The house is in darkness, save for a single reading lamp beside the high-wing back leather chair that I’m nestled in, with a cashmere blanket and a semi-cold cup of coffee. Every now and again a window pane rattles as the thunder announces the streaking lightening outside, as if I hadn’t noticed the rain pitter-pattering on the roof above me. The curtains purposefully haven’t been drawn.

I was out on a date earlier. A blind date set up by mutual friends who seem to know ‘just the perfect’ dinner companion for me. I tend to get a chill running up my spine whenever I hear those words. The last time it was someone I knew. Someone who was the straw on the camels back. I can imagine, that on one of these dates what is there left to say when you’re so tired of talking? If I did, this is what I could say:

“Somewhere in Jo’burg, in a dimly lit room is a man in his early thirties. In his hands a half-read copy of The Hours. Sections of yesterday’s papers are still scattered on the floor, on the sofa, in the bathroom. The warm brown leather chairs, entire walls made of books, and a window that opens out into darkness that is the country side. He’s been living here for a while. He’s thought of moving, but for right now it’s comfortable.

Most of his accent is gone, dulled by a life lived in the city, like a kitchen knife after years of heavy use. But even today, hints of another place still come out as alcohol seeps in. handsome, quite, he’s had a few serious relationships and at least one major heartbreak. It’s been a while since anyone’s managed to surprise him. Sure there are cute guys out there but at this stage of his life he needs more.

He’s a romantic. He’s the one who remembers birthdays and anniversaries, the one who spends hours finding the right present. He likes to see the surprised look on their faces as they open it, a gift that says, “See? I’ve been listening.” He likes to think that the right guy is out there, he’s just not sure.

Somewhere lives a man. He’s a bit of me, and a bit of whom I’d like to meet. An idea of a person that comes to mind whenever I get dumped, go on a bad date, or have sex of the ordinary kind.

He has no clear features or name.

He’s the one.”

It’s still dark outside. The early morning smells come through the open window, and I sitting in my bed with a cover only and a cup of coffee push my thoughts outside into the fresh, clean air of the approaching day. As the words of great writers lay littered around the room, remnants from a weekend filled with poor attempts to regain creativity I woke up to find that you are gone. Where you are, or how long you will be gone and even whom you are going to see are a mystery to me.

In the semi-darkness of the room Peritas, a Great Dane stirs at the foot of the bed. She yawns and stretches and gets comfortable again on the carpet. I roll over too and find comfort in the immortal words of poets both living and dead, who have published their wisdom of love and friendship. The book is old and in the margins I have transcribed initials and dates of friends, lovers and familiar’s past as the words remind me of milestones towards today. I stretch, and yawn and will myself to get out of bed and start today.

I’ve started making lists again – a soft-start of self-imposed self-discipline so that I work towards small, inconceivable goals to get through the days. In starting small I can safely navigate towards the bigger, more important ones. Like yesterday, in the hot spring sun I stood washing the dogs, before washing my car and after going for a bike ride out in the fields. Every morning going forward I will sit and write out what I remember needs doing. And do it before going to bed so that, in seeing achievement I become it.

But I wake up to find you gone. And in that realisation I smile knowing that some part of me is still travelling with you. Where you are going, or how long you will be gone or even who you are seeing is a mystery. But I still have a part of you, and you have a part of me. I draw the curtains back and look forward to a new day. I’ve started writing again and though most of it seems like nonsense, pretty soon it will stop being nonsense and just be the words that have escaped me since I’ve met you.

Be safe, my friend on your journey into the unknown, because in the distance between the darkness and the light, that is when we find ourselves.

“Drop, tuck and roll” were the words of advice that echoed in my head as I fell off the band-wagon and into a burning-bush of common sense. It was to be expected really, as the past few weeks which became months just flew past breaking every speed limit of the possible, that it would careen to an abrupt halt and I would fly overhead and land on my ass. With more than just my ego a little bruised and battered I stood back, adjusted my bespoke suit and re-examined where exactly I had gone wrong.

Strange that most of my summertime mishaps all start at one, single place. This particular stuffy afternoon in mid-July, as I stood beside a bone dry polo field watching the modern day knight’s joust for the prestigious Africa Polo Cup I discovered why emotionally unavailable men should always be avoided. Popping into the loo for a pee he stood there naked as the day he was born with an enticing horn in the showers. Blond, blue eyes and fresh from a Free State farm he was everything I was looking for that afternoon and the coming [sic] weekend.

As June turned to July and then into August, we laboured towards the fast approaching broadcast date for my first TV production the days merged into night and night into morning and the beautiful images, words and ideas magically transformed themselves into a work-of-art. It had taken me three months from meeting to delivery and there it was: the most incredible birthday present imaginable. In the near darkness we sat waiting for the appointed hour with a bottle of [the featured] champagne, a tray of delicate sushi and an air of expectation for the premiere of Belle Époque.

Floating through the Monday, the day of my birthday in a cocoon of self-congratulation, the Tuesday following was a bump back to earth. My production partners decided to change the terms of the original concept and therefore killed the project as it stood. Stunned and shamed with the idea that I would now have to swallow my pride and renegotiate the world’s expectations the drive home was the longest of my life. As always, against my better judgement I turned to him for support. A support that his heart wanted to give, but his head vetoed in fear.

So with my cookie monster in parts northern and foreign for a better part of a month, I remained in the quagmire that was my destination. You see I had focussed so much on the journey that I took my eyes off the end and when I looked up instead of Cannes I was in Caledon and instead of a glittering Lion I was left with a limp poodle. I was allowed one day of disillusioned depression before I was kicked out of bed and into my office. What I did there was immaterial – but I had to be working through the shit to find the silver lining of the dark cloud overhead that hung menacing.

Now almost a month later I have found that silver lining – and learnt how to mine it into a silver bullet to kill my heart’s discontent …

 “Do you ever feel that you’re trying hard to come first without realising that it’s someone else’s race?” he asked me as we drove in the early hours of the morning. It had started to rain again outside and in the silence of the pelting rain against the windscreen I didn’t have any answers only more questions. Questions he seems to pre-empt with the insight that he has gained over the years into my eunuch heart and the searching soul that governs it. For the first time in my 30-something years of searching I found out what it is like to be loved and lost all in the same afternoon. I made him say the words that had remained unspoken for so long. I had to know that what we had wasn’t lost.

 And while the realisation that it gives me no small comfort, the confidence inside that I gained on hearing his words ‘I loved you’ had allowed me emerge back into the world sufficiently to start accepting the friendly invites for coffee again from random, yet handsome, strangers. Usually coffee or dinner ends in good, but unmemorable sex and the pretence of something more is left in the morning along with the trash at the gate. But every now and again, I find myself speeding along life and hit a pothole of memories that reminds me that it wasn’t that long again and that I should slow everything down.

 As I sat on one of the steamer deck-chairs looking up at the dawn breaking on the table shaped mountain, wrapped in a cashmere blanket I got to thinking about the ‘X’ factor. In mathematics we learn that ‘X’ stands for the unknown: A + B = X. But what really is unknown is what plus what equal’s friendship with an ex? Is this an unsolvable equation or is it possible to transform a once passionate love into something that fits nice and easy onto the friendship shelf? As I move into waters unchartered and baring dragons, I couldn’t help but wonder can you be friends with an ex?

 Having touched the veil some years before, it’s been 8-months since we have realised that destiny seems to govern the random events in our lives and that we’d found each other again. I won’t pretend in that first meeting as we sat secluded on a park bench near his office that it was love at first sight. Love came later between us. Between the moonlight and the day dreams and the unconditional sharing of hopes; the fear of knowing and the unknown which kept us stimulated along with the physical and primal expressions of our nature.

 In moments of apparent blasphemous exploration I question why now? Why, when some months ago overwhelmed I fell to my knees as if struck to prayer, but in truth merely deaf and dumb in the realisation that what I wanted more was to find someone who loved me wholly and without reserve. And there, prostrating to no particular deity I cried out as my eunuch heart shattered once again and the memories of a failed love pierced my corporeal body like shrapnel. Wracking sobs lost in the vastness of the desert as my mouth fills with rivulets of arid loam that choked the senses.

 And yet I found an answer to my prayer in him. He who I can no longer call my lover, yet know that he loved me once. And that is enough for the friendship that sustains us through the waxing moonlight that we no longer share under cotton sheets but touch in the daylight before G’d.

After a nasty split from Gucci, the fashion house he turned into a super-brand, Tom Ford has made a film starring Julianne Moore. And no, he says, it won’t be all about sex. Not so long ago, when Tom Ford was planning his funeral — he is very meticulous about everything — he thought that he might like his ’n’ his matching sarcophagi for him and his partner of 23 years, the fashion journalist Richard Buckley. So he asked the architect of his Santa Fe house to draw up some plans. But now he’s thinking maybe no to the sarcophagi and that a more stylish solution might be “simply evaporating”. . .

Anyway, the point is, he’s very comfortable talking about death, which brings us neatly — if I may say so — to all the people who rushed to read the Last Rites over his career after his departure four years ago from that which, I assumed, must not be mentioned (Gucci).“You can imagine what it was like when I left,” he says, seeming totally at ease with the subject. “Even though I could see that the writing was on the wall a good two years before I went. I was suddenly negotiating my contract with people I didn’t know [the billionaire François Pinault’s luxury holding company PPR bought Gucci in 1999]. I had nothing lined up. Literally nothing. You don’t when you’re working on 16 collections a year. It was like a divorce. I was bereft. But I’ve done a lot of work on myself and I’m through it.” Still, it seems tactless to return to Gucci as though it still defines him. Since leaving he has launched perfumes, eyewear and, two years ago, an exceedingly upscale menswear line that he introduced from an exceedingly upscale wood-panelled store on Madison Avenue. He’s also just finished editing his first feature film, A Single Man, with Colin Firth, Julianne Moore, Matthew Goode and Nicholas Hoult, late of Skins, performing a screenplay that Ford himself adapted from Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel.

It’s because of the latest perfume, Bois Maroccain that we’re here in the personal shopping salon at Selfridges in London, as the crowds gather down on the ground floor waiting for him to appear and sign their bottles. Perhaps he’ll never break completely free from the Gucci legacy. The mass hysteria that his departure provoked in fashion ranks — where Ford’s good-natured, pheromone-sozzled image and imagery had turned him into a sort of George Clooney figurehead — lead, about two years later, to quite a backlash. He was vilified for having fired the Yves Saint Laurent creative director Alber Elbaz (who is now a star at Lanvin) when the Gucci group bought it in 2000, and installing himself in the position. “But the board weren’t going to approve the sale unless I was at the helm,” he says now. Then two years ago, when Ford launched his cherished Tom Ford Menswear line, The New York Times slated it and the new store concept — as in, pelted it with boulders the size of meteorites. “You have to laugh,” wrote Horacio Silva. “An unintentionally hilarious parody of a pretentious Madison Avenue boutique, the store reeks of arriviste Anglophile posturing dressed up as gentlemanly refinement.”

Naturally, Ford looks incredulous when I ask him what it was like living through the backlash that began to loom over any conversation about him approximately two years after he left Gucci. “There was a backlash?” he asks innocently. It’s almost plausible, too. This is a man who could sell merkins to a nunnery — and let’s face it, he made a pretty good fist of doing just that in those infamous Gucci ads where the model’s, um, nether topiary was shaved into a G. I should say at this point that Ford’s shirt is unbuttoned only four buttons instead of the usual five, there is a notable lack of prominent chest hair and all in all, he looks comparatively chaste and butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-his-mouth. Even so, the “What backlash?” shtick isn’t entirely convincing. When I saw him at a party two years ago he launched into an extended, if characteristically amusing rant about certain fashion journalists and their inability to “get” him. “True. And I wasn’t even drunk.”

Thing is, he reads everything. Not just Isherwood and Sartre, but every review. And they niggle him. And it niggles him that they niggle him. Or it did. “I had a mid-life crisis for about seven years,” he says. He’s almost 48 now and wearing ridiculously well. Actually, not ridiculously: the Botox is down to a minimum and although he says he’s 5lb overweight (he ate a lot of doughnuts during filming) he looks über Tom Ford-ish. But then his mother, Shirley, in her 70s, is still feisty and now has a husband who is 15 years her junior. “She got sick of her husbands dying on her.”

Ford’s business model since leaving Gucci, while unconventional, is a clever one. As he puts it, he worked backwards. “Of course I knew that there were people laughing and saying ha-ha look, he’s doing eyewear now and he used to be the big ‘I am’, but I knew where I was going and it didn’t bother me.” Most designers slog away building their own brands and then, when their name has sufficient traction in the marketplace, broker lucrative licensing deals so that they can finally make some serious money. Ford, despite never putting his name over the door at Gucci, already had the name. Plus he’s done what few dare — trespassed from fashion into film. That’s brave. Or insane, as he knows. He told Moore, whom he’s dressed for years, that she was sweet do his film. “And she said, ‘I’m not doing it to be sweet. I like the script’. I’m sure she called her agent though to check it wouldn’t be career death.”

Well, the Last Rites-readers should see the hoards of customers who have queued patiently in Selfridges, some for hours, to see him. The men are dressed identically to their hero — black suits with big shoulders, slim waists and narrow sleeves, crisp shirts unbuttoned enough to invite comment and stares, careful lack of tie (they give Ford headaches). His bodyguards and the male models, with their obligatory Ford-ian deep side partings, are all in black. But so are the women. They’re wearing heels, too — in the middle of a Tube strike. It would be easy to laugh at the entourage and the blacked-out Bentley in which I saw Ford arrive.

I confess that I did have a little fond chuckle, especially when he told me about the lecture he delivered two years ago to his fellow luxury purveyors on the importance of green issues. He is a star in a (fashion) world of diminishing figures. He’s clever and witty and he always laughs at himself. Yes, he got on his private plane after the conference. “But look, if they did hybrid Bentleys I’d be the first to get one.” The fact that men still want to dress like him and women wish he was still making clothes for them suggests that, verily, the cult of Ford lives on. So much so that his one perfume counter in Selfridges generated £1.5 million last year, more than any other perfume counters in the department store. He hasn’t even been around to plug the perfumes lately, having been sequestered away in Los Angeles since October making A Single Man.

Mind you, placing the bottle of Tom Ford for Men scent between a pair of breasts in the ad campaign probably didn’t hurt sales. It always comes back to sex with Ford. “No it doesn’t,” he says, looking just a teeny bit injured (although under the subtle lighting of the personal shopping salon, it’s hard to be certain). What about the pictures of him in Out magazine, showing him naked in a shower with a bevy of other buff male bodies? “Probably shouldn’t have done those,” he says. Or the Vanity Fair cover that he art directed, of him sandwiched between a naked Scarlett Johansson and a naked Keira Knightley?

“How else are you going to sell perfume to heterosexual men?” he asks, sweetly side-stepping. “Put the bottle where they want to look.” He sighs. “I hate talking about sex.” (News to me. He’s a latter-day compendium of smart-aleck aphorisms on everything from genitalia to how we are all on a sliding, shifting scale of gender bias). “Thing is, people look much better naked. They’re all the same colour and they can’t screw up. You see someone at the gym and they look great. Then they put on their clothes.” There is precious little overt sex in A Single Man, the film of which we must not talk, but do anyway. Ford would like to make a film every three years.

It’s very compatible with designing, as he sees it, because it’s so slow. “And a lot of the processes are the same.” Years of directing ad campaigns and styling shows meant that he knew how to frame a picture. And his years as an actor (“a terrible one. I got about as far as TV commercials”) helped him to understand characterisation. How he resisted interfering with the costumes — it’s set in 1962, for God’s sake — I’ll never know, but he promises that he left Arianne Phillips, the Oscar-nominated costume designer of Walk the Line, to get on with it. Colin Firth is wearing Tom Ford menswear, however. At a minimum of £3,000 for a suit, Firth presumably enjoyed every moment. Now that Ford is back in London, where his design team is based, he’ll be concentrating on his designer wear for the next year.

 “What I’m doing with the menswear is the opposite of what we did at Gucci, where we democratised luxury. But it stops being luxury when it’s available in every airport. This is about the highest quality, incremental changes each season and the best service.” It seems to be on an upwards trajectory, notwithstanding the current economics. One Brit recently ordered 23 suits from the Madison Avenue store and there are more Tom Ford for Men stores popping up around the world like floating champagne corks.

There are still those pesky reviews, however. “Do you know a journalist from L’Official asked me this morning why I thought I had had such a lack of success at YSL and I said, ‘Where did this myth about lack of success at YSL start?’ We were doubling sales each season. Any losses were calculated because we were opening up stores all over the world.” Oh, well. He says the only validation that counts now are his own — and Richard’s. “Unfortunately, Richard hardly ever has anything nice to say about my work. It’s my mother all over again. In psychoanalytic terms, it’s called the horrible familiar.” He’ll see a lot of horrible familiars in the front row if and when he does women swear, I say. (Obviously he is going to do women swear, but he’s being uncharacteristically coy about it).

“Hah, that’s just it. I won’t be doing shows. Ever. Again,” he says triumphantly. “I don’t want my designs to be shaped by journalists any more. Do you know why I launched this menswear line? Because I couldn’t find anything to wear. That whole obsession with youth, with new, new, new — it’s giving us clothes no one can wear. As for the business model that I followed at Gucci — the new this, the It that, the let’s get it on a celebrity and shoot her in front of a logo, it was getting old then. Now it’s really old.”

The question is, I suppose, why, with so much critical and commercial success, does he care so much about negative reviews — and why, if they make his stomach churn, as he says they did when he was designing Gucci and YSL, is he launching himself at the mercy of film critics ? “Some things you do for money. Others you do because you have to. It was only when I left Gucci that I realised how much I loved creating and having a forum for my ideas.” I think too, that although he says breezily, “I’m not the most creative designer, I’m intuitive,” it probably irks him that others sometimes take him at his word.

At Gucci and YSL, he was at times, a great designer, and never less than interesting. Don’t underestimate intuition either — it enabled him to deliver the right look at the right time for a decade. When he arrived at Gucci, the company was barely able to scrape together the cash for a new photocopier; by the time he left, it was one of the most critically and commercially successful labels of the Nineties. But for Ford, whether its perfumes, clothes, sex-drenched ads or films about existential crises, he still feels that he has something to prove.

Stop your mess and your fuss now baby
I know you’re the one
You cover me with hands like a flower
I see you’re the one
A touch in the night is all right
A kiss in the night is all right
You speak the speech of a dreamer
I know you’re the one
You cover me with hands like the sunshine
I feel you’re the one
A touch in the night is all right
A kiss in the night is all right
Ndohlala ndigoduka … I’ll keep coming home to you.

Vanaand het ek weer so verlang, in grondelose vrees van eie gryse eensaamheid, dat jy by my moet wees,

Nine months have passed since I gazed from my home towards these monoliths in the distance and they remain, as many others a taunt reminder that I am between the love of two cities. And as in times before I sit perched on the ridge that once was my home, with take-out coffee from my favourite 24hrs barista in Oakland’s ruminating the week that had passed. Or in my case, the few months that had passed between the festive season of the last year and the hope of a new beginning now. The excitement of new careers and meanings that seem to keep me moving forward, ever wanting the experience but tinged with fear and longing that always seem so very near.

Dat ek die wye koeltes van jou stem om my kan voel, soos die rimp’ling van die sommerreën vervlugtig oor my spoel.

Six months have passed since he came into my life. And like the Fish River canyon stands a testament to the course of nature, so the carving of his influence into my soul stands in the achievements of the past few months. Moments pass between us, with the promise of more, but in the blink of an eye it disappears like the mist blanketing the rolling hills of my childhood memories. He is like a ripe peach, picked from a low hanging branch on a hot summer’s day, the exquisite savouring of his intellect, his lips and his body always leaves me wanting more. My fear is that, like the auburn siren that once held my heart, he now shares it too but can never know just how much he means to me.

En toe ek deur die duister wind wat oor my huisie waai, die knip hoor lig, het heel my hart in vreugde opgelaai …

Three months have passed since he came into my life. And like the seasons have changed in between, so have I. The pursuit of happiness with him has become relative and while nothing is settled, the space between us has become comfortable. Moments pass between us, with the promise of more, but in the blink of an eye it disappears like the mist blanketing the rolling hills of his childhood home. He is like an ice cream on a hot, sultry summer’s afternoon; the exquisite savouring of his masculinity, his youth and his hard body always leaves me wanting more. My fear is that, like those before he has bewitched me with his ease and anchoring ways. Enough for me to believe I’ve found love.

Nou sit ons voor die vuur en speel die vlamlig deur ons hare … Lang waai die reënwind buite deur die afgevalle blare.

To be loved is, after all a state of mind.

You want all my love and my devotion
You want my loving soul right on the line
I have no doubt that I could love you forever
The only trouble is, I really, really don’t have the time
You’ve got one night only, one night only
That’s all I have to spare
One night only, let’s not pretend to care
One night only, one night only
Come on big baby come on
One night only, we only have ’til dawn (We only have ’til dawn)
In the morning this feeling will be gone (Be gone)
It has no chance going on
Something so right has got no chance to live
So let’s forget about chances, it’s one night I will give
One night only, one night only
Come on big baby come on
One night only, we only have ’til dawn (Nothing but one night)
One night only, one night only
There’s nothing more to say
One night only, words get in the way (Nothing but one night)
One night only, one night only…

I don’t, don’t care if it’s not right / To have your arms around me / I want, to feel what it’s like / Take all of you inside of me / Chorus: In your eyes (in your eyes) / Forbidden Love / In your smile (in your smile) / Forbidden Love / In your kiss (in your kiss), / Forbidden Love / If I had one wish, / Love would feel like this (Love would feel like this) / I know, that you’re no good for me / That’s why I feel I must confess / What’s wrong, is why it feels so right / I want to feel your sweet caress / (Chorus) / If I only had one wish, / Love would always feel like this / Wishin’ on the stars above, / Forbidden Love / If I only had one dream, / This would be more than it seems. / Forbidden Love  / (forbidden Love) / Rejection, is the greatest aphrodisiac (whispered) / (Chorus)x2 / Love should always feel like this / Heaven forgive me, never forbid me / Love should always feel like this …

 In the darkness of the house, I could hear the pre-dawn mother city slowly waking up around me. Faint, almost indecipherable noises like my next door neighbour unlocking his car; a dog barking in the distance at an early jogger or the coffee machine switching on and to start percolating the dark, strong brew that I would need to make it through the morning. Sheltered for a little while longer, I hid under the covers as this would be my last day here before heading back to Jo’burg and the impossible reality of an enormous workload before me. Both terrified and excited there is nothing left to do but leap forward, off the cliff of the unknown!

The past few weeks as I slowly, unconsciously move back into a cocoon of sorts I’ve allowed myself the time to re-evaluate my own wants and needs that has been precipitated with a changing of the seasons. Dangerously perhaps my unreasonable heart has stirred up longings that rejection seems to fuel, a will that is strong but a flesh that is weak when it comes to righting my fitness that has been neglected and an impossible ego that is licked by the fires of ambition that are slowly becoming all consuming. This has left me with a lingering feeling that I am floating ethereally between with no real connection to anything. Or anyone.

I’m slowly getting used to this vagrancy between lives, friendships and yes, even lovers that come and go as the months march on. There are moments when I feel like I belong but then reality reasserts itself and I’m rudely shocked by the naivety of my beliefs. And while that statement might seem a little ‘woe is me’ – it isn’t – reality is the thing that keeps me moving forward, towards self-reinvention and self-discovery. But, like many things now days his words come back and remind me that perhaps I am putting myself under unnecessary pressure but the truth is that there is a part of me that is seeking his approval by achieving the impossible.

… almost as if in winning the unattainable I might also win something else altogether. A sense of acceptance of myself.

Later that morning, coffee drained and dreams forgotten I sat at the airport with another skinny decaf latte and a buttery croissant in my hand. Flipping the pages of my glossy magazine, I was grateful for the distraction when my mobile beeped alerting me that an email from a new business partner had arrived. Transient herself, she was sitting at an airport of her own enroute to her idyllic island honeymoon just off the African coastline. For the past year as I have moved with the speed of the continental drift to put together a platform that will redefine a continent’s industry. In doing so, I’ve found my own way but seemingly lost the plot.

Wouldn’t it have been so much easier with some kind of guide at the start? After all when so many roads to success all come with detours as well you kind of wish that life had a built-in GPS system. Because with so many choices in life, inevitably there are so many mistakes to be made and as we putter along this road called life, occasionally a boy will find himself a little lost. And when that happens, I guess he just has to let go of the ‘coulda, woulda, shoulda,’ buckle up and just keep on going. As we speed along this endless road towards destination called ‘who we hope to be’ I can’t help but whine … are we there yet?