Publications
Partners
Here is the best travel tip I know: when in England, never buy a pizza from a fried chicken restaurant.
I have just come back from the UK. I don’t know if you have been in the UK recently, but it’s a bruising experience. The rand isn’t doing all that badly against the dollar and the Euro, but the pound is its nemesis. It’s as though the pound has incriminating photos of the rand and it will post them on the internet unless the rand just sits there and lets the pound beat it up. When the rand meets the pound it shrieks like a small girl bumping into a clown in a dark alley. It doesn’t even put up a fight – it just rolls over like a spaniel and raises its paws in the air and pretends to be dead.
The rand was at R18-25 to the pound when I arrived, which was so bad it made me laugh to think about it, the way when you sit down in an exam and you’ve studied half the syllabus but you look at the first question and you see that it’s from the half you didn’t study, and so is the next question and the next, you laugh because all your classmates are in the same room and it would be too embarrassing to start crying.
That’s the way I laughed in the UK, but I didn’t laugh for long, because while I was there it just climbed and climbed. Every time I bought a pint of beer it was two rand more expensive, so I started to drink heavily in the mornings, to save money.
Things are so expensive in London I thought my heart would stop every time I reached for my wallet, so I escaped London and went south-west to Devon, where there is a village named after me. For centuries my people lived in the village of Bovey Tracey, on the banks of the River Bovey in the green hills of Devon. Surely here I would be safe. Surely the locals would take pity on a starving prodigal son returning from far-off impoverished lands? Surely they would welcome him in and spare a crust of bread or perhaps a lightly buttered scone? They would not.
Devon is cheaper than London, but only in the way that a tiger shark will eat you more slowly than a great white. I soon realised that I wouldn’t be able to afford to drink beer and eat food. One of them would have to go. The choice was obvious.
“Say, you wouldn’t happen to have any complimentary bar snacks?” I asked the barman as I settled down over my pint. “Peanuts, maybe? Pretzels? A cake of soap?”
The barman looked at me as though I was a communist.
“No snacks,” he said.
“Do you have a newspaper I could tear into thin strips and chew to a comforting pulp and swallow to make my stomach feel full?”
He shook his head.
I contemplated making a bowl of spaghetti out of my shoelaces, but then I sipped the good local ale, which was dark and strong and tasted a bit like Maltabella porridge, and I figured that things would be all right.
By the end of the fifth day, my last day in Devon, I knew I was going to make it. I had made my money last! Through surreptitious means I had managed to stretch my free breakfast to last most of the day, although when I went walking down the high street dogs would chase me to get at the rashers of bacon hidden in my socks. Still, it was worth it - I could afford to splash out on a treat! I could buy myself some solid food for dinner!
I had several choices: there was an Indian restaurant, where I could have a curry for only R200 and rice as an optional extra, and there was a pub selling fish and chips and burgers, but I chose Bovey Fried Chicken, a takeaway joint on the high street with cheerful red lettering and a logo showing two happy chickens. Fried chicken! Named after me! How could I resist?
Inside, I discovered why the chickens on the sign looked so happy. Bovey Fried Chicken served burgers, pizzas, wraps and kebabs. No chicken.
“Why are you called Bovey Fried Chicken?” I asked the manager, a Turkish gentleman with an unfriendly expression. He looked at me suspiciously.
“You want kebab?” he asked.
I didn’t want a kebab. I ordered a large Extra Meaty pizza with the special BBQ sauce and wandered out into the blue English dusk. With a slice or two in your belly, the world looks kinder. The birds chirped, the hills looked sketched in chalk. I thought how nice it must be to live out here, surrounded by gentle natural beauty, earning a mighty currency. Maybe I should think more about it.
I couldn’t finish the whole pizza because I wasn’t used to eating, so I stashed it to eat in the car on the way to the airport in the morning. I went to sleep and woke in the night moaning queasily. I threw up until the morning, thinking, “Damn, what a waste of pizza.” But it was the most expensive pizza I’d ever bought, so in the morning, still moaning and holding my belly, I ate the rest of it.
I don’t want to describe the four-hour drive to Heathrow in a fast-moving car suffering from projectile vomiting and explosive diarrhea. Suffice it to say that when I arrived at the car-rental drop-off, I recommended they just seal the vehicle in a hygienic plastic bag and bury the whole thing in a landfill for toxic waste.
I staggered through the airport, pale and suffering and pitiful. At every turn I met one bored, indifferent Brit face after another, a procession of efficient people efficiently doing their job and nothing more. Through check-in and customs and on the miserable flight home, I sniveled for sympathy and encountered nothing but chilly politeness and slight irritation. Now I knew how the rand feels when it has to get into the ring with the pound.
When I finally made it onto home ground and came tottering through the airport doors, pale-faced and wishing I was dead, the first thing I saw was an airport staffer who smiled at me as I crawled past. Her smile faded.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
I mumbled something unhappy, and she told me to wait right there while she fetched a wheelchair.
“I don’t need a wheelchair,” I protested but she fetched one anyway and made me sit in it.
“Here,” she said, and slipped a small box into my hand as she pushed me along. “I always bring imodium to work, just in case! Oh, you know what you should have? You should have some flat coke!”
And as she pushed me along, chattering away to make me feel normal, I chomped on my imodium, and I thought how lucky I am to live here, and how happy I was to be home.
Darrel Bristow-Bovey is a columnist, screenwriter, travel writer, author - follow him on Twitter
