Bourdain in Lyon

“A bouchon is a uniquely Lyonnaise institution. A casual, laid-back kind of a pub-slash-bistro with a limited, usually old-school menu and always, always, an unpretentious vibe.” C’est vrai. Not unlike AB himself.

You know what they say: A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort. Even today, nearly 10 years to the day after Lyon aired on Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown as the third episode of   Unknown’s third season, more viewers than you might think rate Lyon as one of their favourites, judging from some of the comments in the Bourdain subgroups on Reddit and other social media platforms. Lyon, which premiered on CNN on 27 April 2014, found Bourdain in a cheerful, effusive mood about a country close to his heart, in his opening voiceover, “… the story of one man, one chef, and a city.

“Also, it’s about France and (many) other chefs, and a culinary tradition that grew up to change the world of gastronomy. … It’s about a family tree, about the trunk from which many branches grew.”

The tree of life!

And it was about food, lots of food. Great food. “Some of the greatest food on earth,” in Bourdain’s words

Find France on a map and pick a spot down to the right and somewhat near the middle, and you’ll find the country’s second-largest city — we’ll always have Paris in the top spot — roughly halfway between Burgundy and Rome, midway between the Alps to the east and the Mediterranean to the south.

“Over the past century, the system here, the tradition, whatever it is that took hold here, churned out a tremendous number of the world's most important chefs,” including, Bourdain added, his host, sounding board and culinary consigliere for the hour, “this guy!  Daniel Boulud. Like Prince or Madonna, he needs really only one name. In New York or anywhere in the chef world, Daniel. The name of his three star restaurant in Manhattan, one of many in an empire that stretches from London to Singapore. He came from here, a farm outside the city of Lyon, through the city's great kitchens into New York … Why Lyon? Why here? Look at the fundamentals, the things that Lyonais think of as birthrights. The right to eat delicious cured pork in unimaginably delicious forms … Terrine, pâté, sausages, rillettes. It’s an art that's revered here, and widely enjoyed. Few names garner more respect from aficionados of pig.”

Then the school lunches. Yes, you read that right. Cafeteria food for the kiddies. Ca va bien.

Jamie Oliver, eat your heart out.

The scenes where Bourdain, all six-foot-four of him, stuffs himself into a tiny red Citroen alongside Boulud on a pilgrimage back to Boulud’s old elementary school in the Lyon countryside are, well, Pythonesque. The Citroen, in not terrific shape to begin with and too slow for France’s equivalent of the autobahn, becomes the subject of invective hurled by passing motorists and truck drivers with things to do, places to go, and deadlines to meet.

No matter. They’ll all get there eventually.

“I'm automatically taken back to memories of my own school days,” Bourdain reflects, on camera. “The smell of caustic pine cleaner, chalkboards and fear. The cruel ministrations of tiny-eyed lunch ladies slopping can loads of prison chow into steam tables. The tuna noodle surprise that haunts my sense memories still.

“This is a very sophisticated meal for children. I was a little… “In school, frankly, like a lot of other students, I wanted pizza, pizza, pizza.”

Here, the very thought of pizza seems inappropriate. Inapproprié.

“This is Marie,” Bourdain says, introducing the rural Lyon equivalent of the school lunch lady. “Head chef, cook, host, and server for 320 hungry and very discriminating French schoolchildren, ages 3 to 12.

“On the menu (on this school day): Today, pumpkin soup, homemade couscous and a sauce supreme … (that’s) pumpkin soup with onion, nutmeg,  and chicken stock. Basic good pumpkin soup.

“Dessert is homemade fromage blanc, cheese with chocolate and orange segments.”

But wait, there’s more.

Marie is on a budget.

What, you thought these kids were dining at Les Halles?

Bourdain: “In the USA, the greatest country in the world, no doubt we spend an average of $2.75 per student for public school lunch. Compare and contrast.”

Like, $1.25.

That sound you just heard is Jamie Oliver crying.

Vive l’ecole! Stay in school, kids.

Bourdain:: “The kids attack their food like hungry trenchermen, wiping out three servings in the time it takes me to eat one. I guess they like it … these kids eat fast. Look how fast this kid eats. Turn your head, he'll dish your food right out of your plate. Push up your tray just like in prison, and move it along. Move it along.”

Of course, French kids are not as, erm, grossiére — i.e. rude — as English kids when it comes to trying unfamiliar food in the school canteen. “What is this [grout]?” one boy famously snapped at Oliver on Jamie’s School Dinners, back in the day, after being served veggies rather than his more familiar diet of, dear lord, fish fingers and stale fries.

Make that French fries. Frites, what?

The school cafeteria scene is a thematic anchor of sorts, appearing roughly a third of the way into Lyon. The readers on Reddit are right: Bourdain rarely, if ever, looked so happy as he does in this episode of Parts Unknown.

Boulud, for his part, the eponymous Daniel, learned the niceties of fine dining from his father, a country dweller with country tastes.

Bourdain again: “Meeting Daniel's dad, one seems to understand the roots of his perfectionism. His mom, dad, wife, Katherine and Danielle collaborate, with some debate, on super old-school farmhouse classics.

“The sort of things, good times and bad times, a family could make with (ingredients) readily available on the farm.”

From farm to table, literally.

One example:

“(This) is a hollowed-out pumpkin layered with toasted chunks of kale bread, nutmeg, grated cheese, mushrooms, fresh cream from the cows and the meat of the pumpkin … Daniel's dad can be a bit of a Gallic MacGyver.

“Sitting here with his family in the house he grew up in, you can see where all (this passion) comes from. Their son is now a gigantic international success.”

In the end, it keeps coming back to family. How Bourdainesque.

“His first love [was] French food,” a visitor wrote on Reddit, just a day ago today.

This is April 2024, remember, 10 years after Lyon originally aired.

“He talks about it in one of his books,” the reader continues. Discovering what could be as a kid on a family trip to France.”

And how. Bon appetit.

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Bourdain in the Punjab

“India is one of the few places on Earth where, even for me, that’s not a burden." The one where Anthony Bourdain tapped his inner vegetarian on the India-Pakistan border and found that veggies weren’t so bad after all.

By the time Parts Unknown’s third season opened in April 2014, ten years ago virtually to the day, the tone had been set. So it was somewhat of a surprise that the season-opening episode, The Punjab, marked a subtle but noticeable shift away from the established template to the extent that Bourdain followed anything resembling a template. There is a focus on simmering border tensions between India and Pakistan, a situation that, if anything, is even more pronounced today than it was 10 years ago. There’s a renewed focus on food — the sourcing of food, the making of food, serving food, and the role food can play in alleviating tensions in borderline conflict zones — and in that sense The Punjab reflects some of Bourdain’s earlier work on No Reservations and even, to some extent, his earlier A Cook’s Tour.

The old Bourdain is still there — cranky, irascible, and witty as (heck) — but, strange for an hour about border tensions and an ever-present threat of war — there’s an optimism that wasn’t there in earlier Parts Unknown programs on Libya, Congo and Jerusalem. The colours are brighter, people — Pakistani and Indian alike — smile more, and the food, even to Bourdain’s jaded point-of-view, is, well … divine. It’s almost enough to repudiate his vocal, lifelong stance against vegetarianism. Almost. This is Bourdain we’re talking about, after all.

“To eat around this part of the world, Punjab in particular, get used to eating a lot of vegetarian: chickpeas, dough. India is one of the few places on earth where, even for me, that's not a burden. … In the Punjab, meat or no meat, you are almost guaranteed a free-for-all of intense colours, flavours and spices.

“Unlike some of the joyless vegetarian restaurants in my sad experience, vegetables here are actually spicy, all taste different, have different textures, and are served with extraordinarily good bread. Who knew.”

And, later: “If this was what vegetarianism meant in most of the places that practice it in the West, I would be at least half as much less of a dick about the subject.“

And then, turning to the camera — breaking the third wall — “Look, hippie, if you made bread this good, I might eat in your restaurant. Mmm.”

Along the way, there are visits to the backstreet eatery Kesar de Dhaba Amritsar (“The best food isn’t cooked in people’s homes, you find it on the streets); the kulcha, a type of small bread cooked inside a tandoori-style oven, marinated in butter (“a perfect little flavour-bomb of wheat dough pressed against the side of a very, very hot clay oven, slathered with butter and served with a spicy chickpea curry on the side. Did I mention the butter?”) and the chole, chickpea curry cooked to piping hot and immersed in spices, onions, tomatoes, and herbs, at — and this name is real — the All India Famous Amritsari Kulcha in, wait for it, Amritsar.

What, you thought it might be somewhere else?

The old Bourdain is still there, though, despite his uncharacteristically sunny disposition (“The religion doesn't matter,” one of his local sidekicks tells him, “Food is the religion here”), and it isn’t long before all this vegetarianism starts to wear on him.

“Checking off my list of things to do in the Punjab, I got to score some animal protein. It's time. I've been going all Morrissey for two days now and frankly, that's enough. I need chicken.”

For the record, Morrissey is not just famously “different” — according to a fan interview published in SPIN in 2018, the former Smiths frontman only eats food that is beige.

And don’t call him a vegan, at least to his face, if you value your life.

Back to the chicken, and cue the Beera Chicken House.

And if you think that means beer and chicken, you would only be half wrong: Sikhs, the prevailing religion in the region, abstain from alcohol.

No matter, at least not for now.

Bourdain again: “When we are talking must-haves, tandoori chicken is just that.”

“I have some lemon in it,” he’s told “You will enjoy it.”

And how.

“Sensational. Wow. People (here) do love their food.”

History is everywhere Bourdain goes in The Punjab, but as always with Bourdain, his personal take is, well, Bourdainesque.

“Leaving the fertile plains of the Punjab behind, I'm headed out towards the Himalayas. In getting there, at least the way I'm going, hasn’t changed much in the last hundred years….

“Truth be told, I'm an angry, bitter man when I board. I'm guessing there ain't a Shoney’s or a P.F. Chang on the way.”

Bourdain finds himself on what he can only liken to the tourist train on the Universal Studios backlot in Burbank, Calif. — “You go on the King Kong ride. … while my stomach growls, I become the kind of traveller I warn against -- gripey, self-absorbed, and immune to my surroundings. But as my brightly coloured little train heads up into the hills from Kalka Station, known as the gateway to the Himalayas, my worldview starts to improve.

“The unnaturally bright colours of India start to pleasurably saturate my brain. The views from the window of ridiculously deep valleys, hundred-year-old bridges …  it's, well, breath-taking.”

And how.

Bourdain even takes time to wonder what was involved in building a train track to the roof of the world, as the High Himalayas are often called.

“Already behind schedule and plagued by cost overruns, Colonel Barog” — the British engineer tasked with building the line up to the British hill station town of Shimla, a man so famous nobody seems to know his first name, this, according to the Times of India — “screwed up.

“When he realized the two ends of this tunnel didn't meet in the middle, he shot himself.

“It's the kind of personal accountability I would like to see more of, frankly.

“Or is that just me?

“But all my snarkiness fades as one can't help but reflect on what it took to dig, drag, blast and tunnel one's way up this route back in the day.”

For a man who nurtured an almost cult-like status as a grumpy traveller with disdain for everywhere and everything, Bourdain finds himself, well, enchanted.

“I've been to Mumbai, Kolkata, Rajasthan, Kerala,” he says at the end. “This is a part of India that's different than any of the others. Look, it's fascinating and beautiful.”

Not unlike the show itself.

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Bourdain in Tokyo

After the night before comes the morning after. This was Anthony Bourdain in Tokyo: big city, bright lights and sleepless, seemingly endless nights. And the philosophical hangover that inevitably comes in the morning.

After the night before comes the morning after, right? Work with me here, people.

On Nov. 3. 2013, viewers looked on as intrepid world wanderer and recovering line cook Anthony Bourdain went to Tokyo. This wasn’t your ordinary, run-of-the-mill tourist trek to the land of the rising sun, mind, but a bar crawl through Tokyo after dark, where karate-themed sushi, dancing robots at the eponymous Robot Restaurant, and endless rounds of beer competed with tentacle-porn manga (yes, that’s a thing) for attention.

And the food. Fried snacks in the main. Hot finger food and cold beer — two of the five food groups needed for, well, if not a healthy diet exactly, one that’s livable. Bourdain was there, too, to catch up with former fellow New Yorker and still practicing sushi chef Naomichi Yasuda, who said three years earlier that he’d open his own restaurant in Japan, and then went ahead and did it.

“This is a great country,” Bourdain famously said of Japan, or perhaps not so famously. “Every chef I know wants to die here” (emphasis mine).

No one was about to tell him, mind, ‘You need to get out more, least of all his hard-pressed camera team, but there it is. Watching the Parts Unknown episode Tokyo today, 10 years later, give or take, it’s hard to take everything at face value. What you see is not always what you get. What’s on the screen is not your typical bar crawl. Far from.

Tokyo shows two sides of Bourdain: the curious soul of the restless traveller, ever present in his work for “the bitch goddess that is television,” from A Cook’s Tour for the Food Network in 2002 to breaking on through (to the other side) with Parts Unknown for CNN, not Food Network, and the darker, more introspective side.

“All the best moments are when the cameras are turned off,” Bourdain admitted in one of his later, more introspective confessionals, “and me and the crew … stumble up on top of a sand dune and look out at life's mysteries.”

Tokyo is the ying to the Bourdain yang of his more trenchant foreign correspondence — the genteel term for war reporting — in early Parts Unknown episodes like Myanmar, Libya, Congo, and now, most pointedly, Jerusalem.

Tokyo aired six weeks to the day after Jerusalem, and never that twain shall meet. Least of all today, in March 2024.

Bourdain: “Most people who don't understand sushi will go to a sushi bar and say, ‘Oh! I had the best sushi last night, the fish was so fresh. It was right out of the ocean.’"

Bourdain sampled some 21 late-night eateries and after-hours bars for Tokyo, and every one of them has its own story. Aged sirloin topped with caviar and served alongside moin moin dumplings garnished with plantain is not your average bar fare.

Tokyo also gave Bourdain the opportunity to channel his inner music critic. Japanese pop! Miley Cyrus! Nickelback!

“The pop music scene in Tokyo is not that different than ours — with an accent, though, on pretty boy bands, pop idols, tween stars. Generic, industry-created crap for the most part. Like I said, not so different than us."

Miley. “Picture an army of Miley Cyruses. Or would that be Miley Cyri?"

Nickelback. “"When I see Nickelback I want to kill myself. I want to kill them, and then I want to kill myself. And then I want to kill everybody who listens to them.”

And then, after a quick glance at his camera crew. “What's so funny? It's true.”

Working with Tony Bourdain. It’s not a job. It’s an adventure. Or was, at any rate.

As always, at the very end of the hour, the last word belongs to Bourdain.

“What is weird? What is strange? What do those things even mean, anyway?

“Sure, a lot of what you've seen looks different from maybe the mainstream. It's certainly different from the way we like to portray ourselves, see ourselves, at least our daytime selves. But roughly 50 percent of all movies rented in American hotel rooms are adult films … Maybe there's a line from there to here. So, who's crazy now?”

CNN

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Bourdain in South Africa

Nelson Mandela was 95 and had taken ill when Anthony Bourdain visited South Africa’s largest city 11 years ago for CNN’s Parts Unknown. Mandela’s spiritual presence endures to this day, despite the country’s still uncertain future.

Undoubtedly, some Parts Unknown docs resonate more with viewers on a personal level than others. South Africa, which bowed on CNN in October 2013 toward the end of Parts Unknown’s sophomore season, strikes a chord in me since present-day South Africa is a state I know well. Like Anthony Bourdain, I have spent more time in Johannesburg than the more familiar—and more touristy—Cape Town.

Bourdain’s decision to focus on Joburg, or Jozi as many of the locals call it, is reflective of his swim-against-the-tide style and global worldview, though. There is probably no other travel documentary filmmaker on the planet who would have gone to South Africa and chosen to focus on … Johannesburg.

It’s apparent why, though, in South Africa’s opening moments. Yes, Nelson Mandela was incarcerated in a 2x2 meter jail cell on Robben Island Prison off the coast of Cape Town for 18 years (“Prison,” Mandela would later write, “far from breaking our spirits, made us more determined to continue with this battle until victory was won”). Mandela’s soul and raison d’être were rooted in the Johannesburg township of Soweto, though, and it was Soweto — and Johannesburg as a whole — that became symbolic of the anti-apartheid struggle as a whole. South Africa’s opening shot is of a bemused Bourdain scowling at a statue — still standing to this day — of Boer settlers with big guns fending off the hoards of “darkies” who don’t belong in the place where they were born and raised.

Bourdain: “They don’t look friendly. Who are those … anyway? Some ugly Dutch guys, it looks like, with guns. I’m guessing friendly to the current (apartheid) power. They look like they’re going to, or coming from, oppressing a black man. First order of business, man. When I take my country back, first order of business is to take that [deleted] down. Am I right or what? I’m kind of amazed (it’s still there). Tear that [deleted] down.”

Food has its moments in South Africa — a delectable brai, a barbeque, prepared, served and consumed outdoors in the fresh air, naturally, with the emphasis on meat and sausage, naturally — but Bourdain always intended this to be an exquisitely personal geo-global political and sociological show, which is why it was made for CNN and not the Food Network. Enough with the statue of ugly Dutch guys with guns, Bourdain quickly turns to the subject that really interests him: Mandela and how the people of South Africa have navigated the post-apartheid years, not always successfully but with an enduring hope and human resilience.

Bourdain again:

“In July 2013, when I went to South Africa, 95-year-old Nelson Mandela was critically ill. And the country he freed from white minority rule was already in mourning.

And already fearful of what the future might be without him. … So a good friend of mine, a really great travel writer, said something. The more I travel, the less I know. I feel that paerticualrly strongly here in South Africa, a place I came in a state of near total ignorance, loaded with preconceptions.”

Moments later, watching soccer over beers in a shebeen — “the perfect place to watch a game, talk about a game, drink yourself silly over the results of a game, or just have a very fine local-style meal … There are a lot of places like this; I mean, this used to be the garage or the carport, right?” — Bourdain is beginning to get it, though he knows it’s going to take a lot more than a flying visit and a TV program to get to the bottom of what really makes South Africa tick.

“In what was once a garage are now six tables. A lawn-turned-lounge out back. Closed on Sundays if Grandma’s visiting. These kinds of bars were born during apartheid times when black South Africans not allowed to own businesses in white areas adapted and improvised. They did their own thing. Created these little micro, under-the-official-radar restaurants known around here as eat houses.”

Generally speaking, Bourdain asks his hosts moments later, “Are these good times in South Africa? Bad times? Transitional times?”

1994 was the peak of good times in South Africa, he’s told.

“Then, now with other politics, you know,” Bourdain is told, “other parties fighting, it’s quite tense now.”

That was in 2013. Today, in 2024, that much hasn’t changed really.

Bourdain: “The ANC (African National Congress, Mandela’s founding party) is not universally loved anymore. In recent years, they’ve been criticized for inaction, corruption, and cronyism. And opposition parties are gaining strength.”

Toward the end of the program, after the brai, after the gunning down of an eland, the world’s largest antelope — a scene I could have done without, and Bourdain too, judging from his momentary qualms — Bourdain takes a moment to reflect, in only the way he knows how.

“What did I know about South Africa before I came here? Exactly nothing, as it turns out. But I think, based on what I've seen, that if the world can get it right here, a country with a past like South Africa's if they can figure out how to make it work here for everybody. absorb all the people flooding in from all over Africa, continue to make Mandela's dream a reality, maybe there's hope for the rest of us.”

There it is. In the end, that’s what Bourdain was all about. Hope. It’s why so many of us continue to follow TV travels to this day.

CNN

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Bourdain in Sicily

“It was a low point,” intrepid explorer Anthony Bourdain admitted later of his ill-fated excursion to the boot of Italy in 2013 for CNN’s Parts Unknown. Swimming among “dead octopi” didn’t help — and neither did the 18 negronis.

It sounds like a scheme so loopy and so lunatic that it couldn’t possibly happen in real life. Except it did. When an obsessive, ardent bass fisherman from Louisiana set out to rig a 1983 fishing tournament by purchasing a massive largemouth bass — dead — in a neighbouring US state with the idea of sneaking it into the competition lake and then  “miraculously” landing it during the competition, he first had to thaw the frozen lunker in his bathtub before rendezvousing with his co-conspirator, an angler named “Terry” who was competing in the Roadrunner Bass Tournament in nearby Tyler, Texas. The prize money for landing the biggest bass during the competition would win a cash jackpot that, evenby fishing standards, was reallyn sweet. What could go wrong?

Well, everything as it happened.

I was thinking of the Great Bass Cheating Scam of 1983 while revisiting Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown episode Sicily the other night. Sicily originally aired on CNN during the program’s second season in 2013 — a little early in CNN’s run for Bourdain to wig out about the single worst travel experience of his life, but there it is.

As Bourdain told Forbes in 2016 — yes, it took him nearly three years to recover, he hinted, only half-jokingly — the now infamous disaster featured the intrepid host and world adventurer embarking on an excursion to catch lunch (octopus and cuttlefish) with a local fisherman/chef in shallow waters off a rocky cove, frequented by tourist swimmers, within hailing distance of the Sicilian town’s waterfront. It was actually a staged ploy on the part of his host and guide for the day. A friend of the restauranter threw shop-bought — and very much dead — fish into the sea while Bourdain swam in full snorkelling gear to pluck octopus and cuttlefish from the seabed. The horror, the horror.

When Bourdain surfaced, he was livid. And he wasn’t about to hide that from the cameras, constantly hovering in close attendance. Later, in his voiceover — no, he had not calmed down by this point — Bourdain recalled that he “snapped,” The show’s producer plonked him down in a café to calm him down. This was a mistake. By his own admission — Bourdain was a little fuzzy on the details, which is perfectkly understandable considering how much he drank — he downed some 18 negronis and drank himself into a catanoic stupor.

The scene didn’t improve when he came to. In the next filmed scene, Bourdain was blackout drunk. It was his birthday. He was unknowingly joined at his lunch table by an unsuspecting local couple. It was the wife’s birthday, too, but the cameras picked up an expression of pure disinterest on her face: It happened to be her birthday too, and she was clearly unamused to find herself across the table from a drunk and bad-tempered New Yorker. More indignities were to come. Bourdain was served a plate of tuna tartare with avocado and squeeze-bottle designs on top, on a square plate no less.

Fun fact: This all happens in the first 12 minutes of the episode, and you know what they say: the camera doesn’t lie.

Also, time heals all wounds, right? Work with me here, people.

The more time that went by, the angrier Bourdain seemed to get. At this point in the series, he had dodged malaria — and worse — in the Congo; narrowly avoided being caught in a crossfire between rival militias in Libya; managed not to get himself arrested by the military junta in Myanmar or gored by a bull in Spain (the bull gave it its best shot, and nearly ended ruined Bourdain’s manhood in the process); avoided freezing like a popsicle while ice fishing in the middle of a Quebec winter; survived leeches in the Amazonian jungle of Peru; and avoided finding himself in the middle of a shooting war in the Gaza Strip.

He doesn’t exactly say ‘Who needs this s**t?’ but you can sure as (s**t) see he’s thinking it.

“I am snakebit as far as Sicily (was concerned),” Bourdain admitted later. “You cannot make great TV in Sicily. It’s a fantastic location, the food is awesome, the people and everywhere you look is great, but for some reason both times I have made shows in Sicily, everything has gone wrong.”

But wait, there’s more.

“It’s become a hideous, funny failure. But it wasn’t funny to me down there where those dead octopi were splashing down behind my head. I felt like I was speaking in manic double-speed for the next week. I couldn’t breathe, my crew was very concerned and there were some personnel changes afterwards.”

Personnel changes! That sounds like a diplomatic way of putting it.

“I’m still pissed about it. This is sort of a dangerous paradox about the shows over the years where the producers understand that when things go really, really badly, it’s comedy gold sometimes, but it’s not fun for me.

“I don’t go out there looking to make a funny show mocking this well-meaning but thoroughly corrupt fisherman who was just trying to make things entertaining.

“I think I give up on shooting again in Sicily. Look, my wife is Italian, I love the country, I love Sicily, but I think if I went back and screwed up again it would break me. I don’t think I could bear it.

“I will go back for pleasure though.”

Sadly, as fate would have it, we’ll never know that part.

As it is, Bourdain’s powers of recovery didn’t fail him — not then, at any rate.

He would go on to film 10 more seasons for CNN, 82 more episodes in all.

Bourdain was astute enough, and giving enough too, to realize Sicily’s charms.

“There’s the simple fact of its location, tucked away under the boot of Italy — part of but not really part of that country. [It has] its own language, culture, its own history of Norman, Arab, Spanish, Roman, Turkish, Egyptian interlopers, all leaving their mark and their influence. . .

“This is what I wanted Sicily to be, something to soothe my shattered soul. It doesn’t take much: a bowl of good pasta. In this case it’s the famous spaghetti al nero di seppia (spaghetti and cuttlefish).”

He carried his ill-fated lunch excursion to the end, though.

“Is this what it’s come to, I’m thinking, as another dead squid narrowly misses my head,” he says in his voiceover. “Back in the same country almost a decade later, and I’m still desperately staging fishing scenes?

“Strangely, everyone else pretends to believe the hideous sham unfolding before our eyes, doing their best to ignore the blindingly obvious.

“Then they gave up and just dumped a whole bag of dead fish into the sea. I’m no marine biologist, but I know a dead octopus when I see one.”

And later … a flashback!

“Oh look, my octopus! I remember personally catching that one. It was a mighty struggle, too.

“(Look), I’ve never had a nervous breakdown before, but I tell you from the bottom of my heart, something fell apart down there, and it took a long, long time after the end of this damn episode to recover.”

Three years, as it happened.

Next up: South Africa.

CNN

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