhere in the latter half of the writing, as I started to sense the voices of the book talking to each other, a silence came over me as I was reading, similar to the silence that comes when I step into the cool dark of one of the Orthodox churches in Athens and see the candlelight on the golden tesserae of the mosaics and when I light a thin yellow candle and think with satisfaction that now there is another small flame in the world, even if not for very long. I have since lost that silence but it was there once so I know I can find it again.  I didn’t want to press send because then it would all be over – I would have carried the manuscript back from the white pitiless vastness at the edge of the world, into the civilization of publishers and marketers and readers and judgment. Back to the dirtier and more dispiriting markers of failure and success. I wanted to hold onto it and to stay lost in the terrifying adventure, but I also wanted to go to that party, so I pressed send.  I sat back, dazed. I wondered if I should buy a new shirt for my swanky London social debut. Then I received a text from my publishers. London exists only to break a man’s heart: there was a rail strike, so the party was cancelled. I wondered if I could somehow get the manuscript back.  It would be a lie to say I don’t mind how the book is received, or how many it sells. I think the book is good and I’m proud of it, and I want to sell enough to repay my publisher’s faith and their advance, and so that I can write another book, and another one, and another until I die, each one different to the one before it, a trail of footsteps in the snow leading to safety. But outcomes aside, writing this book is the first time in my life that I knew without question that I was doing what I should be doing. That was a gift that I have waited a long time to receive; it was a glimpse of something as precious as light.  Finding Endurance was published in the UK and Ireland and the USA in April, on my birthday, and I have been quietly delighted with the response from bookstores and readers. The audiobook was somewhat bewildering and disorienting – who is this starnge English man speaking my words?! What are these odd stops and rhythms? Is that how everyone hears my words in their heads?! – but it was well received, and now the physical books have finally arrived in South Africa, and will be in the stores from the end of this week.  There will be launches, of course. In Cape Town I will be at the Constantia Exclusive Books on 12 July in conversation with Tom Eaton, trying not to be self-conscious about how much taller than me he is. In Johannesburg on 17 July I’ll be in conversation with Michele Magwood at Love Books. Michele has always been the most thoughtful and sensitive of readers, and the book wouldn’t have happened without her.  But there will also be a party that isn’t a discussion or a launch, that is just a party. On 14 July at the Spin Street Gallery, an early Friday evening, my publishers are throwing a cocktail party. You’ll have to endure a ten-minute talk from me, but then there will be drinks and chatting and it’ll be fun. There’s a guest-list, because that makes it look fancier and more like a London party, and so the publishers can invite their fancy friends, but I have reserved a bloc of the guest-list for my pals. I would love you to be there, so if you would like to be on the guest list, please drop me an email.  I do hope I’ll see some of you – all of you – somewhere along the way over the next few weeks. I have missed you.  With much love Darrel Poros, June, 2023

My dear friends

I was about to apologise for not having written for a while, but let’s be frank, you haven’t written either. I don’t blame you, mind – writing is difficult, and most of us are out of practice when it comes to letters. It’s so hard to get the tone right: when you have good news you don’t want to brag and when you have bad news you don’t want to grumble, so next thing you know time has gone by and you haven’t written. Don’t worry, I’m not upset with you. We’re friends, and friends shouldn’t be a burden to each other.

What have you been doing since last we spoke? Me, I’ve mainly been walking. Jo and I have just finished a long walk through the Dordogne valley in France. It’s the same walk we did last year, but this time we did it with two much younger friends.

When we invited them, I think they were a little confused as to why we wanted to do the same walk again. When there are so many experiences still to be had, why repeat one? I explained that last year we walked in autumn, and this time in spring. In October there were ripe apples on the trees and the smell of cider vinegar and orchards of trees heavy with walnuts and almonds. In the mornings an autumn mist rose off the river and you would walk through the diamond haze and see the looming shapes of horses and cows and trees until the mist dissolved in the bright cool sunshine. This time there were wild strawberries alongside the paths and there were fields of spring flowers and each village you walked into was bright and fragrant with roses. The white and red and orange roses were vivid but scentless; the pink ones smelt of Turkish Delight.

Our friends are young and the young don’t yet appreciate the differences between seasons. Or rather they do, but they don’t yet feel it. Or rather they do feel it, but that difference doesn’t yet feel as important as it will. But that wasn’t the only reason we were happy to do the same walk again, so soon. We loved the walk last year. It came after a time of difficulty and grief: I had briefly been dangerously unwell; Jo’s father had died. The long walk from Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne, for a week up and down the river valley and the ridges and hill-tracks, following sections of the Camino de Santiago along ancient stone paths through ancient forests and ancient stone villages finally to the pilgrimage town of Rocamadour was the lifting of weight. We arrived lighter of soul than we set out.

A pilgrimage is an adventure, but perhaps you can only take a pilgrimage once; after that it becomes a ritual. As I grow older I realise the equal importance of adventure and ritual. Adventure keeps us young; ritual gives us comfort. We wanted to walk to Rocamadour again, and lighten our hearts again, and this time we wanted to share it with our friends. We wanted to perform a ritual, and to give it to them as an adventure.

It is an interesting experience, walking a long path with younger people. On the first day they kindly slowed their pace uphill for fear of leaving us behind. The young are very strong and very fast: they can get there before you, so long as they can get there today. By day 5, as we waited for them at the top of a hill, pretending to examine some nettlesome shrub so as not to make them feel bad, I remembered what Ernest Shackleton said to Frank Wild on the Antarctic plain in 1910, as they leant into the icy winds of the Beardmore Glacier, walking back to fetch help for Bowers and Evans, both much younger men, incapacitated in their tents with exhaustion. “Well, Frank,” said Shackleton, with what you have to imagine was a twinkle in his eye, “it’s the old dog for the hard road, every time.”

And so we walked the same path we walked last year, walked the same tree-shaded corridor to the waterfall at Autoire, placed our feet on the same steep stone steps up to the ruins of the Chateau des Anglais, ate the same lunch of cheeses and breads between the broken walls of Taillefer before Carennac, overlooking the green valley and the silver river and the distant turrets of Castelnau, and we watched as they took the same journey we had taken: the excitement and uncertainty, the surprise of discovery, the soreness, the tiredness, the slow recognition as the path taught them how to walk, the lightness and satisfaction, the exhilaration.

Our next walk will be somewhere new: it will be a discovery again, an adventure, but we will also keep walking old paths, like returning to favourite books as an older reader, walking deeper tracks into them and also noticing what is new in them, what has changed.

From France we caught the train to England to visit my mother. My mother has two artificial knees and at least one, possibly two artificial hips. She has emphysema and has had Covid twice. She lived in South Africa for 81 years, all her life, until earlier this year when she packed up her home, sold her furniture and called me to say that she was moving to England.

“Um,” I said. “Why?”

“I thought it was time for a change,” she said. “And your sister lives in Tunbridge Wells, so I’ll move there. And you live in England, so you can come and see me.”

“I don’t live in England,” I said.

“But you go there a lot.”

“Not really.”

“Oh well. You can come visit when you’re near to England.”

My mother lives in a ground-floor flat on a nice street in Tunbridge Wells, about twenty minutes’ walk from my sister. When I arrived I asked her what she’d like to do, and she told me that she would like to go to London for the Queen’s birthday and jubilee. She was eight years old on the Queen’s coronation, and of course she wasn’t in England then.

On Thursday morning we caught the train to Charing Cross. The train was full, and we listened to a posh man in a blazer and straw hat with a wicker picnic basket who said he was going to St James’ Park, so we thought we would try that.

When we stepped out of the train station there were flags and bunting and people everywhere. There were people in Union Jack dresses and children waving little paper Union Jack pennants. It was still early in the day so Trafalgar Square was still only 100% full. We walked between the lions where the pigeons would be if there weren’t so many people. People were sitting in deck chairs and perching on lampposts and trying to spread blankets on the cobbles. There were people having picnics between the lions’ paws.

“What are they all doing here?” demanded my mother. “You can’t see anything here.”

We tried to walk to St James’ Park and realised why they were all in Trafalgar Square. They were all in Trafalgar Square because there was no space anywhere else. Pall Mall was full. The side-streets were full. You couldn’t get to St James’ Park, but St James’ Park was full. There were great rivers of people trying to find a way to somewhere where they could see something, and turbulent counter-currents of people coming back again. You couldn’t walk without touching people and being touched by them, without bumping and jolting and stopping and shoving and being shoved. We had to walk in small agonizing shuffling steps, like penitents.

I kept losing my mom because she is not quite as tall as many other people in the crowd. I worried she would be taken by some perilous cross-current of people and end up in Shoreditch. It was madness to continue but I wanted to find her a place where she could see something, whatever there was to be seen. Finally after two hours I was starting to drown. I felt bruised and sore and my legs hurt and my back hurt. I couldn’t go on. Where was my mom? I swam back against the tide and found her walking in a different direction, chatting to a tattooed Canadian man about Meghan Markle. “Everyone is in a very good mood,” she said.

We never did see anything, no horses, no carriages, no marching bands, although we were on one side of a wall when something happened on the other side of it, and everyone cheered and waved their pennants so we cheered too. Somehow we even managed to not see the fly-past, I’m still not sure how. Finally we poured ourselves into our train seats, heading back to the south-east and Tunbridge Wells. I collapsed like a wet paper crown. My mother with her plastic joints and metal knees and her 81 years and her emphysema sat fresh as a rose, peering out of the window as Canary Wharf whooshed by. “What a lovely atmosphere,” she said. “How nice to be able to say we were there.”

I am in Turkey now, in a small town on the Mediterranean coast, where I am working on a book. I was commissioned to write it a month or so ago, and it is due at the end of September. It is a wonderful book, or it will be if I manage the impossible and put down on paper the lovely shapes that are in my head. Outside my window is a blue bay with a hazy island and a hot yellow sun, but my head is in the ice and snows of the Weddell Sea and the South Pole. Writing a book, it strikes me, is like a long hard walk that doesn’t end the same day. You have to be ready for the excitement and uncertainty, the surprise of discovery, the soreness, the tiredness, the slow recognition as the book teaches you how to write it. It’s a hard road, but hard roads need an old dog.

Thank you for being there. I think of you fondly and often. Do write some time.

With great love and affection,

Darrel