Episode 28 : Still Saying Yes

Welcome to Life Chapters, Money Choices, the podcast where we travel through life’s big transitions. I think that’s appropriate today because I’m joined, along with my co-host Kim Potgieter, by someone who has made travel very central to her life. So much of modern life seems obsessed with slowing down, stepping back and disappearing at a certain age. But I think we’ve got that script absolutely wrong. What if later life could be all about reinvention, or continuing what you love most? About more curiosity, more movement and more meaning. Our guest today is someone who’s lived that with a bit of panache and substance and irreverence, and more than a little adventure. Kate Turkington is one of South Africa’s best-known broadcasters, travellers and travel writers. She was the first woman to be inducted into the South African MTN Radio Hall of Fame as well. Before I make her blush too much, over decades she has really been one of the most remarkable travel bloggers, vloggers and writers this country has ever produced. And at 90, she is still going strong.

Kate Turkington

Nearly 92.

Michael Avery

Nearly 92, there we go. From Antarctica to Tibet to Roggeveld and the Kalahari, it’s great to have you here in my little Parkview studio, Kate.

Kate Turkington

After an introduction like that, I can hardly wait to hear myself speak.

Michael Avery

We’ve invited you on because we feel you’re an inspiration in the way you’ve lived your life. What would you say has been the core golden thread running through a life as a broadcaster, a writer and a mother?

Kate Turkington

Yes, I know that sounds so arrogant, but it isn’t. I could tell you lots of things I’m bad at. I have a superb memory, but I have no memory for names. Yesterday I was out with a grandson. I called him three different names before I got to the right name. But so what? Otherwise, no, I think take every opportunity, make every opportunity. Here we are, I’ve come to something. Take every opportunity, make every opportunity. When I arrived in the UK, I wrote to ITV. I was 29 years old. I’d been teaching, living in Nigeria, and I wrote to ITV and said, “Anything I can do?” They said, “Come in for an interview.” I went in for an interview. In no time at all, I was co-hosting an evening show called Roundabout Six, and that’s how my broadcasting career started. Then the BBC poached me, actually. I went to World Service, which was fantastic radio, and then from there to BBC television.

Michael Avery

I’ve got to ask you, and I’ve got to digress a bit if you’ll allow me to, but someone who has formerly worked for the BBC, and I’m sure follows current affairs very closely as you do, what did you make of the recent furore around the censoring of Donald Trump and the lawsuit, and just what has happened to the BBC editorially over the last while?

Kate Turkington

I’m hoping, because I’m one of these people who still has a lot of innocence, faith and trust in people, that they’ll get rid of the wussy elements and come back to where they were. Let me give you another example. When I first started working for World Service, I was sent up to the north of England to interview a shoe factory. This was the 1960s, during the Cold War. Remember, you probably don’t remember, you’re too young, when we had nothing to do with Russia or whatever. Anyway, I was sent up to interview the head of this factory because they had got a huge contract, a multi-million rand contract, with, shock horror, Russia. So off I go and had a little car interview, and he was very nice. He said, “Would you like some shoes?” I said, “Oh, yes please.” So I walked out with six gorgeous pairs of shoes, drove all the way back to London, and had a brilliant producer who, looking back on it, was a kind of mentor. The word mentor wasn’t invented in the sixties. I said to her, “Guess what? I’ve got six pairs of shoes.” She said, “Get in your car, drive back and give them back.” That’s how there really was no such thing as a free lunch.

Michael Avery

Yes, yes.

Kate Turkington

Never.

Michael Avery

Have you found in your career as a travel writer that you’ve ever been offered inducements to write a particular kind of story? “We’ll fly you first class,” for example.

Kate Turkington

I think my reputation preceded me. The latest book has just come out, which is Fodor’s Essential Africa. A lot of people in South Africa don’t know Fodor’s, one of the biggest travel companies in the world. Just to give you another example, it gets four million visits a month to its website in America. They put out over 300 guidebooks. I’ve been writing for them, and Tara too, my daughter Tara joined too, for 25 or 30 years. So you can ask me anything about sub-Saharan Africa. And you know, Michael, it’s a bit like you and Kim and your professions. What have you got? All you’ve got is your reputation. Your reputation is all you’ve got. Once you besmirch that, or once somehow you get a bad word, that’s the end of your career. So that’s a very long answer to your question, which is no, I haven’t.

Michael Avery

So I want to take you a little bit further back to your earliest money memory. And I know money is not what drives Kate Turkington at all. But do you have an early money memory as a child growing up? Was there a lot around? Was it something you discussed around the dinner table?

Kate Turkington

I was an evacuee at four. I was sent away with a million and a half other children from London with a brown paper label tied onto our coats. What happened at the beginning of World War II? England had a plan to evacuate all the children from London. You’ve got to remember, America didn’t come into the war for about three years, and only because they were forced in by Pearl Harbor. So Britain and France and Europe fought alone. And I said to my mother, “But how could you have sent us away?” I was four, my sister was six. She said, “They were dropping leaflets from the sky. The Germans are coming, we’re going to be invaded,” because Britain really thought they were going to be invaded. So it was a superb British operation. In four days, they evacuated one and a half million children from London. We didn’t know where we were going. Our parents didn’t know where we were going. You were sent to a station. Now, here’s an interesting thing. I told you I had a superb memory. I was four, I can remember being three. The six months I was evacuated, I have absolutely no memory of. And a shrink would call it classic, totally classic block-out. So for six months we were evacuated from London. So there was no money. My first pocket money came when my mother and father, for the first time in their lives, made money because they worked on the munition lines. We moved out of London to Hertfordshire and they worked on munition lines. So for once there was some money. I’d be given half a crown, which is the equivalent of 25 cents, once a week, saved it all up, and went to London on the train every month to the theatre. So I saw every production, with a very good friend, of every great actor and actress of that time, from Laurence Olivier to Vivien Leigh to John Gielgud, you name it. So that was my earliest memory of money.

Michael Avery

Do you think, given that, I mean, that kind of experience is very difficult for us to comprehend in a world where, yes, we see war in the Middle East and we see war. But it’s a much easier world in the main. I know a lot of the woke generation will complain, and I do think there’s a certain element of us being desensitised to just how hard life actually can be. And totally spoiled. Let’s call a spade a spade. But do you think that built a certain resilience in your ability to be able to ricochet around through your career, land on your feet and say, right, you know?

Kate Turkington

No, I think genes play a certain part. My maternal grandfather was the captain of a sailing ship, and he lived with us during the war when he was old. He used to say, “In my day, the ships were made of wood and the men were made of iron. Now they’re made of iron.” And he literally sailed with Joseph Conrad. He sailed round the world, and finally he fell off the mast in Canada and broke his leg. The nearest port, unbelievably, was Buenos Aires. You’ve got to remember, this was a sailing ship with sails. And he taught himself English in the three months it took. For some reason we cannot find out, and I have his obituary from the Port of London Authority where he ended up, we have no idea how a Swedish sea captain came to be transferred to the Royal Greenwich Naval Hospital in London. That’s what happened. And he was nursed by my grandmother, who was a Yorkshire witch, and that’s how, so you asked me about ricocheting and resilience.

Michael Avery

I think genetics is good.

Kate Turkington

And just to further that, at the end of World War II, my mother had, you couldn’t travel, there was no such thing as holidays during 1940 to 1945. You couldn’t go anywhere. But she had been brought up in this house on what is now Canary Wharf. It used to be called the Isle of Dogs. So she remembered the sailing ships coming in. She remembered the house being full of foreign sailors. There were monkeys, parrots, so the idea of travel was there. About six months after the end of the war in 1945, having never travelled in her life, she bought six tins of Nescafé and six pairs of nylons, and she said to my father and sister and me, “I’m going to France.” And off she went to France with her treasures. Can you imagine nylons and coffee in post-war Paris? And she found a little pension there. She didn’t speak a word of French, got quite pally with the people, and eventually stayed a month because after two weeks they said, “We’re going on holiday, will you mind the pension for us?” And I remember her walking back down a road, Foward Avenue, with a little sort of French hat. That was it. She’d never done anything like that in her life. But it didn’t surprise us. So that’s, I have one of my daughters now who’s about to climb Kilimanjaro. We’re all the same. If somebody says to me today, “Come to Ulaanbaatar,” where I’ve always wanted to go in Mongolia, I’d go. I’d think, you might be a bit creaky, but you know what? I’ll go. I’ve just come back from Tunisia. So yes, resilience perhaps you learn, but it’s also inbred and it’s having role models.

Michael Avery

When you see it and you’re exposed to it from a young age, it almost becomes like, well, it’s what people did.

Kate Turkington

Other mothers didn’t do it.

Michael Avery

Have you ever, and I don’t want to go through your entire career because we haven’t got time, babe, we’ll do the first 48-hour podcast, I’m sure, but have you ever considered slowing down? Because it’s the one thing that is remarkable about your story.

Kate Turkington

You don’t have to continue. No is the answer. Because if somebody asks me to do something, I’ve just been invited to Kafue, where I’ve never been, in Zambia. So of course I’m going to go. I don’t know if this counts as slowing down, but before I would accept lots of invitations and do stuff. Now I’m much more self-indulgent. The only reason I’m sitting with you is because of Kim, and I want to do it. Otherwise, I wouldn’t.

Michael Avery

Yeah.

Kate Turkington

I wouldn’t do it.

Michael Avery

Yeah. Well, Kim, sorry, we’ve kind of left you on the side, I believe.

Kim Potgieter

I’m smiling so much.

Michael Avery

Yeah. So what stands out for you from Kate’s story? And I know she’s an inspiration to you.

Kim Potgieter

Well, we use her as our inspiration as we say yes to a whole lot of new things that we’ve never said yes to before. My friend and I started this thing this year where every month we have to do something different that we would never have done, and we encourage each other to do it. I think, just for myself personally and then working with clients, what I do see is that with all the structure we put into our lives, there is an element of thinking we are controlling our lives. We are not being on what Kate’s on. If I listen to Kate, she’s on an adventure. She sees her life as an adventure from that first time when she shares her money memory. She says it didn’t have an impact, but it did. What did she do when she got her pocket money? She went to the theatre because the theatre was of the highest value to Kate. And I think this is a lesson for all of us. I’m sitting here learning this morning. I always learn every time I have a discussion with Kate, and I wish I was more like her. But deep down inside myself, there’s also this little girl who worked out that she needed to plan her life because if she planned her life, she felt like she was more in control. Now, as I’ve got into my 50s, I realise that control is an illusion. It is a complete illusion, and I am really encouraging myself for my next chapter to have a little bit more of what Kate’s got, where I will see an opportunity and take it. And I plan to. Her daughter Tara is going to climb Kilimanjaro. I was in the Amazon with her in April, because that, for me, will make this next chapter way more exciting. And I think maybe, just for our listeners, you might not be Kate and you might not be me, because we probably sit on quite different extremes. But at the same time, for yourself, potentially just thinking, what could you be saying yes to, as opposed to just the responsibilities that we’re doing and that stereotype we’ve got of going into retirement, that stereotype of midlife? I always call it, let’s recalibrate it, relook at it. We don’t have to stick to what we’ve been doing just because we’ve been doing it.

Michael Avery

Yeah.

Kate Turkington

But one of my grandsons, the one who’s just become a father, got married two years ago, did his MBA. He said, “If I’m going to do an MBA, then we can start having children.” He’s the absolute opposite of me. Mind you, his father’s a lawyer, so say no more. But he’s got his life planned out, and I can remember him sitting, I hope he doesn’t hear this, he’s in finance, when they first got engaged, he and his gorgeous wife, saying they’re going to have three children, and they’re going to do this and that. And I’m sitting there thinking, keep your mouth shut, Kate, keep your mouth shut. Life happens, baby. Life happens. Surely if you plan your life to such a degree, and then the plans don’t work out…

Michael Avery

You’re setting yourself up.

Kate Turkington

You’re just going to need plan B, Michael.

Kim Potgieter

So for me, goal-setting, and I do a lot of goal-setting with people in general, is important because what I have seen is that people have so many regrets later in life. They end up living the plans that other people had for them, as opposed to the plans they had for themselves. So a question I always ask people is: what will their next chapter look like if it turns out well? And Kate, so many people don’t know what that is. Now, if they were like you and they were adventurous and going off and trying new things and doing new things, I could sit here and go, your way is the only way to do it. But unfortunately, what I see more commonly than the discussion we’re having today is people who make their worlds too small. People who don’t see it as an adventure. They see all this responsibility, and responsibility is big, and they’ve got the world on their shoulders. So I think there’s a kind of balance between you and I. I mean, Kate did ask me, “Kim, why would you ask me to be on a money programme when I don’t have money? I don’t do money.” And I got Kate a few years ago to come and speak to a group of clients. We had a room full of a hundred of our clients, and she opened with, “I don’t do money, and I don’t know why Kim’s actually got me here.” But I think it’s more that life that you’ve got, that will, that resilience, that sense of adventure and curiosity. I’m just hoping it will have a little bit of a contagious energy.

Kate Turkington

Yes, and I have quoted the Dalai Lama before, and I’ve been lucky enough to interview him twice. Once with two other people, once with more people. He said, “The past is gone. You learn from it, but it’s gone. The future never comes.” Carpe diem, he didn’t say carpe diem, he doesn’t speak that. Carpe diem, seize the day, and do your best in the moment. It’s just the most beautiful thing: the future never comes. Where are you? Where are we now? We’re in the present, so make the most of it. As I always say, I might trip over a doorstep and break my neck on the way out. So what? I can’t control it.

Michael Avery

So interesting. Dr Curtie Ranshot, who we had on the show, helps people practise more mindful, conscious, in-the-moment living. He stressed that, not nearly as articulately as you referenced the Dalai Lama, but in that context of being overwhelmed by responsibility, the future, the past, and not being able to just live in the moment.

Kate Turkington

To take joy. Just the sunshine today and the fact it’s a beautiful day. Yesterday I was standing at my door. I’ve been president of BirdLife Sandton for about 15 years. I’m not a twitcher. I was standing at my door and I have a little courtyard, and a fiscal shrike, you may not know the bird, is a little bird the size of a sparrow, but it’s fierce. So I’m just standing there in the sunshine. This bird swoops down into my courtyard, stabs a baby lizard, flies up onto the wall, juggles it about, and swallows it. I immediately WhatsApped all my family because we all love birds. Now that was the highlight. When I do my five questions at night, I always ask myself five questions. That was my highlight of the day, seeing that little bird in action.

Michael Avery

Tell me a little bit more about that. Is it a daily habit, a ritual, a routine?

Kate Turkington

I have five questions. First of all, what am I grateful for? And sometimes it’s same old, same old, because I have wonderful family and wonderful friends, but it might be something special. Yesterday, one of my family went through quite a serious operation. She came through fine. That was my highlight yesterday.

Michael Avery

I’m pleased to hear that.

Kate Turkington

Question number three is, what have I learned? So it might be, I’ve just finished rereading Hannibal, the historical novel. I’d forgotten so much Roman history. Was I kind? Was I kind to somebody today? Yes, I was. And finally, when did I feel most alive? Now sometimes there isn’t a highlight. There’s always gratitude, but sometimes there isn’t a highlight. Learning is always there. One learns. I can’t remember what wise philosopher said it, it might have been Plato, but the older you get, the more you realise how little you know.

Michael Avery

Yeah.

Kate Turkington

You really do. So it’s a nice way to… I tap myself on the shoulder and say, “Well done, body,” because it’s a pretty good, nimble body. Well done, body. Then I do my five questions. Then I go into what the Buddhists call monkey brain. My brain goes all over the place, thinking of all sorts of things. I was doing a toast to Jonathan Ball, the publishing company that has been in business for 50 years and has become, as I said, a cultural institution.

Michael Avery

Oh, absolutely.

Kate Turkington

But I was telling stories of authors I’d been with. And just remembering that, once in Ireland, I went to an Irish island with the Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney, the Irish poet. We went to a lake island in County Antrim with another poet called Michael Wood, and we drank a lot of Bushmills whiskey. Seamus Heaney composed, you must read his poetry, it’s wonderful, easy to read, poignant, brilliant. So I became a Nobel Prize winner. He composed this poem as the stars were coming up. It was a nice Irish evening. We drank more. But Seamus Heaney composed this perfect four-line poem. When we woke up the next morning, not one of us could remember a word. But we enjoyed the day. Carpe diem, and the past is gone.

Michael Avery

Yeah, no, there is such a lesson in that seemingly simple message, and it really is about being curious. Because I think, almost, you say, “Well, why am I on a financial money podcast?” I think curiosity is a financial planning tool. Remaining curious allows you to remain engaged. It helps you to set goals if you want to, if something piques your interest. It gives you a bit of structure, but also in a way that isn’t overly controlling. And I think that’s why I like curiosity, Kim. It’s almost a balance between the yin and the yang that you and Kate represent. Just as we wrap up, what is the parting shot for listeners who’ve just had a little glimpse into Kate Turkington’s life and story?

Kim Potgieter

Well, I think her five questions are great. I think it’s definitely something to encourage all of us to think about in the evening. I love it, thanking your body. Thanking your body for getting you through the day. And then, from what I get from Kate, maybe I could take, and the listeners can take, just a little bit more sense of adventure when we are looking at different opportunities. Just do it. Do it. Just do it.

Michael Avery

I love it. We’ll leave it there. I think it’s a great way to end. I was reading Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast in the Luxembourg Gardens, and I just happened to come across it in this cute little French bookstore that had a tiny little English section. We had other plans for the day, and I thought, well, let’s do it. There we go, Kate, I’m going to pass that over to you. But he recounts his early years as a struggling writer, if he ever struggled, really, to write.

Kate Turkington

And his boat, that he went to fish in, there was his chair, his rods, and a bar with his bottles of rum, exactly as it was. He was quite a badass, but he wrote beautifully.

Michael Avery

He really did. He stripped everything down to its essence, but he lived in the moment, and I think that is the overriding lesson for me. And those five questions. Fantastic. Kate Turkington, it has been a real pleasure having you on Life Chapters, Money Choices. Thanks so much for your time and for your inspiring journey and story. Kim, as always, great having you on the podcast.

Kim Potgieter

I’ve learned lots today.

Michael Avery

And that’s what I’m going to be very grateful for as well when I go to bed tonight and ask myself those five questions. Well, that’s where we’ll leave it for this week. Remember to like, subscribe and share. We’ll bring you more insights on Life Chapters, Money Choices in the fortnight. Take care.