Durban - This business of getting older is sorely underrated – particularly in today’s crass and callow world which so worships youth. At 44 – which is impossibly antediluvian to some and extraordinarily fresh-faced to others – it’s clear that one of the benefits of aging is that you know what you like. And like what you know.
Take cars. Best car in the world? The Range Rover – purely for its effortless, aristocratic ethos and the way it conspires to be so much more than the mere sum of its parts.
The car most capable of carving two decades off one’s life? The exuberant firecracker that is the Opel Astra OPC with its ability to make one feel 24, not 44, when pressing on in it.
This same certainty holds when it comes to travel.
Most electric, invigorating city in the world? New York. A bit of a cliché perhaps, but there you have it.
And my own favourite getaway in all of South Africa (and this comes after extensive local travel)? Ardmore Guest Farm in the Champagne Valley in the central Drakensberg.
After all, over the past 17 years I’ve stayed here a score or more times, along the way becoming friends with owner Paul Ross and his delightful English wife Sue.
Large chunks of my addiction-memoir Dystopia – and I almost added “highly acclaimed” and “internationally lauded” but that would be a bit too vomit-inducing, wouldn’t it? – were also written here. Both in the Mountain View cottage in which I regularly ensconced myself during the writing of it, and under the liquid amber tree that shades Ardmore’s front garden, with three of South Africa’s highest peaks rearing up in the background.
And in Dystopia there’s an entire chapter simply called “Ardmore”. Pardon me while I quote from it, less out of shameless narcissism, more because it sums up this mountain retreat that occupies such a seminal place in my psyche.
“I took her (the Pop Icon – as she’s called in the book – my great love) to Ardmore too. I had to. Ardmore Guest Farm in the Drakensberg, where the serenity hangs like morning mist, and where I had been visiting for over 15 years. Ardmore, where I want my ashes scattered…
“…Ardmore has something of a Goldilocks and the Three Bears quality to it. It’s neither too stupidly, worryingly chintzy for its own good, nor is it alarmingly rustic, and while the accommodation has nothing as crass as TV or telephones, it’s comfortable. The whole of Ardmore is just… comfortable…”
I go on to write thus:
“That last trip to Ardmore with the Pop Icon was sad too. One night she was getting ready for dinner. I was standing outside our double-storey cottage on an Irish-green lawn, smoking a cigarette. Through the upstairs bathroom window I could see her moving around. Daisy and Milo were at my feet. On a far hill a fire – controlled or not, I don’t know – cut a yellow-orange crescent through the winter-dry grassland. The moon was full and my heart should have been too.
“But it was lead-heavy. I was running on premonition-broadband and I knew that I should capture this scene in my brain-archive because The Darkness wasn’t dead, it was just resting. Soon, like three-year-old having a tantrum – a ‘tammy’, as my sister used to call it when her daughter was little – I’d break and destroy all that was good with the Pop Icon…”
Yet since then I’ve thrice returned to Ardmore. Each time with Daisy and Milo, my two little rescue dogs and constant companions, for one of the many allures of the place is that it’s pet-friendly.
The first two trips without The Pop Icon were hard. But the last trip – earlier this month – was cathartic. And it was invigorating to share Paul Ross’s enthusiasm for the seven new cottages just added to Ardmore. Cottages that are housed in a venerable block of stables that at one time accommodated the famed Ardmore ceramics, which has since moved to the Midlands, and which is an entirely separate – and separately owned – enterprise to the guest farm. The rest of the accommodation is in an eclectic selection of rondavels and cottages, from cosy to three-bedroomed, double-storey affairs.
And while there are ample activities to be had at both Ardmore and in the nearby Champagne Valley, the guest farm’s signature is its tangible serenity which perhaps helps explain why half or more of the guests are foreigners. Many of whom, I think, no, know, could easily afford to stay somewhere far splashier and flashier, yet are time and again drawn to Ardmore.
Just as I am.
l Call 036 468 1314, or visit www.ardmore.co.za. Rates start at R495 per person per night, including dinner, bed, breakfast.
Sunday Tribune