Poetic Licence

It has been a week of extremes – of local and international news, of temperatures, highs and lows. Although not by any means always bad, extremes can certainly prove uncomfortable. Much depends upon one’s circumstances, one’s point of view. And perhaps on one’s health.

The forty-degree temperatures of recent days, for example, can seem horribly oppressive, and people with respiratory difficulties must pray for relief. Yet our UK visitors, fresh from the dark and freezing depths of winter, are reveling in the heat. For them it’s a welcome escape.

They and I have just returned from another extreme – this time one of geography. We took a meandering road trip down to the southern tip of the African continent, the superbly inspiring Cape Agulhas where two oceans, the Indian and Atlantic, meet, producing some enormous winter storms and notoriously powerful ‘rogue’ waves, which can approach 30 metres in height, enough to swamp even large vessels. Extreme indeed.

For us, though, in high summer, the coast’s cooling breezes were actually a relief from the torrid weight of our local temperatures.

Through this process I have developed my people skills. I am a very calm person and this helps me to communicate clearly and work closely with my colleagues. I am also very good at handling customers, both praising and complaining. I have developed business skills and like to consider new ideas to draw in customers in.

What do you most enjoy about working at Essence?

I love working with people – whether customers or co-workers. The owners of Essence have been so kind to their employees. We really work as a team at Essence and this has made working here a pleasure.

As newly-appointed manager of Essence, what is your role in ensuring that the café is successful?

In addition to communication between staff, coordinating activities and keeping customers happy, it is my responsibility to promote our menu with specials and new products to enhance our offerings. There is scope to mix up the menu and offer our home-made mushroom and pepper sauces to accompany our excellent mains. In this way, it is my job to put Essence on the map. I also need to ensure that our customers are satisfied with their experience at all times, following up after they have received their meals and serving them

Watching the surf roll in deceptively placidly across thousands of miles of southern ocean, I found myself remembering a wonderful poem by Welsh poet Sheenagh Pugh. Featured in my 2013 international anthology called For Rhino in a Shrinking World (https://rhinoanthology.wordpress. com), it celebrates the natural world’s incredible ability to survive, and even flourish, in some of earth’s most inhospitable places:

Extremophile

Two miles below the light, bacteria live without sun, thrive on sulphur in a cave of radioactive rock, and, blind in the night of the ocean floor, molluscs that feed only on wood wait for wrecks. White tubeworms heap in snowdrifts around hydrothermal vents, at home in scalding heat. Lichens encroach on Antarctic valleys where no rain ever fell. There is nowhere life cannot take hold, nowhere so salt, so cold, so acid, but some chancer will be there, flourishing on bare stone, getting by, gleaning a sparse living from marine snow, scavenging light from translucent quartz, as if lack and hardship could do nothing but quicken it, this urge to cling on in the cracks of the world, or as if this world sophistication of the British upper classes, despite all the Etons and Oxfords and London clubs.

Spare

By Prince Harry (Ghostwriter: J.R. Moehringer)

Publ. Bantam

402 pages

It is quite a list, and it is not even complete:

“Revenge - Meghan and Harry and The War

Between the Windsors”, by Tom Bower

“Harry: Conversations with the Prince”, by Angela Levin

“Meghan and Harry: the real story”, by Lady Colin Campbell

“Meghan – A Hollywood Princess”, by Andrew Morton

“Meghan And the Unmasking of The Monarchy”, by Andrew Morton, again

“Finding Freedom: Harry and Meghan and the Making of a Modern Family”, by Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand

How many books on Harry and Meghan can we possibly deal with?

And now we have “Spare’, by the Prince himself –ghostwritten by J.R. Moehringer. This unexpectedly well-written memoir reminds me of a satirical novel, written by Nancy Mitford in 1959, called “The Blessing”. A young high-born English lady marries a French aristocrat and goes to live with him in Paris. It all ends in tears. What Mitford (herself a member of British high society) explores here is the lack of

And yes, if there is one quality that Prince Henry Charles Albert David, Duke of Sussex, Earl of Dumbarton, Baron Kilkeel singularly lacks, it’s sophistication. This results in his referring to himself as Prince Harry, and creating a kind of every day “Game of Thrones” in which (amongst others) he consistently calls the heir “Willy”, the present King ”Pa”, and the late Queen Mother “Gan-Gan.”

It is also this lack of sophistication that diminishes the three-act tragedy (Childhood, Army and Meghan) that Harry tries to present to us. Far from being the tragic, troubled Prince Hamlet that he would like to be, he is far more like the simple Snout in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, which he played in a production at Eton. (Apparently, Pa laughed loudly – at all the wrong places, as Harry ruefully notes. That takes a right royal talent!)

What took me by surprise was that all those years at Eton, all those shooting parties and Christmases at Balmoral, and all that hobnobbing and high jinks in high society on both sides of the Atlantic did not leave the smallest patina of style and decorum.

The First Act is simply a tale of the scampish events in the life of a young boy growing up in a privileged society, no different to any other not-especiallybright kid. Even the death of Diana does not affect him at that time, because he cannot bring himself to believe that she is dead. The actuality is that he was an eleven-year-old boy, walking behind the coffin of his mother, watched by the eyes of millions of people all over the world. There is a curious void around his relationship with Diana, apart from his hatred of the paparazzi that he thinks drove her to with a smile. These are behaviours and qualities that I must instil in my co-workers. What do you anticipate will be the greatest challenge for you? itself, so various, so not to be spared as it is, were the impetus never to leave it.

Loadshedding is definitely our greatest challenge. It affects the card machines and coffee machines. It is difficult to plan around this uncertainty and keep customers happy in the midst of a crisis. Tourists are not always as forgiving of circumstances.

In your opinion, what makes Essence a special café?

Essence is on the main road and has been here for a long time. People know about the café and we have regulars. On Sundays, bikers stop at the café for breakfast – which has been a longstanding tradition. This sort of regularity puts Essence on the map and helps us to build a good reputation and client base. Which item on the menu would you highly recommend for breakfast?

Although it is not the only spectacular option, I can highly recommend the Eggs Benedict. It is served on an English muffin, with bacon or salmon and Hollandaise sauce. It is loved by many of our regular customers.

Sheenagh Pugh from the collection Short Days, Long Shadows (Seren Books, 2013)

And another famous poem, by Sylvia Plath, makes a similar argument from a different standpoint: that of simple, “bland-mannered” mushrooms growing unobtrusively in absolute darkness. Their “[s]oft fists insist on/ heaving the needles,/ the leafy bedding,/ even the paving” yet “shall by morning/ inherit the earth”.

Mushrooms

Overnight, very whitely, discreetly, very quietly our toes, our noses take hold on the loam, acquire the air.

Nobody sees us, stops us, betrays us; the small grains make room.

Soft fists insist on heaving the needles, the leafy bedding, her death. He does not attempt to understand her star quality and her victimhood. Possibly Meghan’s star quality has eclipsed the image of the most iconic woman in the world? even the paving.

The Second Act is even less enlightening in his royal adult education. Adventures in the Okavango, work in Australia, aid in Lesotho and training as a helicopter pilot… It is as if his attention is wandering.

However, the Third Act is where all the action is. Drama turns into soap opera. Meeting Meghan Markle brings out some spark of selfhood in Prince Harry. He grows a beard. He begins his feud with the tabloid press. He begins his feud with the Windsors. His trophy is a Hollywood star. And then, a curious thing begins to happen. His memoir, or confessional, call it what you will, begins to do the work of the paparazzi. He (unwittingly?) provides his greatest enemies, the tabloid press and the “paps” with intimate details of the royal life that they could only dream of. A fistfight with William resulting in a broken necklace and a back injury from a dog bowl. Meghan’s problems with her father. Meghan collapsing in tears on the floor. Anguished royal family confabs. Siblings ignoring each other. Meghan again collapsing in tears on the floor. The birth and public reception of the H&M kids. Et voilà! The champion of privacy has abolished his own.

What is missing is any sense that he might have of his exceptionalism, an awareness of his royal point of view and his seat on the lofty perch. His complaints are those of royalty and his fights with the royal family are often open to ridicule.

However, interviews with Oprah and the alwayshungry public will keep feeding the TV stations.

Our hammers, our rams, earless and eyeless, perfectly voiceless, widen the crannies, shoulder through holes. We diet on water, on crumbs of shadow, bland-mannered, asking little or nothing. So many of us! So many of us!

We are shelves, we are tables, we are meek, we are edible, nudgers and shovers in spite of ourselves. Our kind multiplies: we shall by morning inherit the earth. Our foot’s in the door.

Sylvia Plath from Collected Poems (Faber & Faber, 1981)

The multi-million-dollar Netflix deal will ensure further episodes in the seemingly endless soap opera – and additions to the list of books above. Will they return one day to reclaim their royal titles when King Willy is on the throne? Who knows?

Tune in, stream and read – all will be revealed in the next 36 instalments.