Things Fall Apart. Kate Turkington Doesn’t

My friend Kate Turkington turns 92 in September.

I’m writing this now, whilst in the Philippines during a monsoon, because waiting until somebody dies to tell them how extraordinary they are has always struck me as a particularly stupid human habit. And I’m certainly not waiting until Kate’s 100th. At her 70th birthday I organised for a guy to jump out of a cake. At her 90th I was privileged to speak alongside some of the many people who love her. At her 100th I plan to do absolutely nothing useful. I will sit not so quietly in a corner, drinking Laphroaig and leaving the speeches to everyone else. And I am missing her 92nd birthday as I will be in Italy – so I thought, now’s the time to write this!

Kate and I originally bonded over books. More specifically, African literature.

I studied African literature at Stellenbosch in the early 1990s, under the wonderful Annie Gagiano, and it changed the way I saw this continent, literature and myself. Kate, naturally, was several steps ahead of me. She holds a First Class Honours degree in English from London University and an MA cum laude from Wits and among her 13 books is something quite remarkable: the first critical study of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, published in London in 1977.

So, yes, we had things to talk about.

Achebe’s great novel is about many things – change, culture, identity, community, pride, fear, the collision between worlds and what happens when the certainties on which we build our lives start shifting.

Things fall apart.

They do.

Countries change. Families change. Bodies change. Careers end. People disappoint us. We lose people. We make mistakes. We grow older. The world we thought we understood becomes another world entirely.

Kate’s lesson to me has never been that we can stop any of this.

It is that we can keep living while it happens.

And bloody hell, does she live.

Yes, really

One of Kate’s books is wonderfully titled Yes, Really! A Life.

It could equally have been called Why the hell not?

Kate has travelled from Tibet to Thailand, Pretoria to Patagonia to Peru, Kashmir to Kathmandu, the Arctic Circle to Antarctica. She has waltzed at dawn in Beijing, encountered penguins in Antarctica, broken bread with monks in Tibet and been to Everest Base Camp. Her own website rather appropriately borrows from Shakespeare’s Puck to say that she has “girdled the world”.

And she is still going.

Still travelling.

Still reading.

Still asking questions.

Still interested.

Still interesting.

Still occasionally doing things that make the rest of us think: Kate, are you completely mad?

Sometimes she definitely is.

That helps.

Even better, at nearly 92 she has a new podcast/show. Because obviously the sensible thing to do in your nineties is to launch another media venture. Recent episodes range from books and theatre to conservation, surgery, politics and travel. Wit meets wisdom and, apparently, no topic is off limits. Sounds about right (although at times does make one blush!)

We talk a lot about ageing as though the goal is merely to survive it. Kate reminds me that longevity without curiosity is a rather poor bargain.

Being alive is not the same as living.

Kate lives.

Never say no

Many years ago, Kate and I travelled in Ethiopia together and were, in what remains one of my better travel-insurance anecdotes, held by armed Afar rebels. Kate was very upset when they let us go.

As one is.

I’ve written about it before on CN&CO and still owe people the full story.

There are other stories. Burkina Faso. Paris. Botswana. Strange hotels. Stranger people. Dinners. Books. Adventures that seemed perfectly sensible at the time and rather less so afterwards.

And the wonderful thing is that hundreds of people could write a paragraph just like that.

That is part of Kate’s magic.

Everybody has a Kate story.

More impressively, everybody thinks they are one of Kate’s favourites.

I certainly do.

I am realistic enough to know I am not the favourite. But I am definitely one of the favourites.

As are, apparently, several thousand other people.

It is a rare gift – making people feel seen. Being genuinely interested in them. Remembering the story they told you. Asking about their children. Sharing a book. Sending an article. Making a connection. Giving someone the sense, for however long you are together, that there is nowhere else you would rather be.

Kate once said in an interview: “I just do trust.” She acknowledged the naivety in that but also said that trust had very rarely been misplaced. She spoke in the same interview about her continuing desire to learn and to pass that learning on.

That combination – trust and curiosity – may explain quite a lot about her life.

It may also explain some of the trouble.

Whisky and words

We share another great love.

Laphroaig.

For the uninitiated, it is an Islay single malt. Smoky. Peaty. Medicinal. Completely distinctive. Some people taste it and wonder why anyone would voluntarily put it in their mouth.

Kate and I know better. Which is why Kate told me on our first trip togethe r- bring your own bottle!

For years we have shared a love for the stuff and one of my most treasured Kate moments happened when I finally visited Laphroaig itself last year.

I veido-called her from there.

After all those years of drinking it together, talking about it, ordering another one when perhaps strictly speaking another one wasn’t necessary, there I was at the source and she was the person I wanted to call.

We chatted.

Nothing earth-shattering happened.

And it remains one of my special memories.

I increasingly think that life works like that. We expect the big milestones to matter most, but often it is some small interaction that lodges itself permanently in your heart.

A phone call.

A whisky.

A friend on the other end of the line.

The moving finger

Kate has given me many books.

One of the most beautiful is a copy of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.

There is a verse in it I return to often:

“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.”

We cannot erase the line.

I increasingly understand that.

I have done things I regret. Said things I wish I hadn’t. Failed people. Made bad calls. Lost people I loved. Most of us, if we live long enough and honestly enough, accumulate a fair amount we might edit if life came with Track Changes.

It doesn’t.

The finger writes.

And moves on.

But Kate has helped teach me that accepting the permanence of what has been written does not require becoming trapped by it.

Turn the page.

Keep writing.

Go somewhere.

Read something.

Meet somebody.

Forgive.

Learn.

Laugh.

Pour a whisky.

Live!

Perhaps that is one of the connections back to Things Fall Apart. Life is not the preservation of some perfect, unchanging order. There isn’t one. Things fracture and reform. We adapt or we don’t. We choose whether change makes our world smaller or sends us out into it with renewed curiosity.

Kate keeps choosing the world.

Books, bloody books

I love that we share reading.

Not simply books as decoration or proof of cleverness – although Kate is very clever – but reading as an active engagement with life.

She remains a book reviewer. Her new show recently devoted an entire episode to her current recommendations, with Kate quite literally surrounded by piles of books.

Perfect.

Books matter because stories matter.

African literature helped Kate and me become friends. Shakespeare matters to her. She loves words and she loves puns – including truly terrible ones, which I suspect she enjoys even more when everybody groans.

She has taught English. Written textbooks. Written about African writing. Interviewed thinkers, politicians, spiritual leaders, writers, adventurers and oddballs.

She loves learning.

At 92, that may be one of the most important lessons she offers.

Never decide you know enough.

Kate once said: “The desire to learn is so important.”

Amen.

Why keep a dog and bark yourself?

Then there are the practical Kate lessons.

My favourite remains:

“Why keep a dog and bark yourself?” a favourite expression of her husband Alan.

I have quoted it in another CN&CO blog when writing about leadership and delegation.

It is extremely good advice.

I have mangled it occasionally by employing excellent dogs and then barking loudly myself anyway, but I continue trying.

Kate is full of these little bits of wisdom. Some literary. Some profound. Some wonderfully irreverent.

She is smart without needing you to know she is smart. Okay, now I am lying. She does want you to know 🙂

Funny.

Kind.

Generous.

Sometimes outrageous.

Sometimes maddening.

Never dull.

And underneath all of it, deeply loving. Deeply caring. When my mum died Kate, who doesn’t do funerals (or cooking) was a deep comfort to me. And more recently also when my dad died.

The real favourite

Because here is the bit that matters.

For all the countries, books, broadcasting, awards, famous interviews and adventures, Kate’s great love is her family.

Her four children. Her grandchildren. The wider Turkington clan.

I am lucky to know and be friends with members of that family and they are, in their own different ways, inspiring people too. Welcoming one of Kate’s gradndaughters across the fnish line at Comrades this year was supr special.

Kate is a matriarch in the proper sense of the word. Not because she controls everybody – God help anyone who tried to control that family – but because her life runs through theirs.

In a 2018 interview Kate said something that perhaps tells you more about her than any list of achievements ever could:

“I don’t have things – my value is in relationships.”

And in Yes, Really! she writes of understanding her role in life: “It was to love and be loved. It was to be strong and to give strength.”

There it is.

That is legacy.

Not the Wikipedia entry.

Not the awards.

Not how many countries you visited.

Not even how many books you wrote.

People.

Family first.

Then friends.

Then the countless people who heard you on the radio, read your writing, attended a talk, travelled with you, drank with you, argued with you, learnt from you or somehow crossed your path.

Kate once described herself simply as being “surrounded by love”.

She is.

Because she has spent a lifetime putting it out into the world.

Old people who are young

I love old people.

Especially old people who are young.

I wrote at the end of last year about how underrated real old age is – the fierceness, perspective and freedom that can come with it. Kate was one of the people I had in mind.

We worship youth far too much.

Youth can be wonderful. It can also be insecure, ignorant, frightened and terribly concerned about what everybody thinks.

Kate has earned the wonderful freedom of not giving a damn about quite a lot of things.

In discussing getting older, she once put it more directly: when you are young you want everyone to like you; when you are old, you don’t care nearly as much. Or as Kate would say – not give a fuck!

There is freedom in that.

But Kate has never confused not giving a damn with not caring.

She cares enormously.

About people.

About South Africa.

About family.

About books.

About learning.

About the world.

She keeps showing up.

A few years ago she told an interviewer that every time she travels, she comes back realising there is no country in the world she would rather live in than South Africa.

That too feels very Kate.

Go everywhere.

Learn from everyone.

And know where home is.

The meaning of life

Kate turns 92.

I hope there are many more trips. More books. More arguments. More appalling puns. More whisky. More slightly mad decisions. More family celebrations. More stories that begin with someone saying, “You will never believe what Kate has done now…”

And yes, I very much intend to be at the 100th.

But Kate has already given me the answer to one of the questions humans have spent thousands of years complicating.

What is the meaning of life?

To live.

Not merely breathe.

Not wait.

Not endlessly prepare for some future version of yourself.

Live.

Be curious. Say yes. Travel. Read. Love people. Make mistakes. Learn. Tell stories. Help others. Laugh at yourself. Keep a few very good friends. Have another adventure.

Things will fall apart.

The moving finger will write.

And still, while we are here, there is life to be lived.

Happy soon to be 92, my very dear Kate.

Love you.

And thank you for showing so many of us how it is done.

Carel