Celebrating Greytonness
The first Greyton Book Club Festival was intimate but well-attended and promises to attract more and more book lovers every year.
Celebrating Greytonness
Posted by Let Luce by Lucille Kemp on 20 Sep 2011, 09:31
Categories: Travel News
In early August this year, it was the first ever Greyton Book Club Festival, and friends and I were lucky enough to be bunking with a Greyton local, in order to experience it.
I was intrigued with the idea of a book club festival. What with the grand scale of the Cape Town Book Festival and Franschhoek Book Festival, a book club festival sounded rather cosy.
We were on the road at 7am on Saturday and the weather was perfect. There’s something great about travelling with photographers – as the little accents of Western Cape countryside caught their eye, I was forced to notice them as well.
Nature’s flower bed of colour click click, the dramatic shadows cast across mountains from a sunrise, distant snow-capped peaks click... It was going to be a good day.
We arrived in Greyton around 9am, and though it is a gorgeous little Overberg village by a river, Greyton has a distinct Cape Town flavour with its funky stores that sell clothing and cake, the well-stocked antique shop, the High Street’s rustic décor that looks rather designer, its organic café and of course its market, which is the heart beat of Greyton on a Saturday. I felt it the minute we parked the car and stretched our legs. I was feeling so grateful to be scooped from my fish bowl (Cape Town’s bustling city bowl that I call home) that I could have jumped, with all fours, onto the horse-drawn carriage that was ferrying people to and from the market, but I calmed myself and walked the 10 paces instead.
The market is obviously popular because I even bumped into a friend, who was staying in Botriver for the weekend, who’d come to town solely to grab some market delectables.
Above: The Greyton market attracted both book lovers and passer's by looking for a sweet or savoury snack.
The market’s main attraction has got to be the lemon stand with its pancakes of lemon curd, cinnamon and sugar, limoncello and homemade lemonade on sale, if I had drawn enough cash I would have bought one of everything in lemon, a handbag made out of jeans, as well as a chunk of twelve-month-old cheddar. Finding myself shivering in the shade while sampling olives, I tried to figure out what it is that makes Greyton feel so familiar. Then I overheard a woman that I can only imagine is a local, as she had he dogs with her, saying to her friend, “This cold is nothing, when I was in St Pietersburg, the chill factor was -53 degrees celcius…” And that’s it – Greyton is country but not country-bumpkin country, it’s more like continental country, making it immediately palatable for all seasoned urbanites – South African or not.
The real main attraction
Olive pips in the bin and on we ambled to the festival, which was to quietly take place behind a variety of closed doors. I liked the fact that there was more than one venue, that the festival was taking place in the town not at a convention centre and that most of the talks flowed on from each other so you had time to get to the next one and could attend all the sessions if you liked. I was also excited because I love being around writers, the really good ones are never stuffy and always have more wit than wordiness to even out the fact that they’re talking about themselves.
So the day went: Wordsworth Books at the Post House chatting about the top 10 books, the speaker naturally knew a helluva lot and even asked us what our favourites were, so you were bound to get new titles for your reading list. Then, packed like sardines in the Vintage and Vogue “wardrobe”, we laughed as we listened to the poetry readings. Kids of Nature had a 10-year old and nine year old telling us about their book Enya & James in the land of Magic at Vanilla Café, which is warm, inviting, vibey and spacious with its grassy outside area that will definitely become the watering hole for the masses in book club festivals to come.
Above: Lauren Beukes and Sarah Lotz casually chat about their writing. Photo by: Michael Hammond
Then off to hear about how to get published by internationally-acclaimed author Christopher Hope, as well as an Indian cooking demonstration at The Ladle.
Later in the afternoon Margie Orford and Sarah Lotz bounced off each other about how they write their crime novels. And straight after, the famed Lauren Beukes, who is enjoying her time in the sun with Zoo City, talked a bit about the writing of this sci-fi story. The weekend concluded on Sunday with Petra Vandecasteele talking about her book In Celebration of Fynbos, she delighted us with tales and had us tasting buchu, wild garlic, dagga and rooibos, which incidentally are all good for hangovers…
Greyton Book Club Festival was a success – it was intimate but relatively well-attended; if you know anything about Cape Town you’ll know that people can be slow in catching on so this winning formula just needs time to bring in the numbers. The festival was a scene as I had imagined it, bunches of friends who road-tripped to Greyton for the weekend to have conversations about books they loved, and make a good time of it. So I decided, upon being safely returned to my fish bowl, that I’d start a book club, hire a car and be back next year.
