I went to Grey!

The Golden Liberals

The term liberal means the assimilation of cultural attributes into a greater systematic governance. Two examples exist. Winston Churchill and George Grey. Churchill assimilated the Boers and the Commonwealth. Grey assimilated the Maoris. An example in America would be Lincoln who assimilated the Southerners. The binary nature of politics today where people are divided into left and right wing has resulted in the term liberal being misunderstood as liberal does not mean left wing. These is no way that either Churchill or Grey could be classified as left wing. They also were balanced and stood up to blatant dictatorship. A true liberal is gold and probably has some Scottish heritage. My ancestor, Christoph Bartels had a similar relationship with the Zulu’s while on my maternal side the Elliots and the Murrays, who were indeed Scottish, became boers.

In 1980 I started my association with the Golden Liberals as my parents enrolled me at Grey College. That year there was a one hit wonder, Video Killed the radio star!

George Grey

That day shortly after Easter as the second decade of the 19th century was starting was not the day George Grey was meant to enter the world. His mother went into premature labour in Lisbon, Portugal after inadvertently overhearing a conversation in which it was mentioned that her husband had died. George Grey's father had died in some insignificant skirmish. Tragedy did dog George Grey. Although he became a distinguished diplomat, he lost his own son early on in his marriage. He was estranged from his wife for the most part of his life, but notwithstanding, George Grey’s influence stretched over both New Zealand and South Africa. He was the founder of the school I attended, namely Grey College in Bloemfontein.

Grey was Governor General of the Cape Colony in the mid-19th century. South Africa did not exist in those days. The Cape Colony, the present-day Western Cape, was a British Territory. Just more than a decade before, the Boer population had started migrating north. Boer republics were established in the Free State, Transvaal, and Natal. My family was part of the grouping that ended up in current day Pietermaritzburg.

The reason for this migration is often stated that it was triggered by the abolition of slavery. However, this is a simplification of a problem where there were multiple causes including the pressure for greater farming resources.

Unlike, a similar trek that occurred in Northern America, the Boers did not decimate the indigenous population with modern weapons. In Northern America, the local indigenous tribes were exposed to genocide. An irony never lost on me whenever the first world wags its finger in self-righteousness. I am not a first world resident, confined to what a leader of the free world referred to as a shithole.

The British rapidly annexed the Boer colony of Natal and during the period following this event there was the infamous self-inflicted starvation of the Xhosa. George Grey was Governor during this time and resolved the situation by assimilating Xhosa officials into government structures. Having dealt with the Xhosa crisis he focused his attention further north.

Grey visited the Boer republics and was well received. He wanted to unite the British colonies and Boer republics and ironically the Boers were not averse to the suggestion. However, the British Foreign Office was!

George Grey's journey to the inland region of Southern Africa was vastly different in those days was vastly different than it is today. There were no roads and very few settlements. The social event that was most attended was the monthly church gathering known as Nagmaal, the Christian rite communion. The mode of transport was horses as well as the ox wagon. These ox wagons would be the primary source of transportation inland into South Africa before railways started to be laid out in greater lengths in the latter part of the 19th century.

Invaders

In those days there would have been no Cosmos flowers next to the side of the road or path. There would also have been no Blackjacks to catch on your socks or trousers when a person went to answer the call of nature in the veld (since there were no garages with toilets). Neither would there have been any Kharkibos dotted around the veld.

All these invader plants came to Southern Africa during the Anglo-Boer war, after George Grey's death. The war resulted when the colonies and republics became belligerent after the discovery of diamonds and gold at Kimberly and Johannesburg, respectively. When the war erupted, the British shipped in many troops and horses. The horses were provided with feed from Argentina and contained the seeds of Cosmos, Blackjacks and Kharkibos. This was the country to which Windhond, one of my family would eventually settle in.

George Grey's efforts to avoid this future conflict in the mid nineteenth century had not met with approval from his bosses in London. They decided to recall him. Sounds very much like present day cadre deployment and shenanigans by the ANC! On the ship back to Britain, he became estranged from his wife. Arriving back in London, a new government had been voted in and George Grey had new bosses. His new masters were not averse to his views and wanted him back at his old post. Fate, however, intervened. In New Zealand, the Maori wars broke out and George Grey was diverted to resolve the issues in that country. His influence on the course of South African history was stopped and instead his greatest legacy would be made in New Zealand.

It is highly unlikely that should George Grey have remained in South Africa that the conflict with the Boers would have escalated into a war. More importantly he would not have allowed the foundations of Apartheid to be laid. It is also unlikely he would have disenfranchised the indigenous population. It was also Grey who made a significant intervention to ensure that peace was made between the Boers and Basuto and that what is how Lesotho was established.

Grey resolved the conflict between the two belligerent parties by defining a mutually agreed border. Being a fit man, he walked the border with the parties including climbing out some steep koppies. Some of the Boers leaders were as portly as their contemporary counterparts and struggled to keep up. Soon afterwards the treaty was signed.

Kiwi

In South Africa George Grey had learnt his lessons well in how to deal with the British Foreign Office, and as a result made many unilateral decisions in New Zealand. More famously he created a new constitution without input from London. New Zealand did not turn out bad. It is one of planet Earth’s most progressive nation with a young woman as its leader. I often wish to be a Kiwi as the New Zealanders name themselves.

On a recent trip to London I walked through St. Paul's churchyard on the way to the London offices of the bank I was working for at the time. The crypt doors had just opened, and I popped in to have a look. There was the grave of Nelson, one of the most famous of British warriors, and next to him was interned Sir George Grey. It was an insightful moment for me to realize how prominent a member of Victorian Society he was that he was honoured with a position at the side of Nelson. In another twist of fate, South Africa would also have its own famous Nelson in Mandela.

Since his birth two hundred years ago George Grey left a great impact and legacy with his actions. One of those happened on that trip previously mentioned into the interior of South Africa, when he stopped at Bloemfontein.

At Bloemfontein, he was met by an honour guard of horsemen which included Andrew Murray. Murray was one of the same descendants of my family of the Scottish Calvinists who came to this country a century before. During his stay at the settlement, Grey bequeathed a couple of thousand pounds for the establishment of a school for boys. This was in memory of his son who had died in infancy. That school became the world-famous Grey College, noted as a Rugby factory. One of the first leaders and teachers at the school was Andrew Murray. He became a well versed and revered theologian and effected formulated the basis of the Christian movement in South Africa. Elsewhere in South Africa, Christof Bartels was using his ministry to dull the trauma of his years in the cavalry. From the school's inception, the boys who would call Grey College their Alma mater would make their mark on South African and world history.

During the Anglo-Boer war the real leader was President Steyn, a Grey boy, and not Kruger. Churchill referred to him as the only real Englishman at the treaty talks, in a disparaging reference to the members of the unrefined British delegation. Steyn was a member of Temple Bar, and his adversaries were not close, neither in language, nor ability.

In the same war, a Grey boy, Deneys Reitz, would be a bittereinde, someone who would fight to the last. When peace was eventually made, he established one of the most prominent law firms in the new Union of South Africa. His book, Commando, would become one of the defacto standard stories about war. During the First World War, Reitz would serve as a Guard Colonel in the British Armed Forces. In the Second World War, he would be South African High Commissioner in London.

During the two World Wars there would be a couple of great men who graduated from Grey College and would make an impact on the global stage. The first was Sir Lourens van der Post. He was a novelist, philosopher and World War Two soldier. The other was Braam Fischer. Braam Fischer was Nelson Mandela's lawyer and friend. He would pay a heavy and torturous price for his opinions and actions. However, without the efforts of Braam Fischer the course of South African history might well have been very different. Mandela referred to him as the Afrikaner who changed his opinion and planted the seed in his mind that reconciliation was possible. Fischer used to live down the road from me in another suburb of Johannesburg known as Greenside.

During the Second World War, the headmaster's son gave his life to the cause of attempting to assist in the Polish Ghetto uprisings. The Polish uprising is notorious as the Russians knowingly did not intervene to stop the Germans suppressing the uprising. This would allow Stalin to better control a weakened post war Poland. The Headmaster's son was a pilot who was flying in supplies for the uprising, and whose effort with many other South African airmen would be unacknowledged post war due to political machinations.

Greybrakke

The political allies of Sir George Grey were known as Greyhounds or Windhonde in Afrikaans. Amongst the boys of Grey, we call ourselves the Greybrakke, which is a derivative of the Afrikaans word for hound or dog, but more specifically mongrel. That was the same nick name of Riebeeck Elliott. The character of these individuals has its roots in an act made on horseback in the flat and never-ending veld of the Free State by a liberal gentleman, who was ahead of his time.

Donuts & a coke

My dad would take me to Grey College in either our Mercedes Benz 300D or Nissan 1400 bakkie from the Natal Midlands to Bloemfontein. It was a five-hour journey stretching over parts of the roads that were always under repair. The roadside would be dotted with Cosmos, Blackjacks and Kharkibos. At Grey I was focused on academics as my sporting abilities were non-existent. That did not stop me from participating, even reaching the second team in my age group on occasion. The school had several old and historic buildings, many built by the famous South African architect, Herbert Baker. But the building that was the most comfortable was the one known as the Tuckshop. Nestled amongst the firs in a corner of the school, the building dated from the Anglo Boer war where it served as a temporary hospital. It was a wooden structure that had been covered in corrugated iron sheets. After school we would spend our meager pocket money on cokes and donuts and occasionally hot dogs. A school term was 10 weeks, and my mom would often post me letters with extra R10 notes in the envelop which when opened would necessitate a trip to the Tuckshop. In those days, the post office worked like a well-oiled machine. By the turn of the millennium, it became a joke as post and parcels would be subject to pilfering.

The Daly of academics

The clever boys in my standard were Jan von Delft and Japie Thiart who would always be in the first and second position in the academic standings. Except, one time, were I sparked and shocked everyone to stand at the top of the standard. It was like John Daly winning his first golfing PGA Championship going from zero to hero.

I was in the hostel where we were a bunch of rabble rousers. Because of my academic ability the headmaster, Michau Heyns would cut me slack, often punishing my mates while I walked off scot free. He would look and me and ask me why I would admit to some ludicrous escapade that my mates and me had participated in. I would attempt to prove my rebel credentials to him, and he would send me on my way without punishment. He was a mathematics teacher and I enjoyed mathematics. I was in his eyes a mathematician and not a rabble rouser.

Klaas

We had several traditions at Grey. We wore a blazer that was a fashion insult and greet each other with a handshake taken from an obscure French knife brand that some old pupils brought back from Europe after the First World War. The knife was a Opinel and that handshake is commonly known as that of John the Baptist. However, some things were universal. My friend at school was Eion du Toit who was ‘n verligte. We would know him as Klaas. The first day in the hostel when the prefects asked us where we came from, we gave out hometown names. Eion arrived a bit late and when the prefect asked him where he was from, he replied that get came from the plaas. The prefect promptly named him Klaas van die plaas on the spot, and that name would stick with him for the rest of his life.

We had many conversations and would meet often. One memorable year we drove to a Grey reunion meeting in Bloemfontein. Klaas was an expert in craic. At the reunion dinner we were a few minutes late as Klaas had brought along a bottle of Johnnie Walker Platinum Scotch whisky which we shared in the parking lot with a dozen other old Greys. Klaas would die from a sleep apnoea disorder. He was visiting Johannesburg and we had one last dinner and drink at the Parkview Golf course before I dropped him off at his bed and breakfast. He did not make it to morning.

Hansie

Often, we would go down to Grey around Founder’s Day in October. The one year I bumped into the headmaster who came after Heyns and whom we called Vollies. Now Vollies could talk the hind leg off a donkey and not give you any opening to butt in with your own conversation. He always reminds me of the day he found me in a plaster cast straddling the swimming pool gate. I had broken my leg in a rugby game but on that day decided to join my mates at the pool on my crutches. When my mates saw Vollies coming they scattered, leaving me in the position that Vollies found me. He was highly amused and wanted to know if I was planning to swim while I was in the cast. He helped me down and walked with me back to the hostel. By this time, my mates had remorse and had lined up at his office for the obligatory hiding. For once, he let us get off scot free.

Vollies invited me and Klaas to lunch in the Cricket pavilion. The past versus present game was being played that day. I was randomly placed next to Ewie Cronje who was the father of Hansie Cronje. Hansie had been implicated in a cricket fixing scandal that had ended his career. He had been banned Cricket and tragically died in an aircraft accident near George. Kathleen (Kath) & I had driven down to Grey for the funeral and were seated next to another famous Bloemfontein sports personally, named Zola Budd. Budd had participated in the Olympics and had a notorious race against Mary Decker who crashed into her. You know the rule, the one ramming you in the rear end is always to blame. As a South African aside, all Toyota taxis are known as Zola Budds and the Nissans as Mary Deckers. The Zola Budds are more reputably more reliable.

I decided to make conversation with oom Ewie and asked him how his day had been watching the Cricket. He turned to me and said that when you are young you go home to your family as that is the best place to be. When you are older, he continued, you go to your school because that is where a person then finds comfort. Tears started rolling down his face and we ate lunch for a few minutes in silence before the conversation picked up again. I realized that at the school were the fondest memories of his son and during this time is son would usually be visiting him. He remembers his son, not at Lord’s or any famous cricketing ground but a lonelier grassy patch in Bloemfontein with less spectators. Even though the tears were rolling down his face, there was no better place in the world he would rather be.

I have encountered many interesting characters associated with Grey. This included Hayward Kidson, one of South Africa's leading all time cricket umpires. I met him at a lunch at the Rosebank Hotel. He told me his greatest moment in the game was telling Bill Lawrie to f##k off when he was obviously out but he remained standing at the crease. Bill Lawrie he told me, won't even walk to catch a bus.

It would be well over fifty years after Grey’s trip on horseback before the first cars would make their smoky way to the settlement of Bloemfontein. And it would be one hundred and fifty years before George Grey's view of democracy would eventually become a reality in South Africa. The present-day history in South Africa would have been vastly different if Grey had come back to South Africa instead of going to New Zealand. It is highly likely that apartheid would never have been created with its policies of systematic racism. I am liberal and I was a Greybrak and I was born a South African.

1984

My Matric class was 1984 and we still maintain and keep contact. We always joke about how you know when someone went to Grey. The answer is they tell you.

That year in 84 was one of the best in music, with Queen being the best.

Leith House | A Lesson in Lines and Loyalty

In Standard 8, I moved to Leith House, the third hostel at Grey College, as a “New Poep.” The initiation was brutal, akin to army basic training, grueling, relentless, and designed to toughen us up. It did. I shared a room with Gordon on the cold side of the hostel, where the winter chill seeped into our bones.

One winter weekend, after a rugby match, I returned to the hostel, still buzzing from the game. A matric named Visser was there, lounging with the arrogance of seniority. He made a derogatory remark about my eye, I had a coloboma. The words hit like a spark to dry grass. I saw red. Without thinking, I swung, my fist connecting with his face. Only after the punch landed did I realize the folly of my action. Visser was older, bigger, stronger, a matric towering over a Standard 8 kid. But some insults cross a line, and this was one of them.

His reaction unfolded in slow motion. I braced for the counterpunch, watching his fist arc toward me. I ducked, and it sailed over my head, but his jacket wasn’t so lucky, the seam split with a loud rip. I thought I was done for, ready to face the inevitable follow-up blows. But then, standing beside him was Andries Kriek, a prefect. He stepped in, placing a firm hand on Visser’s arm. “Stop,” he said, his voice calm but ironclad. “You asked for it with that insult.” He warned Visser that if he hit me, he’d have to deal with him.

For the rest of the year, I showed my gratitude by helping Kriek with chores. One day, while tidying his room, I stumbled across his stash of Penthouse and Playboy magazines hidden in his cupboard. In those days, such magazines were banned, their presence a rebellious secret. My eyes were opened, not just to the contraband, but to the unspoken codes of Grey.

Leith House had a self-regulating system, a balance between cheekiness and cruelty. There was a line, and everyone knew it. Visser crossed it, and Kriek, a true man of Grey, enforced it. His intervention wasn’t just about stopping a fight—it was about justice, about recognizing when a line had been breached and setting it right.

The Wit Olifant Caper

One eventful day, I was recruited by Kriek to carry paint cans. He and his fellow matrics were off to paint a rival school, Sentral’s, mascot, a concrete elephant known as die Wit Olifant, painted white, naturally. There I was, squeezed into a seat with a bunch of hefty rugby players in the back of a Ford Valiant, a beast of a car. We stopped at a suburb house belonging to one of the boys to raid his dad’s paint store. The matrics sat in the car, smoking, while I lugged the paint tins and loaded them into the boot.

We arrived at Sentral, ready to transform the Wit Olifant. Unluckily, I hadn’t packed paintbrushes—no one had given me that instruction. Without missing a beat, the matrics poured the cans over the concrete elephant. By the end, it looked like a psychedelic, mythical creature ready to take flight. Everyone was pleased. But that wasn’t the end.

The following Monday, Heyns climbed onto the tannoy and summoned the belligerents who painted the elephant to the office. I was in Afrikaans class with Trevors as the teacher. When I tried to leave, he didn’t believe me and told me to sit down. My conscience gnawed at me, so I approached him again, insisting I needed to go to the office. He agreed, but only after laughing so hard tears streamed down his face.

At the office, the matrics were lined up at the desk in front of Heyns. “What are you doing here?” he asked me. “I carried the paint cans,” I said proudly. He looked at me, noted I was good at maths, and let me go. Then, turning to the matrics, he flexed his cane with a loud swish, telling them they weren’t good at maths and to get ready to bend.

When I returned to class, Trevors had another fit of laughter when I told him Heyns had chased me away.

The Matric Serenade

The air in the Leith House Appel kamer buzzed with a nervous energy, the kind that only comes when you're young, reckless, and standing on the cusp of something unforgettable. The room smelled faintly of chalk dust and polished wood, with that out-of-tune upright piano squatting in the corner like an old friend who’d seen better days. Above it, the blackboard was a chaotic canvas of song lyrics scrawled in white chalk, our hymn sheet for the night. Printers weren’t a thing back then, so Bester and Marx, our resident piano maestros, pounded out the melodies on those worn ivory keys, coaxing notes to life despite the piano’s protests.

Chita and Grobbies, the guitar heroes of our crew, were the real showmen. Chita, named for his obsession with Tarzan films, swinging through our imaginations like a jungle king, had been taking lessons with Tommy Cronje, our long-haired geography teacher who moonlighted in a band and carried the kind of cool we all envied. They strummed their guitars with a confidence that made us believe we could pull this off. The songs? A trio of heart-on-sleeve classics: Air Supply’s Making Love Out of Nothing at All, Nelson’s To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before, and Peter Cetera’s It’s Hard to Say I’m Sorry. There was a fourth, but it’s slipped into the mists of time, lost like so many fleeting moments from those years.

The night of the final year’s Ball was the main event. We piled onto the old Mercedes school bus, its engine rumbling like it knew the weight of our mission. One of our mates, barely legal with his grade 10 license, took the wheel, our very own teenage chauffeur steering us through the night. We toured the girls’ school hostels, stopping beneath their balconies like Romeos in scuffed school shoes, serenading them like Juliet’s with all the passion our adolescent hearts could muster. The girls leaned out, their laughter and whispers floating down, and for those hours, we were legends. The stars above, the creak of the bus, the strum of guitars, it was iconic, a memory etched in the kind of clarity that only youth can sharpen.

Not everyone made it to the serenade. Some of our mates, chasing a different kind of thrill, were off drinking, their absence noted but not mourned in the heat of the moment. When we rolled back to the hostel, the night took a turn. One of the boys, too deep in his cups, was caught mid-tryst in his room, a scandal that sparked more laughter than judgment. It was the kind of chaos that defined us, messy, bold, and unapologetically alive.

Those school years, with the matric serenade as their crescendo, were a tapestry of crests and troughs, much like the waves of life. The Leith House Appel kamer, that battered piano, and the songs we sang beneath those balconies, they’re the small things, the bursts of warmth, that linger like a blue sunset noticed by no one else.

Keys to the Kingdom

At Grey College, I held the keys to a world of quiet adventure, a secret realm within the school’s hallowed walls. The keys to the library, the Centenary Hall, and the Main Building were more than metal—they were my passport to freedom, creativity, and a touch of mischief, carefully balanced to avoid the pitfalls that snared others.

The motto at the school was “Waardeer en daar is meer, abuse and you lose.” Well somehow I built the illusion of trust. Heyns was a maths teacher and as I was a good maths scholar, it was assumed that I would never abuse. I was given the keys to the Kingdom.

The Main Building’s central spire was my crow’s nest. Tucked beneath its peak was a small room, the birthplace of the Stabilis newspaper, where I poured my love for writing into a cheeky paper printed by the NG Kerk. Ja, well no fine. There were Easter eggs hidden in every edition. As one of the editors, I shaped stories that captured my view of the pulse of the school. On sun-drenched days, I’d slip through a window onto the roof, four stories high, basking in the warmth and the thrill of being somewhere forbidden yet serene. The view stretched across Bloemfontein, and something not likely to be revisited. The pigeons were not impressed.

The library was a different sanctuary, home to an Apple IIe that became my playground. When it wasn’t churning out school reports, I’d lose hours at its glowing screen, exploring a digital world that felt boundless. The library’s unrestricted access meant boredom was a stranger; there was always a new program to tinker with or an idea to chase. Those moments at the keyboard sparked a lifelong curiosity, a hobby that felt like a calling and became a career. Journalists weren’t paid well.

Then there was the Centenary Hall, where I wielded the keys to the stage and its lights. I helped illuminate school productions and concerts, orchestrating beams of light that brought activities to life. After formal dinners, when the hall emptied, I’d sneak back to savour leftovers—crumbs of decadence washed down with a stolen glass of wine. Those quiet feasts were a private celebration that have remained secret till now.

I wasn’t reckless, though. I’d seen friends face disciplinary hearings, even expulsions, for poor choices. So I moved like a shadow, the Ghost of Sir George Grey, slipping into these spaces after hours with calculated care. My secret weapon? A pair of two-way radios, shared with Marx, my ally in the hostel’s first room. He’d tip me off when Vollies, the patrolling teacher, left the building, giving me the all-clear. In return, I’d treat him to takeaways from Angelo’s or a doggy bag from the hall’s bounty, a fair trade for his efforts in preserving my secret.

Vollies, the deputy principal and Leith Housemaster was a complex character and I wonder if he knew and let it ride. One of the interactions I will always remember with him was this one. I had broken my leg in a game of Rugga and was in plaster and on crutches for 16 weeks. One day I accompanied some friends to a clandestine unsanctioned swim in the school pool. We hopped the gate. As I was busy with the effort of hopping over the gate with my leg in plaster, Vollies arrived. My friends scattered (yeah, the lafaarde) and I was left stranded on top of the gate. When Vollies asked me what I was doing I replied nonchalantly, “nothing.” Well, he pissed himself laughing and helped me down from the gate and walked back to the hostel with me and asked why I went for a swim when obviously I wasn’t able. I said I wanted to dip my toe of one leg in the water. I then recall him telling me about how his dad was troubled by the bottle and how he doesn’t touch the stuff. I think he was telling me to not do something stupid because of peer pressure. It actual fact, all I learnt at that stage, was don’t get caught and hence my assimilation of secret agent tactics.

Those years at Grey College included confusing emotions of crests and troughs. Holding those keys, I navigated responsibility and rebellion, to write my story while staying just out of sight. The spire, the library, the stage, they weren’t just places; they were chapters of a young life lived audaciously, quietly, and all I can say as a wrap is, I hope they can take jokes. While my fellow brakke were being caught and bliksem’d for the minor indiscretions of karreskud, I was sitting in the Centenary Hall feasting and toasting like Julius Caesar.

Karreskud | Gooi hom in die Sloot

The air was thick with mischief at Grey College in 1984, where the nights were long and the thrill of rebellion coursed through our teenage veins. Among the hallowed halls and hostel rooms, a peculiar tradition thrived among the matrics: karreskud. This was no ordinary prank, it was the art of sneaking out under the cover of darkness to disrupt lovers parked at the Free State Stadium, their cars fogged up with secrets. For us, it was a hoot, a rite of passage, a way to poke at the adult world while we were still boys.

Our matric setwork book for Afrikaans was “Gooi hom in die sloot!” Little did I realize that I would be required to jump into the sloot.

The hardcore karreskudders of the ’84 matrics were a tight-knit crew, a band of serial pranksters who treated these nighttime raids like an addiction. They were legends in their own minds, plotting their escapades with the precision of a heist. I wasn’t part of their inner circle—they figured I’d snitch, the goody-two-shoes who’d spill the beans to the housemaster. Little did they know, I had my own nocturnal wanderings, slipping out for the thrill of the night, not to tattle but to taste the same freedom.

The Voorsitter of the Karreskudders was my buurman who had room 205 in Leith House. He was Sir Dawid of Vryburg. I was resident in 206.

One fateful evening, as I roamed the schoolyard under the stars, I stumbled into their pack, en route to the stadium. Surprised to see me, they hesitated, then threw me an invite—a rare ticket to the chaos. I didn’t know it then, but I was about to witness the granddaddy of all karreskud encounters.

As we crept toward the stadium, one of the lads, eyes gleaming with anticipation, whispered about his dream target: a VW Beetle. “Perfect karreskud fodder,” he said. You could jump on the bumper, feet pounding, and if you had mates on both sides, you could make that Volksie hop like those lowriders in Mexico. The thought alone sent a ripple of laughter through the group.

Our first victim was a Mercedes, its windows steamed up like a sauna, heavy breathing fogging the glass. One of the skudders, a subject matter expert in the nocturnal mating habits of Homo Sapiens Skudders, peering in, declared with a smirk, “Hulle naai.” We launched our attack, rocking the car with gleeful abandon. But the guy inside? Unfazed. He kept at it, riding the moment like a cowboy at a rodeo, undeterred by our antics. I couldn’t help but be impressed by his commitment.

We had a number of other subject matter experts in the group. There was Nico, Lord of the Mags who knew a ton about car wheels and even a guy named Delport whose favourite prank was to shove a potato up the exhaust of a skudder’s victim. There was also Bes, who wasn’t a subject matter expert but was a langasem. His hand was in a splint as he had attempted to get a mulligan for a test by injuring his writing hand. He hand recently watched the film, Escape to Victory, where one of the players was purposely injured not to play.

Then, in the dim corner of the car park, we spotted our next mark: a Ford Cortina. That should’ve been a warning. You don’t mess with a Cortina man, he’s got grit, and probably something to prove. But we were young, invincible, and drunk on the thrill. We approached with military precision, surrounding the car and giving it a good shake. Big mistake.

The door flew open, and out came a furious driver, cursing like a storm and brandishing a pistol. The night exploded into chaos. He fired shots into the air, each crack splitting the silence like thunder. We scattered like roaches, legs pumping, hearts racing. I bolted for the nearest fence, only to realize it bordered the concrete sloot—a deep, treacherous trench carrying the river through Bloemfontein toward Loch Logan. No choice left, I leapt in, a few skudders beside me, and we ran, splashing through the shallow water for a kilometre until we reached a place to climb out, breathless and soaked. I was hauled out by a mate named Stokkies, who had ended up in the water of the sloot after attempting to tightrope walk a sewerage pipe over the sloot. For a moment there I though I’d be abandoned by my comrades, like when they left me dandgling on the pool gate like drying biltong when we went for an unathorized swim and Vollies rocked up.

Back at the hostel, we regrouped, counting heads. Wimmer and Stompie were the first to arrive back as their self preservation desire was the highest. Miraculously, no one was sporting bullet holes. Two guys, Gavin and Gustav straggled in late, pale as ghosts. They’d been nabbed by a passing police van, thinking they’d found safety. Instead, they were tossed into the back cage, roughed up a bit, and let go with a warning. They were delivered to the hostel by the cops. We laughed it off, adrenaline still buzzing, but we all knew we’d danced with the devil that night.

The housemaster, Vollies, was fast asleep, oblivious to our brush with disaster. We slipped back into our beds, the night sealing our secret. That was the granddaddy of karreskud—a tale of teenage bravado, a Cortina-wielding gunslinger, and a sprint through a concrete river that we’d never forget. As the years progress, the escapades of that night, stretch like “Visvang Stories.” Vleis, a keen fisherman himself is starting to claim that he could Karreskud 'n Hilux bakkie with his small toe.

The Forty Days Fiasco

The Forty Days celebration was a rite of passage at Grey College, a mischievous nod to the rock hit 40 Days, marking the final forty days of school. For us seniors, it was a chance to let loose, to etch our names in the annals of school legend with pranks that danced on the edge of rebellion. My mate, Dougie, and I had a plan that year, one that would make the quadrangle talk for weeks.

We had dodged the monotony of cadet marching, where wed trudge up and down roads and fields in formation, by volunteering at the local fire station. There, we learned the art of wielding fire hoses, the big ones, connected to the street hydrants, not the tame ones bolted to the school walls. It was practical knowledge, we told ourselves, but deep down, we knew it was a ticket to something grander.

When the Forty Days arrived, we waited for break time, when the quadrangle buzzed with students. As the crowd swelled, we unleashed the fire hose, its powerful jet sweeping across the quad like a rogue wave. Laughter and screams filled the air as students scattered, drenched and delighted, dodging the spray. It was chaos, glorious chaos, and we thought we were untouchable, until Dr. Michau Heyns, our headmaster, rounded the corner to investigate the commotion.

In a moment of reckless bravado, I swung the hose toward him. The water caught him square, soaking his suit. The quad fell silent, save for the hiss of the hose. His face turned thunderous, and with a barked order, he commanded us to shut it down and report to his office. My mate and I exchanged a look, part dread, part defiance, knowing wed crossed a line.

My history with Dr. Heyns wasn’t exactly spotless. Earlier that year, I’d published a cheeky photo of him in the school paper, hands in his pockets, captioned as him “playing pocket billiards.” It was a jab at his strict rule against students doing the same, a rule enforced with the sting of his cane. I suspected hed been biding his time, waiting for a chance to settle the score.

We stood in his office, the air heavy with anticipation, for a nerve-wracking twenty minutes while he changed into a dry suit. When he returned, he delivered a stern lecture about not getting “too big for our boots,” even with only forty days left. His words were sharp, but it was his actions that left a mark. He administered a caning unlike any other, one stroke for me, then one for my mate, alternating as we circled his desk. Six strokes each, the maximum, delivered with a precision that left no doubt about his displeasure.

As was tradition, we thanked him for the punishment, our voices steady despite the pain. Then, with tears stinging our eyes, we hobbled to the toilets. There, we filled a basin with cold water, desperately trying to soothe our throbbing backsides. The icy water offered little relief, but as we sat there, wincing and laughing through the pain, we knew we’d earned our place in the Forty Days lore.

That day, we learned more than just the mechanics of a fire hose. We learned about consequences, about the fine line between prank and peril, and about the stories that bind a school together. The quadrangle would dry, Dr. Heyns would move on, but the tale of the Forty Days Fiasco would echo through Grey College, a testament to our fleeting, fiery rebellion.

Years later a would meet Dr Heyns at a reunion. He face lit up in recognition saying I remember you. My ass gave an involuntary shudder in remembrance.

The Western Flyer Cyclist

From my earliest days on the farm, tearing down the dusty district road on my Golden Raleigh, cycling was my freedom. The wind in my face, the blur of grasslands and potato fields, it was my escape, my adventure. When I arrived at Grey College in Bloemfontein, that love didn’t fade. I convinced my dad to get me a Western Flyer, a cheap road bike that suited me just fine. I wasn’t about to be a boertjie with a clunky dikwiel. That sleek bike was my ticket to speed, and I became the notorious cyclist of Grey, zipping through the school grounds and the city streets with reckless abandon.

I’d race to the girls school, heart pounding more from the ride than the prospect of actually talking to anyone. When I got there, I’d be all teeth and no words, tongue tied and awkward. Unlike some of the self-proclaimed Casanovas in our ranks, I didn’t have wild tales to tell. One lad bragged about a tryst in the coal room, emerging covered head to toe in soot, his story as black as his clothes. My adventures were simpler, defined by the rhythm of pedals and the open road.

But not every ride ended in glory. One fateful day, I was speeding toward the poskantoor to withdraw some cash. The road was my playground, and I was flying until I hit a brick. At that speed, there was no saving it. I moered off, my face meeting the tar in a brutal slide. I broke a few teeth, bloodied and dazed, and limped back to the hostel. A hostel master, shaking his head, drove me to Universitas Hospital. The pain was sharp, but the embarrassment lingered longer. To this day, the lads never let me forget that spill, the day the notorious cyclist ate the road. Its a scar, a story, and a reminder: even the fastest fall sometimes.

The Gorgeous Jacqui Badenhorst

High school was a kaleidoscope of hormones, homework, and hero worship, and at the center of it all was our English teacher, Jacqui Badenhorst. She was no ordinary teacher—she was our Marilyn Monroe, brunette edition, with a magnetic presence that could stop a room. Always impeccably dressed, her outfits crisp and tailored, her makeup flawless, she was a vision of elegance in our dusty, Free State school. We were smitten, every last one of the boys.

The real show began when Jacqui turned to the green chalkboard. As she wrote, her chalk scratching out elegant cursive, her hips would sway in a subtle, rhythmic dance with each letter. It was mesmerizing, like a burlesque performance disguised as a lesson on Shakespeare or sentence structure. We’d sit, chins propped on hands, pretending to take notes while stealing glances at her graceful movements. The chalk dust would settle on her dress, and somehow, even that looked glamorous. Those bouncing bodacious buttocks were monuments like the granite boulders on the hill side of Oakvilla farm. Unforgettable.

But that sexy dance at the board wasn’t the thing that really made the testosterone flow. Her desk was in front of the board and when she read to us out of a text book or set work she would push her chair in at the desk and stand behind it. She would push her lower body hard against her chair and we would all be distracted. Not listening to one word she was reading. Occasionally there would be the grind up and down, like a stripper on a pole. To this day, I need a cold shower just thinking about it!

I was a diligent English student, but Jacqui’s class turned my effort into obsession. She had a way of making literature feel alive, like the words could leap off the page and into our lives. When she started using my compositions as examples for the class, I was over the moon. My stories, often scribbled late at night while at the hostel, were suddenly held up as the gold standard. I’d sit there, cheeks burning, heart racing, half-proud, half-mortified, and completely in love.

One day, Jacqui pulled me aside after class, her eyes sparkling with that warm encouragement she was so good at. “There’s a Navy essay competition,” she said, “and I think you should enter. Write a story with a naval theme. You’ve got the talent for it.” I didn’t know much about ships or the sea—our school was 600 kilometers from the nearest coast—but I wasn’t about to say no to her. I poured my heart into a story, weaving in the names of all my classmates as characters. It was a tale of adventure, camaraderie, and a touch of teenage bravado. I handed it in, hoping it’d make her proud.

Then came the curveball: I broke my leg. A clumsy tumble during a rugby match sent me back to our family farm to recover for a few weeks. Crutches, boredom, and the endless horizon of the countryside became my world. But when I hobbled back to school, still on crutches, I wasn’t prepared for what awaited.

The first hall period was a surprise. The principal called my name, and I limped to the stage, confused, the eyes of the entire school on me. There, in front of everyone, I was handed a certificate and an envelope stuffed with prize money. I’d won the Navy essay competition. The applause was deafening, echoing off the walls of the assembly hall. For a school better known for its sports trophies than its academic accolades, this was a big deal. I stood there, clutching my certificate, feeling like I’d just conquered the world.

From that day on, I carried myself a little taller, as if I had an extra feather in my cap. Jacqui’s belief in me had turned a farm cowboy into a momentary legend. My crush on her hasn’t faded with time, neither has the memory of her chalkboard dance and the pride she instilled in me.

Syssitia at Hamilton Hall

Hamilton Hall, a grand sandstone building designed by Herbert Baker, stood as the heart of our boarding school’s dining rituals. It was where the boys from Murray, Brill, and Leith hostels converged, three times a day, for meals that were as much about tradition as they were about sustenance. These were no ordinary meals; they were a syssitia, a communal affair steeped in ceremony, where we sat at long tables of twelve, each presided over by a prefect who commanded respect and order.

The ritual began outside the hall, where we lined up by house, standing in neat rows before marching in with military precision. Once inside, we stood behind our chairs, heads bowed, as a prayer was offered. A teacher would strike a gavel, its sharp crack signaling the start of the meal, and we’d sit, the oldest boys served first, a nod to the hierarchy that governed our world. Exactly twenty minutes later, the gavel would sound again, prompting us to stand, give thanks, and file out in an orderly exit.

Meals varied in quality. Breakfast and lunch could be hit or miss, but Sunday dinners were the highlight, a proper roast, the aroma of which filled the hall and briefly made us forget the monotony of hostel life. On less inspiring days, we were served what we dubbed “submarines”, a watery meat stew where you’d have to “depth charge” the pot with a spoon to unearth a elusive chunk of meat. If the food was particularly lackluster, some of us would sneak across the road to Angelo’s Roadhouse for a takeaway, a small act of rebellion against the kitchen’s offerings.

Angelo’s roadhouse has standard takeaway fare but something that was guaranteed to fill any hunger gap was their dagwood. It was the definitive greasy and cheesy loaded treat!

Tradition laced every meal with moments of camaraderie and mischief. Occasionally, a boy would rise to propose a toast—for a birthday, a special occasion, or just for laughs. One unforgettable toast followed the tragic news of a giraffe escaping from the Bloemfontein Zoo, only to meet its end under a lorry. That evening, as we choked down a particularly grim supper, a boy stood and proposed a mock toast “vir die kameelperd wat sy lewe gegee het vir ons aandete”, implying we were eating the unfortunate beast. The hall erupted in laughter, but the humor was short-lived. A lady staff member, face turning green, stormed out, and the boy who dared the jest was promptly caned.

Discontent with the food wasn’t uncommon, and once, we staged a full-blown eating strike, refusing to touch the dismal fare. The protest ended predictably: every one of us was caned, a painful reminder that defiance came at a cost. Punishment was part of the culture, as was the infamous “tea with the matrics.” During school breaks, tea and buns were served outside Hamilton Hall, but if the matrics invited you to join them, it wasn’t for pleasantries. These “invitations” were a forceful way of telling younger boys, especially the windgat ones—that their behavior needed correction. No one wanted that summons.

Tea itself was a race. To secure a cup and a bun, you had to sprint from class to be first in line; latecomers went empty-handed. For those with pocket money, there was an alternative: skipping tea altogether and heading to the tuckshop, a rickety old corrugated iron building, once a military hospital from the Boer War. There, a Coke and a donut offered a sweet escape from the rigid structure of hostel life.

Hamilton Hall was more than a dining room; it was a stage for rituals, rebellions, and the small moments that shaped our school days. The gavel’s echo, the taste of Sunday roast, and the sting of a cane for a cheeky toast, they’re etched into my memory, as much a part of growing up as the lessons we learned in class.

The Cast of Teachers

Our school was a vibrant tapestry of colourful teachers and mischievous antics, each leaving an indelible mark on my memories. Among them was Trevors Jordaan, a teacher and occasional rugby coach who seemed to embody joviality itself. His white shirt, a staple of his wardrobe, always bore the faint outline of a pack of Gunston cigarettes tucked into the pocket—a subtle badge of his laid-back demeanor. I’ll never forget the day in the bathroom when I glanced over and realized Trevors was, well, impressively endowed. It was the kind of moment that left you blinking in disbelief, a story whispered among us boys for weeks.

Then there was Dries vd Waal, the greenhorn teacher who arrived with a fresh face and ambitions to eventually take over as first team rugby coach from the legendary Lappies. One day, Dries was substituting for a teacher who was out sick. Paola and I, ever the provocateurs, decided to test his mettle with a heated political discussion, spouting the most outrageously liberal views we could muster. Dries, visibly shocked, marched next door to Trevors’ classroom to report our audacity. Moments later, he returned with Trevors in tow, who took one look at us, burst into laughter, and clapped Dries on the shoulder. “They’re winding you up, mate,” he chuckled. “It’s par for the course. You’ll get used to it.” Dries’ bewildered expression was priceless, and we reveled in our triumph.

Another unforgettable figure was Rock Ferreira, our Afrikaans and Latin teacher, always draped in a distinctive blue dust jacket. His classroom was a stage for our pranks, particularly Paola’s masterpiece: paper caricatures strung together with Prestik, expertly tossed to stick on the ceiling. They dangled there like trophies of our ingenuity, much to Rock’s bemusement, or perhaps he never noticed, lost in his world of declensions and Afrikaans idioms.

Our maths teacher, affectionately dubbed Seekoei for her plump figure, was actually named Truana. She presided over my domain of triumph, as maths was my forte. I consistently scored above 100% on tests, thanks to her habit of including a bonus question that I’d nail alongside every other problem. Those perfect scores were my quiet rebellion against the chaos of school life.

Then there was Religious Instruction, a period overseen by a teacher we called OS. He quickly gave up on teaching us anything about faith, as our class was a hotbed of arguments and debates. Instead, he let us run wild, turning the period into a playground for Paola and me to outprank each other. We’d devise elaborate schemes, knowing OS wouldn’t cane us like other teachers might. Those moments of unbridled mischief, free from the threat of punishment, were the heart of our schoolboy camaraderie.

These characters, Trevors with his cigarettes, Dries with his rookie earnestness, Rock with his dusty jacket, Seekoei with her bonus questions, and OS with his resigned leniency, wove the fabric of our school years. They were the backdrop to our pranks, our triumphs, and the stories we’d carry into adulthood, each one a thread in the rich tapestry of youth.

A Shattered Leg & a Haunting Connection

In 1982, my life took a dramatic turn on the rugby field at Grey College. I was 16, full of youthful bravado, chasing a rugby ball with everything I had. It was a crisp day, the kind where the grass smells sharp and the crowd’s cheers echo in your bones. Then, in an instant, a loose scrum collapsed on me. I felt a sickening crunch, and my world tilted. My leg was shattered, 27 pieces, the doctor later told me, as if it were a jigsaw puzzle they’d have to reassemble.

I tried to stand, driven by instinct and adrenaline, only to glance down and see my leg bent at a grotesque right angle. The sight hit me like a punch. I collapsed back onto the field, my fingers clawing at the grass, tearing it out in clumps as pain seared through me. The world blurred, shouts, teammates’ faces, the sky above, until I was loaded into an ambulance and rushed to Universitas Hospital. Morphine dulled the edges, wrapping me in a haze where time and faces melted together. Visitors came and went, their voices muffled, their identities lost in the fog of drugs. I was too out of it to recognize or remember them.

The medical bills piled up, but I was fortunate. The newly established Chris Burger Fund covered my expenses, a lifeline for a kid like me facing a long recovery. At the time, I didn’t think much of the fund’s namesake. I’d always assumed Chris Burger, a Western Province player, had died on the field at the Free State Stadium in 1980. It wasn’t until September, when I read about him, that the weight of his story hit me.

Chris Burger, only 28, had been in a similar scrum, on a similar field, just two years before me. A loose scrum collapsed, and he lay motionless, his neck broken. He told the doctor, “Dok, ek het geen gevoel in my bene en arms” (Doc, I have no feeling in my legs and arms). They carried him off on a wooden changing room door, a makeshift stretcher, to Universitas Hospital, the same emergency room where I’d been wheeled in. A neurosurgeon tried mild traction to relieve the pressure on his spinal cord, but it was no use. His teammates, including captain Morne du Plessis, visited him as he lay fully conscious, facing death with a courage I can barely fathom. He told a doctor, “I know my God. I am ready to go,” and passed away peacefully of respiratory failure early that Sunday morning.

Reading that, I froze. I had lain in the same emergency room where Chris Burger took his final breaths. The realization hit me like a wave, and I cried, hot, messy tears for a man I’d never met, for the fragility of it all, for the sheer luck that my injury, though brutal, hadn’t taken my life. His story, his courage, and the fund that bore his name became a thread connecting us across time, a reminder of how close I’d come to a different fate.

That fund, now part of the Players Fund, still supports injured rugby players. It’s a cause worth supporting, a way to honour Chris and others like him. If you can, please donate to www.playersfund.org.za.

The Brass Tap at Grey

The main building at Grey stands as a sandstone splendor, its weathered facade a testament to time and tradition. Behind it looms the Reunie Hall, where sturdy beams overhead have borne witness to the legacies carved by generations of boys. Off to one side, the ou klok chimes, a ringing tribute to the fellowship that binds us across the years.

But for me, the heart of Grey lies in a quieter corner, unassuming yet unforgettable: a simple brass tap fixed to a pillar along the walkway to the side of the main building. It’s not grand like the sandstone arches or storied like the beams of Reunie Hall, but to me, it’s every bit as iconic. That tap, modest as it seems, holds a memory that outshines the rest.

No water ever tasted better than the water from that tap, drunk straight from the stream, open-mouthed and greedy. It was better than Perrier, better than anything bottled or refined. That water didn’t just quench thirst, it refreshed the body and soul, a cool rush of clarity that seemed to carry the spirit of the school itself. Maybe it’s just me, caught in the haze of nostalgia, but when I think of Grey, it’s that brass tap that brings the most joy, its memory sparkling like the water it poured.

When I need my soul replenished, I journey to that tap.

Ronald Bartels | LinkedIn | Instagram

The virtues of boredom.

My father and I were talking yesterday about boredom, and I wanted to share some thoughts on the subject I have accumulated over the years. We even have a song coming on this big record we’re making that sings the virtues of boredom. I don’t shy away from it. I am somewhat of an expert on being bored.

“I don’t have time.”

I have talked to many folks, musicians, and other professionals, who say, “I don’t have time to be bored.” I find that mindset troubling. I write all my best stuff when I am bored. If I am never bored, no best stuff. I make ample boredom time for that reason. It’s actually work. As a songwriter, I don’t have the time to not be bored.

What gives you “permission” to do?

Boredom is permission for me to “go there.” I have the time and open mind to experiment, think on one thing forever, practice. I have the time for tuning weird, or playing bass through a fuzzy preamp, or brushes on a djembe, or singing in Spanish! If I am in a hurry-up work mode all the time, the kooky shit stays in the closet. I have to be bored to run the bases of creation in music. The link is real. I simply create better when bored.

“Bored people are boring people.”

Our society discourages this thinking, making sure we are never bored. We even say, “Bored people are boring people.” This is not true if you are the ones boring them. It makes you the boring person, in this instance. It is right there in the phrase, it just needs a comma. The truth is the mind is better conditioned to create while bored. It isn’t just me, it’s science.

In Psychology Today, for example, Jeffrey Davis talks back in 2022 about boredom not only facilitating creativity, he said it contributes to well-being. His key points are: 

“With so many forms of entertainment at our fingertips, we never need to let ourselves be bored.”

“When we don't allow our minds to wander, we miss opportunities to become more creative, reboot mental health, and reconnect.”

“Instead of shunning boredom, we should embrace our mind's need to wander.”

Even Einstein.. Albert Einstein even said of being bored, “the monotony and solitude of a quiet life stimulate the creative mind.”

It is a luxury, but often attainable, just not sought after.

I realize I have the luxury to be bored today, more than any time of my life. I am trying to make the most of it. I know folks can’t just be bored like I can. But maybe they could if they did what I did. I do not know, purely speculation. I got rid of social media, I limit time online, I really try to be bored. I want to write good songs more than anything else I want to do in this life. Being bored is crucial to that. My mind is not free if it is always stimulated. It is reacting. Reacting is a different vibe than creation. It has to do with what others create. That’s really not creating, if you think about it. It might be necessary to react. We have to live. But we shouldn’t call it creating. I understand folks may not have this luxury or privilege in their mind, but many could. We’re just addicted to anti-creativity devices. 

When god was bored, he created, according to the lore, which means we are talking about humans. It’s only natural, right? 

This is not new. This boredom thing goes back. Clearing the head, resetting the creative juices is as old as the hills. Our memories have gotten short because we don’t use them. When you get good and bored, you get memories. 

And then there’s safety.

Boredom also requires an element of safety. You don’t let your guard down on the battlefield. I realize I am very fortunate to feel safe these days. It is new. It helps immensely with writing and improving. Safety alone facilitates my kind of boredom more than any other factor. Not comfort, not spare time, not gadgets, not a cozy shirt. Safety is the number one thing. Numero uno. Being safe at the moment is permission to be bored. Being bored is permission to create. How I operate. 

Here’s what’s shitty

Everyone who puts things in your brain that pass through a data scientist knows this about human nature. They know the best ways to keep you busy, occupied, and distracted. They push your buttons, making you react. I have been off social media for a good while now, and let me tell you, they are puppeteers on social media and everywhere else. They very much use this kind of knowledge to manipulate thoughts and behavior in billions, not creating, no memories, just junk. They sell candidates, they sell Pop-Tarts, they sell philosophies, they sell health products, on and on. If they can afford a micro-targeting campaign, they manipulate you into not being bored because they need to sell stuff. Don’t give them what little of yourself you may have left. Most folks do not care if you feel safe or not. This includes data scientists. They do not like it when you are bored. Resist, be bored.

Kelly Kintner (Youtube)

Editor, Producer

My ancestors arrived from Hanover aboard a ship named after the legendary Queen of Sheba, from Ethiopia

Comrade Ernie

My dad Ernfried Bartels was commonly known as Ernie. He went to High School during the Second World War at the Hermannsburg Mission School just outside of the dorp of Kranskop. The school was the location of the original Mission established by Harms for evangelizing within South Africa. The original commune structure exists in that location to this day. It was also the school attended by the first prime minister of South Africa, Louis Botha.

My dad was aware that he was at a German school & at that the moment in time South Africans were in North Africa and Italy fighting the German nation because of the fascist policies and belligerence of the Nazis. He made make the choice to not associate with that grouping of Germans. He was no fascist.

He ran the Comrades Marathon and came in 69th in 1959. His stories about the race encouraged my brother to have a life long passion for running and in the end he finished 10 Comrade Marathons.

The Cult of Kwasizabantu

Also located outside Kranskop is the Kwasizbantu Mission that includes a greenhouse facility, dairy and water bottling plant. To all intends and purposes Kwasizabantu has given an air of sophistication in delivering Christian missionary work amongst the Zulus of the Valley of a Thousand Hills but was at its heart it is a cult. It has developed a self-sustaining model of financing its activities by creating various farming and business entities. Although there have always been undercurrents of abuse leaked and known to the outside community, it was only during the year of the pandemic that News24 finally exposed them for what they are in a string of stories revealing the perverted inner workings of the cult.

The Ship Kandaze

My dad's family traces its African roots to Christof Bartels, a missionary, who arrived aboard the ship Kandaze at Port Natal, the year after George Grey returned to England. The Kandaze was named after the legendary Queens of Ethiopia and belonged to the Hermannsburg Mission Society. The Society was originally meant to convert the heathen Galla, (commonly known as the Oromo) of Ethiopia to Christianity. Instead, the missionaries were declared persona non-grata in Ethiopia which was under the influence of the Coptic Church and ruled by Sultan Seyyid Said, the Muslimic sovereign. They searched for alternative converts, which happened to be the Zulu of Southern Africa. Thus, the Kandaze docked at Port Natal instead of Ethiopia. Elsewhere in Southern Africa a prominent theologian named Andrew Murray was leading a revival.

The Bible refers to the conversion to Christianity of one the Queens of Ethiopia’s officials in Acts 8:27-39. The succession for the throne in Ethiopia was matrilineal. Harms obviously named the ship for his missionary work after this legendary biblical figure.

Christof was in love with a girl name Charlotte. After his arrival in Natal, he learned she had dumped him. The broken-hearted Christof crossed out all references to her in his diary, which included detail logs of his journey on the Kandaze. He would eventually marry Auguste, who left Hanover on what could be best described as a long-distance blind date. They would spend more than a half a century together and die three months apart in the year that the Titanic struck an iceberg and sank.

Before becoming an ordained Lutheran pastor, Christof had been a cavalry officer in the Hanoverian army of the Saxe-coburg and Gotha. This army experience would help him as he established many congregations amongst the Zulus. His first congregation was established when he was ambushed by two Zulus. He was riding on horseback and instead carrying a lance, as he did when he was in the cavalry, he would carry a large stick. He was a highly trained and skilled military man as well as excellent horseman. He set amongst the two Zulus and administered a good beating. He admonished them and told them that he was coming by in one month again, and by that time he wanted them to have started on the building of a church. When he arrived back a month later, the two men had gathered all their families at the location and so his first congregation was created.

The Zulus

The Zulus are abrasive and are well versed in battle. It was no wonder that those Zulu’s appreciated a man who wield a stick in the manner that Christoff did, as the sport of stick fighting is a well ingrained in Zulu culture. Forget Churchill, Patton, Napoleon, or even Storming Norman but the greatest military genius was none of these, it was a Zulu named Shaka. He was able to mastermind the tactics that resulted in the biggest defeat of the British Army ever in a single skirmish. And this was achieved using inferior technology. It happened in the same area I grew up as a kid in Kwazulu-Natal.

It occurred at the Battle of Isandlwana shortly before the First Anglo Boer War. A force of British soldiers armed with the best weaponry at the time, were overwhelmed by a more skilled opposing Zulu force that was armed only with primitive weapons called Assegai, which are iron spears. These Assegai were combined with a highly skilled and mobile fighting formation known as the Buffalo horns which was devised by Shaka. This would be assimilated some sixty years later during the Second World War by the Germans for a type of more modern mobile warfare known as Blitzkrieg while my dad was at High School.

Ironically, instead of learning from the loss, the British covered it up by subsequently awarding a disproportionate number of battle honours to an insignificant action the next day at Rorke’s Drift. This stubbornness resulted in large scale methods of entrenched warfare continuing to be used including during the First World War. These methods were eventually reversed due to the enforced circumstances of the Second World War and its emphasis on mobility, which they should have realized from Shaka’s methods, if they paid any attention.

The British were armed with the state-of-the-art Martini-Henry breech-loading rifle as well as two seven pounder mountain guns deployed as field guns and a rocket battery. The Zulus as mentioned were equipped mainly with the traditional assegai iron spears and Nguni cow-hide shields

The Zulus tactics, known as the “buffalo horns” formation (impondo zenkomo in the Zulu language). It comprised three elements. The horns which encircled and pin down the enemy and were made up of younger, greener troops. The chest which delivered the coup de grace where prime fighters composed the main force. And the loins which were used to exploit success or reinforce elsewhere, and these were often the older veterans who were positioned with their backs to the battle so as not to get unduly excited until required.

As a young boy I would visit with my family our Bruyns cousins on my maternal side at their farm just south of Dundee. The farm overlooked the battlefield. The outline of that hill where the battle occurred is etched in my memory as my dad pointed it out. Shaka did not lead the battle at that hill. He had long since been assassinated by his brother Dingaan, but he was a formidable leader and his tactics and philosophies lived on in the following generations of Zulu armies. The legacy of Shaka also lives on in South Africa who are a hardened and abrasive nation.

The Bruyns family had been part of the Gert Maritz trek party that had migrated from the Cape to Natal. They had encamped at present day Pietermaritzburg. Another leader of a trek party that had also arrived in Natal was Piet Retief. Retief decided to do a deal for land with Dingaan, the notorious Zulu leader who had assassinated his brother Shaka. Maritz was reluctant having been told that Dingaan would use the opportunity of a meeting to double cross the Boers. Maritz declined and Retief set off for Dingaan’s kraal without Maritz but not before riding past his tent and insulting him by calling him a lafaard (coward). Retief met his fate by being killed in Dingaan’s kraal.

At that stage elsewhere in the world in the Americas the native population was being subjected to genocide and in Southern Africa Dingaan’s actions resulted in a Battle known as Bloedrivier that would provide the Boers a foothold in the province. Ironically, the differences between Maritz and Retief was a common Boer characteristic. They would never have common purpose or agreement and always have various splinter groups. The organization that my maternal grandfather JT Elliot belonged to was known as the Saamwerk Kommitee and had as its primary purpose to unite the Boers into a greater and more united Afrikaner grouping.

The reasons Christof became a pastor was related to his feelings of being remorseful of his conduct while in the Hanoverian army. The army had often massacred rebellious adversaries with Christof running them through using his lance. He was influenced in his decision to become a missionary because he attended a revival service addressed by the leader of the Hermannsburg Mission, a Louis Harms. He felt he needed to repent for lancing those opponents. Today we would know it as post traumatic stress disorder, but in those days, he related it to a calling by God to atone.

Because he was a Hanoverian officer, Christof would maintain loyalty to the House of Sax-Coburg and Gotha, which would later become the House of Windsor in the United Kingdom of Great Britain. He was brought up for court martial before the Governor General of Natal for showing disloyalty to the Crown during the Anglo-Boer war. His crime was that of preaching against war, accusing both sides of being at fault. The Governor General summarily dismissed the charges when Christof told him he was perturbed at the charges as he prayed for the welfare and health of the Regent every Sunday in Church.

The rotten apple of Lilienthal

His descendants would live around Dalton and attend the Lilienthal Church. During the World Wars, their English neighbours would stand surety for them. Mostly because the government did not trust the immigrants who came from the territories of the German enemy. My grandfather Ludwig Bartels had a retired Colonel of the Natal Carbineers as a neighbour who drove over to intervene when the local police paid a visit to question the family’s loyalties.

Post-war the major event was the cult that was started by the pastor of Lilienthal, the notorious scoundrel, Anton Engelbrecht. Engelbrecht was a Lutheran pastor at Lilienthal Church. The church is located close to Dalton, a little backwater in the Kwazulu-Natal Midlands, north of the town of Pietermaritzburg. My dad and his family were members of the church. Engelbrecht started moving outside the boundaries of the philosophies of the Lutherans. This caused conflict with his congregation and Engelbrecht was excommunicated from the Lutheran Synod, and together with another dubious character, Erlo Stegen, started a sect known as Bible House that was based at Claridge close to Pietermaritzburg. Stegen was my paternal grandmother’s nephew. He was a rotten apple.

My dad, a young man just out of High School refused to leave the Lilienthal church even though his family applied emotional blackmail against him to join the cult. Engelbrecht based his cult on prayer sessions, that were eventually exposed as nothing more than sexual shenanigans behind closed doors. All performed under the ruse of religion. Twenty years after it started Engelbrecht's little facade crumbled deservingly around his ears. But his protégé, Stegen, then created an offshoot, based on the same principles that exists to this day. Stegen had similar acts of religious based deviant sexual behaviour known as prayer sessions with acquaintances known as the Mamas. Perversely, sex was taboo to members of the cult who were ordered and pushed into a regime of pious exploitation. The cults of Engelbrecht and Stegen have destroyed many lives, including some of my own family. My aunt, Enid, was a beautiful woman. She joined Volkskas, nowadays known as ABSA, as an accountant, being one of the first females in this position in Kwazulu-Natal. She became engaged to a young man who truly loved her, and then her world turned insane. She was raped by Engelbrecht. Instead of following the normal course of justice, these maniacs within the cult supposedly prayed to God and concluded to suppress the crime. My dad was given the nasty task of having to meet the fiancée of my aunt and return the ring, “because that is what the Lord wanted!” The young man pleaded with my dad, saying no matter what has happened, he would still want Enid as his wife. My father's efforts to reconcile the pair were met by a brick wall. He cried when he related the story to me, one evening during the last years of his life, his body racked by Parkinson’s.

Amongst the older German community resident in Dalton after the Second World War it was common knowledge that Engelbrecht's violation of my aunt lead to the birth of a child.

I can only imagine the insanity faced by my aunt, abandoned by the Christians whose God was meant to be kind and generous. Yet, sickeningly, the cult always blamed the woman and exonerated the men. Enid died a spinster with a lifelong addition to sleeping pills and drinking Castle Stout. When Kathleen (Kath) & my boys were born and we went to visit her, and she said to me they were like her own grandchildren, and at the moment I walked outside and shed a tear, just like my dad at a life that could have been so different if people hadn't falsely made God's decisions for him. My dad often told me that the cult viewed prayer as making a phone call to God. However, he added, you do not know who would answer that call, as it could be God or Satan. Satan answered the calls of the cult was my dad's implication.

The cowshed myth

Stegen used knowledge of Enid’s rape and the sexual prayer orgies as leverage over Engelbrecht to initiate a palace coup at Bible House. Shortly after my own birth, he established Kwasizabantu Mission assimilating the assets and followers of Bible House. He wiped the history of Bible House by concocting a story about a revival in a cow shed. The story was nothing more than a regurgitation of an event described by JC de Vries that happened near Worcester the year before Christof Bartels arrived at Port Natal on the Kandaze. This was part of a Christian revival in South Africa at the time in which Andrew Murray played a prominent part. The Kwasizabantu narrative is this (something he read in Afrikaans Stegen translated to Zulu): When God comes down

Engelbrecht would retreat from his preaching and evangelizing and would marry one of the women with whom he had an affair, under the guise of Bible House prayer session. She was my dad’s brother, Heinz’s wife mom. A complicated web of abnormal relationships.

The abuse at the Mission continued and Enid’s sister Inge together with her husband Hogart Joosten formed the initial leadership backbone of Kwasizabantu, which was later assimilated by their son Dietmar. The other leaders at the Mission which came to prominence after Stegen became deposed due to increasing dementia was his daughters and Lidia Dube, a daughter of one of the Mamas. The Joosten’s other son who is my cousin André Joosten is an alleged rapist associated with various abuses at the Mission including assault. During the year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Mission was exposed in a set of news articles published by News24, a prominent mainstream news organization, which triggered numerous criminal and other investigations.

The Joosten's are regarded as Kwasizabantu royalty because Hogart Joosten was the treasurer at Bible House and facilitated the funneling of funds from that entity to Kwasizabantu. To cover this blatant heist, Erlo attempted to wipe out the history of Bible House and insert a new narrative in the form a fake Damascus experience, the so called cowshed revival.

Several of my cousins as mentioned were deeply entrenched in the machinations of the cult and lived lives that were often like those of the Mennonites. The women wore drab clothing and no makeup and strangely wrote to us asking for forgiveness for incidents of insignificant misdemeanor or fun. Like when we attempted to peep into the bathroom window when my sister and her friend were bathing. The windows were frosted, and we saw zilch. However, one of my cousins held the ladder for my brother and me. We received multiple letters about this prank that had been subsequently portrayed as a sin. The cult members would be intimidated into seeking repentance for incidents that were superficial but would overlook gross human rights abuses.

The Engelbrecht and Stegen cults condoned sexual and physical violence based on perverse reasoning. The main doctrine of the cults was that followers need to continuously repent after which the deeds and crimes would be swept under the carpet. This created a toxic environment whereby cycles of abuse became ingrained into the workings of the cults including the Mission based outside of Kranskop. To strangers these monsters disguised themselves as calm, meek and humble humans.

A family member married the daughter of one of the Bible House followers, Dr Justin Mitchell. Mitchell, wrote the preface for a book about Stegen named “God amongst the Zulus”. The relationship was troublesome, and as with most followers in the cult of Engelbrecht, was most probably abused which affected her interactions later in life. The marriage would dissolve as a result.

True heroes

One of the other times I saw my dad cry was when he described the life of his hero to me, Albert Schweitzer. I can understand why Schweitzer was my dad's hero as not only was he awarded the Nobel prize during the year the Bible House cult was established, but he was also a humanitarian, theologian, doctor and one of the best musicians of his time. He was the antithesis of an Anton Engelbrecht as he was a man who lead by his actions. Schweitzer and Engelbrecht stood in contrast to each other at a similar point in time.

Cult leaders are emotional pop stars whose primary interest is their own enjoyment and wealth. They sweep up their adherents to follow a polluted road of self-indulgence. I have encountered these cult-like leaders in life whether it be in present day business, politics, religion, sport or even entertainment. They call themselves South African and often state they are Christians. I am not that type of Christian. Pious and compassionate people don't need words to identify themselves as their actions speak for themselves.

Ronald Bartels | LinkedIn | Instagram

The day I closed down South Africa

Token-ring

In the mid-nineties I lived in Pretoria, in Hill Street, close to Loftus. Loftus Versveld is one of the prominent Rugby stadiums in the country. This was in the years immediately following the establishment of a full democracy in South Africa with Nelson Mandela leading the government. I worked for a token-ring company named Madge Networks as a Technical Account Manager. It was in direct competition with Ethernet, which would eventually become the dominant technology. The main competitor was Cisco.

One of my colleagues at Madge was Duncan Ogilvie. I was in contact with him when we stopped working at Madge and would often braai lamb chops and have a beer sitting on the stoep. During the pandemic he took his own life. Never knew that he was having mental health difficulties. He was a great mate.

The Madge offices were in Rivonia. My trip would start early mornings before seven as with heavy traffic the journey might take up to an hour. One morning I was driving in to work and was listening to a CD and switched to Radio 702 just before 7. Nowadays people rarely listen to CDs. The presenter on Radio 702 was John Robbie, an Irishman. The headline news was about major delays at Johannesburg International Airport which is now called OR Tambo that was reportedly caused by a computer problem. The country was at a standstill. I had worked at the airport for a major national airline installing many switches and CAUs and was very familiar with the environment. CAUs were token-ring hubs. I was coming up to the Buccleuch interchange and decided to go left to the airport instead of right to the office. Maybe there was something I could do to help.

A few moments later my mobile rang. It was the major national airline's IT manager who had heard the same news broadcast and asked me to meet him at the airport. He was as much in the dark about the situation as what I was. The two of us arrived at much the same time at the departure hall of the airport. The crowd and queues were extremely long. We walked to the front counters to determine from the staff what was the issue. Many of the passengers threatened us as the assumed we were hopping the queue and told us to get back into the line. Having struggled our way to the front we duly learned from the duty controller that there was no connectivity to the mainframe. Since my companion had walked over from the headquarters building, he confirmed it was not a general mainframe outage as the systems were all accessible and working from that building.

I had my laptop with me, an IBM Butterfly (one of the best laptops I have ever owned!) I attached my laptop using my Smart token-ring adapter to the network and loaded a good old DOS application called RingManager. I looked in dismay as RingManager proceeded to tell me that there were well over five hundred nodes connected onto the single ring (maximum should not be more than two hundred). The laptop screen then froze. Being a typical techie and not believing it the first time I proceeded to do it a second time with the same results by turning it off and on again. I conferred with the guys from the national major airline and told them that it was my suspicion that someone had looped the rings at the airport together. There was only one location where this was possible and that was the main fibre patching room. We proceeded to the patch room and at first inspection all was in order. However, when we started checking the patches, they were totally incorrect with the diagram pasted on the wall next to the cabinet.

The security guards confirmed that a cable installer had signed in and worked in the room at one in the morning connecting a new voice switch. We deduced that the patch cables were in his way, so he unpatched them all. He then installed his new fibre cables and then randomly patched the cables back. We started patching the fibres back to their correct position using the diagram on the wall. The technician who pasted the diagram on the wall was diligent and in today’s modern data centres this is never done. Nowadays you will never encounter diagrams present in patch rooms. When it comes to resolving problems, they are crucial. The assumption is you have it available electronically, but the fundamental problem is they were probably never created and not documented.

The airport network slowly started coming online as we worked through the patches and the departures were able to move from manual boarding to full digital ticket check-in and boarding.

After the crisis was over at around ten that morning, we had some strong cups of coffee. I asked the guys from the major national airline why there was no escalation as the operators had a network management alert console. No one had the answer, so we decided to go over to the operations area to work out the reason. The operator was sitting in his office blissfully unaware of the crisis. The network management console had a total of eleven million unacknowledged alerts. When questioned as to why there was no escalation the guy said that no-one had phoned him. He only does anything when someone phones him and since no-one phoned there was not any problem. He did not realize that his job was to tell people there was a problem. I never knew what happened to the poor bloke but there were some pissed off people ready to strangle him.

Change management

I have repeated seen changes done in isolation and not in an end to end fashion. In some companies each business unit does their own thing and does not consult with any other stakeholders. Change management will fail and cause outages unless there is a transparent end to end process where all stakeholders and their vendors within an organization have visibility to these types of activities.

Too often the changes are done in a fashion of need to know. I need to know and will tell you about it if I think you need to know. Murphy usually conspires to bring two changes together at the most inappropriate moment to cause absolute havoc.

Whenever I sit delayed in some airport, I often have the urge to go and ask the airport personnel who messed up the change process, because that is the most probable reason. The problem is not limited to a single national airline, in this case, South African Airways, but also countries as a whole. Ironically, South African Airways would go titsup due the cronyism in the post democratic South Africa under the control of the African National Congress.

The best example of a politician who was able to handle and manage change was Nelson Mandela. When I was at school at Grey College, Mandela was banned. We had no sight of him as his picture and words were banned and there is a famous Johnny Clegg song about it, Asimbonanga.

Braam Fischer

On the honours board in the Reunie Hall at Grey College under 1934 was the name of Braam Fischer. Fischer was a white Afrikaner, who was Mandela's lawyer and friend. Every hall period my eyes would drift to that name on the board. I knew who he was, and his name was cursed by the apartheid government in power. Some would have liked his name erased, but the school refused. Many famous people have matriculated from the school including Laurens van der Post, Denys Reitz and countless Springbok Rugby players. Of all these Fischer's ideals matched most closely those of the school's founder, Grey. He had died a horrible death in prison for his convictions and would not die in the comfort and praise of the nation. But his contribution was immense. Here is Fischer explained in the words of Mandela, delivered in that same Reunie Hall on 28 November 1997, where I sat:

Bram Fisher tel ongetwyfeld onder daardie klas van goeie mans en vroue wat op die wyse deur alle Suid-Afrikaners in verering gehou sal word.

Ons weet egter dat dit nie altyd die geval was nie. In sy lewe het hy voor die moeilikste keuses te staan gekom. En sy uiteindelike keuses, het hom 'n uitgeworpene gelaat in sy eie gemeenskap en in die geledere van sy beroepslui.

‘'n Man so hartstogtelik verbind tot die wet en die gereg het gesterwe as 'n gevonnisde prisonier. 'n Afrikaner in murg en been, sonder verskoning of voorbehoud, was soos 'n melaatse behandel deur sy eie mense.

Aan die ander kant: die seun van een van die mees vooraanstaande en bevoorregte gesinne in die samelewing van daardie tyd, het sy lot ingewerp met die van die armstes onder die armes.

Dit mag klink na 'n verhaal van teenstrydighede. Daardie teenstrydighede was egter nie soseer in die man Bram Fisher nie; dit was die teenstrydighede van die samelewing waarin hy, en talle Suid-Afrikaners, moes leef.

Ons regstelsel het in botsing gekom met die ideale van geregtigheid vanwee die onderdrukking van die meerderheid, en die verwording van die wet om die geregverdigde weerstand van daardie meerderheid te onderdruk.

Dit was die gedwonge skeiding van mense en die ontsegging van basiese politieke regte op grond van ras en kleur, wat daartoe gelei het dat 'n mens se respek vir sy medemens in stryd kon kom met sy sy trou aan eie gemeenskap.

Bram Fisher se durf en moed in die wyse waarop hy hierdie moeilike keuses aangepak het, het dit makliker gemaak vir andere om op daardie pad te volg. Sy beeld, toegewydheid tot die stryd vir vryheid en menswaardigheid, aktiewe bevordering van nie-rassigheid – daarin le die fondamente van ons huidige pogings tot versoening.

Pause for a moment. The words are in Afrikaans. Afrikaans was the predominant language of what Mandela classified an illegal regime. Ironically, it was a language more associated with the kombuis than the voorportaal. It was the language of JT Elliot. What is implied by this is that it had its origins amongst the South African coloured population and not the boers (Dutch language farmers). They placed a higher regard on Dutch. Afrikaans was the language of Die Stem, written by Langenhoven who had been my oupa's neighbour in Oudtshoorn. It was only in 1952, the year after the establishment of Bible House, that my mom's aunt was the first one to be married in Afrikaans and not Dutch. Donald and Margarite Munro were the first to have the language used in a wedding officiated in the NG Kerk. But the language became hated as it was assimilated by the ruling governments who introduced systematic racism in the form of apartheid. The words in Mandela’s speech are amazing but even though it reflects on Fischer, it reflects more on the character of Mandela. Here is a leader who when imprisoned, learned the language of those oppressing him and when he came to honour his friend he did it in his Fischer's native tongue, even though it was a language he should have despised. Mandela was better and more fluent in Afrikaans than me. He was more an Afrikaner than what I would ever be.

We often debated politics at school. I was not shy to make my views know and was branded a kommunis. The word was generically used to describe any liberal. It was difficult to intellectually justify apartheid and we all realized it. I went to University and many of my friends participated in the border wars. Like all wars, it leaves its scars. Colloquially we refer to it as being bosbefok.

I am a liberal and in the language of the conservative world it is still misconstrued as it is identified as what they are not, while it should be identified by what they are. It is one of the fundamental reasons I always feel alienated as I am classified by what I am not, not by what I am. An example is the branding of people as disabled. I feel it is hugely insulting as people are physically or mentally impaired and they are not recognized for what they are! During apartheid there was the binary classification of white and non-white. This was abhorrent but the inherent bigotry in other areas has not been irradicated.

Unlike the other leaders I admire like Amundsen, Turing or Flowers, Mandela was still alive in my lifetime. While I was in the navy, a few thousand kilometres away from the border wars, I recall the speech by de Klerk when he announced Mandela’s unconditional release. I was travelling on the road between Muizenberg and Stellenbosch and listened to it on the radio. For me it was a defining moment, as I knew that my views and debates from ten years previously had been correct. I was driving past a fishing spot known as the hole.

The actual event I remember the most about Mandela was the 1995 World Cup. When he walked into the stadium with a Springbok jersey, he won over the complete nation, including many of his former enemies, and not just those of the black people. Then there was the 747 flypast by South African Airways, and we won the Rugby World Cup against the All Blacks, but that always seems of secondary importance. It was a simple gesture, but he was a great leader who understood that small and simple gestures can change the course of history and that he did. The event has been immortalized in the movie, Invictus.

When Mandela died, I was in holiday in Mauritius. We watched parts of the funeral on the television in out hotel bedroom. Ironically, the speeches by world and political leaders was not what I remember. A fake deaf interpreter named Thamsanqa Jantjie had been appointed by the ANC for the event. He proceeded to stumble his way through the proceedings like a drunk seagull directing traffic. This was only a minor indiscretion by the government of the day that was focused on full scale looting which would make Mandela tun in his grave.

That trip in Mauritius was notable in that we went on a fishing trip and bagged a sailfin, as well as a few Dorado and Barracuda! The sight of a sailfin break and jumping out of the waves behind the boat was an awesome and lasting experience.

I am not a Mandela. When I am suppressed, I have images of carving up my antagonist into little pieces with a sword. A good leader, negotiates and engages. That is what made Mandela a great leader. He was able to resolve a conflict situation in South Africa in a few decades where in other parts of the world, similar conflicts have continued for centuries. Leaders like Mandela do not come around often, and in our lifetime, we had him in South Africa.

In the Reunie Hall at Grey College, the Honours boards became filled, and a new row was placed above the old ones. Above 1934 is 1984. Look closely and you see a name, R. BARTELS. That is me! It is a great feeling to be the company of a hero like Fischer, who was honoured by the great leader, Mandela. I was honoured.

Early Years in Johannesburg & the Flat in Yeoville

My early years in Johannesburg were a mix of ambition, adaptation, and unexpected challenges. Fresh into the workforce, I landed my first job at Datavia, a division of Transnet, in the bustling heart of Braamfontein. I was a programmer, spending my days wrangling COBOL, embedded SQL, and JCL on an IBM mainframe. The work was technical and demanding, but it felt like a rite of passage, a chance to carve out my place in the world.

I found a flat in Yeoville, a vibrant suburb with a bohemian edge, just a stone’s throw from Berea and the infamous Hillbrow. During this time period, my future wife, Kathleen (Kath), was busy clubbing in Hillbrow at the Bella Napoli. At the time, Yeoville seemed like a decent spot, lively, affordable, and close enough to work. I had no idea that Hillbrow was sliding into chaos, its reputation as an inner-city cesspool growing by the day. Braamfontein, too, would eventually feel the ripple effects of that decline. Yeoville held on for a while, but over the couple of years I lived there, I watched its charm erode. There was a decent restaurant that served a great t-bone and the pizzeria was liberal with the garlic, just the way I liked it.

My flat was modest, furnished with hand-me-downs from my Tannie Marguerite, a sturdy dining table, a creaky bed, and a few chairs that carried the weight of family history. The one modern luxury I allowed myself was a Sony Trinitron TV, its crisp display a small source of pride. Life was simple, but I was content, focused on my job and settling into the rhythm of the city.

That rhythm shattered one evening when I was attacked at my doorstep. A group of three black youths cornered me, demanding my mobile phone, a bulky Bosch brick. Before I could react, a blade caught my shoulder. The pain was sharp, but the shock was sharper. I was lucky—it could’ve been worse—but that moment broke something in me. Yeoville no longer felt like home; it felt like a trap. I knew I had to leave.

I wasted no time. I called my mate Jose, hired a trailer, and planned my escape on the weekend. With his help, I packed up my Tannie’s furniture, my prized Trinitron, and whatever else I could fit. We hauled it all to Randburg, a quieter, safer suburb that promised a fresh start. The move was exhausting but liberating. Johannesburg had shown me its rough edges, but I wasn’t ready to give up on it—not yet. That would come later.

As a result of this experience I went and purchased a Colt .45 Model 1911. I would have this weapon up until the boys were born when I decided the probability of accidental discharge was not worth the risk. My brother lost his best friend at the age of four due to a gun accident. I never told Kath about the stabbing, as it was demasculinizing and a humiliation. But I became vigilant about security situations and moving in dangerous areas. Aware of the threat when family members drove into inappropriate areas and subliminally it was even there when I was sleeping. Since I don’t have a Colt pistol anymore, I have a broadsword. I even brandish it in my dreams.

Network Interface Consultants | A Tech Adventure in the Netware Era

My time at Network Interface Consultants, a Novell Netware reseller, was a whirlwind of tech challenges and triumphs in the early days of local area networks (LANs). As an ECNE and MCNE, I was knee-deep in the world of Netware, installing and maintaining LAN servers with a precision that felt like conducting an orchestra of bits and bytes. My days were filled with the hum of servers, the click of keyboards, and the occasional beep of a Motorola pager clipped to my belt.

One of my proudest roles was being one of the country’s go-to experts on System Fault Tolerance III (SFT III), Novell’s high-availability solution. It was a beast to configure, but ensuring those servers stayed online through thick and thin was deeply satisfying. Beyond that, I carved out a niche connecting PCs across LANs to mainframes and AS/400 systems, bridging the gap between the old guard of computing and the new. It was like teaching two different languages to talk to each other, and I loved every minute of it.

Messaging was where I truly shined. I worked on email systems, digital telex, and paging—technologies that were the lifeblood of communication in those days. The star of the show was a DOS-based email system called Da Vinci, which later evolved into the mighty Groupwise. I even had the privilege of installing Groupwise for Multichoice’s TV stations across Europe, which meant jetting off to Amsterdam on KLM—first class, no less. Those flights were lekker, a rare treat in a job that was otherwise all about cables, configs, and coffee.

One of my standout contributions was building a rudimentary monitoring system for the LANs. This was no off-the-shelf solution; it was a custom job, cobbled together with grit and ingenuity. The system was tied into the Message Handling Service (MHS), which integrated with Da Vinci. To keep tabs on the network’s health, I set it up to send a heartbeat signal every eight hours if there were no alerts. If something went wrong, like a server crash or a connectivity hiccup, MHS would dial up a paging system known as Radiospoor via a trusty US Robotics modem, alerting us through the paging company in Midrand (whose name escapes me now). We’d get a buzz on our Motorola pagers, and off we’d go to troubleshoot, often lugging a bulky Bosch mobile phone for backup communication.

Back then, South Africa’s analogue phone lines and Eskom power were rock-solid, outages were unheard of. But that reliability could be a double-edged sword. If my pager stayed silent for too long, a nagging feeling would creep in: Is everything actually okay, or is the monitoring system itself down? That’s why the heartbeat was critical—it was our reassurance that the system was still watching, still alive.

Working at Network Interface Consultants wasn’t just about tech; it was about problem-solving under pressure and finding joy in the small victories, like a perfectly synced mainframe connection or a page that didn’t come through at 2 a.m. It was a time when technology felt like a frontier, and I was one of its explorers, pager in one hand, modem in the other, ready to keep the network humming.

I drove a Honda Ballade, which would eventually be replaced by a BMW 320i. I would often drive with the Colt pistol, loaded and wedged under my thigh. The memory of being stabbed still haunting me. I would only give up on that Colt once my sons were born due to the risk of a weapon being found and accidentally discharged by them.

COBOL Programmer at South African Transport Services

In the early days of my career, I landed my first job as a COBOL programmer at South African Transport Services, the predecessor to what is now Transnet. I was tasked with working on the Branch Line System, a network of smaller railway stations scattered along the branch lines. These weren’t the heavy-duty lines handling bulk cargo, containers, or city-to-city transport. Instead, they serviced the kind of logistics that companies like Value Logistics or The Courier Guy handle today, smaller, everyday shipments. In a single year, the system processed at least 12 million consignments, or what we now call waybills. A consignment could be anything from a couple of microwaves destined for OK Bazaars to thousands of steam irons headed to Stuttafords.

The technology we used feels like a relic now. Each station was equipped with a green-screen terminal linked to the local post office, or “poskantoor.” For the more remote stations without green screens, staff relied on carbon-duplicated books to record consignments. These paper records were later manually punched into the system at the nearest green-screen terminal. It was a clunky, labor-intensive process, but it worked—at least most of the time.

Looking back, it’s surreal to think about how those branch lines have largely faded away. Many of the railway tracks we served are now overgrown with weeds, rusted beyond repair, or even stolen for scrap. The world has moved on, but that first job, writing COBOL code to keep those consignments moving, was my introduction to the intricate dance of systems and logistics that shaped my career.

Graduation & the Call to the Big Smoke

The air was thick with anticipation at my Maties graduation. The ceremony itself was a blur of gowns, proud smiles, and the weight of years of hard work finally paying off. I was the second guy off the stage, my heart still racing from the moment my name was called. As I stepped into the foyer, a man approached me, James Flower, a recruitment officer from Spoorweg. He had a sharp, no-nonsense air about him, the kind of guy who could size you up in seconds. “What were your marks like?” he asked, cutting straight to the point. I couldn’t help but grin. “Nailed distinctions in Computer Science,” I told him. His eyes lit up, and before I knew it, he was pressing an airline ticket and hotel vouchers into my hand. “Come up to the Big Smoke for an interview,” he said, like it was already a done deal.

Back then, airline tickets were a different beast. None of this e-ticket nonsense, just red carbon copies, flimsy yet official. If you paid with a credit card, they’d haul out one of those wick-whack machines, sliding it back and forth to emboss your card details onto the carbon paper. The boarding pass came with a little sleeve to keep it safe, and the whole process ran on something called Galileo, I think—a clunky system with cryptic codes. Six or seven keystrokes, and boom, you had your pass. It felt like a ritual, like stepping into a world of possibility.

I flew up to Johannesburg, the Big Smoke, for the interview. Nailed that too. When I landed the job, it came with perks that felt like winning the lottery: an unlimited train pass and four free SAA flights a year. I could feel the world opening up, one carbon-copied ticket at a time.

From Total House to Braampark & Durban Adventures

During my time at Transet, I spent most of my days at Total House before we relocated to Braampark. My role rarely involved direct physical interaction with the mainframe, except when I found myself in Durban. Those trips were a unique blend of work and unexpected fun.

I’d occasionally travel to Durban with tapes in tow to run management information reports on the backup mainframe. This was done to avoid disrupting the live system. The Durban setup was different, more hands-on. While waiting for reports to process, which could take hours, we’d kill time in the mainframe room by playing cricket. Our makeshift ball was a bottle top wrapped meticulously in packing tape until it was just the right size for our impromptu games.

Over time, I grew comfortable operating the console myself, running tasks and monitoring the system. One memorable day, the shift crew decided they wanted to hit the beach and asked if I’d mind watching over things. I agreed without hesitation. Hours later, the manager walked in, expecting to see his usual staff, only to find me—an unfamiliar face—sitting at the console, managing the mainframe solo. The look on his face and the conversation that followed were, to say the least, quite interesting.

Ronald Bartels | LinkedIn | Instagram

The day television entered our lives & I discovered we had deep rooted rugby genes

My father, known far and wide as Mastelek, the strong man in Zulu, was a force of nature on our farm, but he rarely made a move without consulting my mother, Lenore. She was the quiet & beautiful anchor to his boundless energy, & their partnership was the bedrock of our family life. She was a classic Sophia Loren beauty, just like my own wife, Kathleen (Kath). But like any long marriage, theirs had its rocky patches. I never knew the full story behind one particularly tense period, perhaps it was the relentless grind of farm life, the dawn-to-dusk harvesting seasons that turned even my beloved potatoes (the best thing since sliced bread, in my book) into a symbol of exhaustion. Whatever the cause, Mom decided she needed a break & flew off to Cape Town on a Boeing 727 from Durban to visit her Aunt Marguerite for a well-deserved holiday.

We all piled into the Mercedes to fetch her from the airport upon her return. Dad, ever the character, had decided to grow a mustache in her absence, a thick, bushy one like Thomas Magnum from that TV show we’d later obsess over. To top it off, he donned an outrageous paisley shirt that screamed “look at me.” When Mom stepped off the plane & into the arrivals hall, she walked right past him without a flicker of recognition. The look on his face was priceless. By the next day, the Magnum ‘stache was history, shaved clean away, but that paisley shirt? It became a staple in his wardrobe, popping out for special occasions. I inherited his love for them; there’s something about a bold paisley that just feels right on a man with a story to tell.

Speaking of stories, I’ll never forget the day television first flickered into our lives. TV had just arrived in South Africa, & Dad couldn’t resist. He drove to Greytown and came back with a shiny Telefunken set nestled in a swanky, modern-style cabinet. His face was lit up with a moerse big smile, like he’d conquered the world. That grin vanished quicker than a summer thunderstorm when Mom laid eyes on it. She was thrilled about the TV itself, progress & all that, but the cabinet? No consultation, no dice. She had an antique fetish, just like me; I’d happily hunt antiques all day long if life allowed it. So, back it went.

The very next day, we trooped off to Greytown again, me in tow like a reluctant sidekick. I’m pretty sure the shop was Morkels, one of those old-school furniture places that smelled of polish & possibility. Mom wandered the aisles, eyeing the cabinets with that discerning gaze of hers, while Dad & I hung back, trying not to fidget. That’s when the door swung open, & in walked this giant of a man, tall, broad-shouldered, with an aura that filled the room. It was Oom Philip, none other than Philip Nel, the greatest Springbok of them all. Turns out he was family; Mom’s mother & his wife were cousins, so there were some serious rugby genes running through our bloodline. Her uncle, Windhond, had even been a junior Springbok back in the day. Oom Philip always said that Windhond should have been a full Springbok if his love for a Latin lass hadn’t diverted him to the Argentine. That family connection was via the Maritz’s. Yes, the descendants of the famous Afrikaner Trek leader whose blood ran like dust and granite through my Ouma Joey.

Dad spotted him immediately & introduced me with a proud grip on my shoulder. “Hier is my jongste seun,” he said, & Oom Philip shook my hand with a firmness that made me stand a little taller. They fell into easy conversation, Oom Philip recounting how he’d ride his horse 30 kilometers just to get to rugby games & practices in his heyday. His voice was steady, commanding yet kind, like a man who’d led armies into battle. He has done both on the sports field & in WWII. All the while, Mom was making her decision on the cabinet, an antique-looking one with ball feet & that classic, timeless elegance she adored. She was happy, Dad was happy. Happy wife, happy life, as the saying goes.

Meeting Oom Philip that day left an indelible mark on me, not just because of the family tie, but because he embodied the pinnacle of South African rugby spirit. Philip Jacobus Nel was born at the turn of the previous century on a farm in the Kranskop district of Natal, much like our own rugged patch of earth close by. Educated at Maritzburg College, he rose through the ranks as a formidable forward, playing lock or eighthman with unyielding grit. He made his Springbok debut before the depression years against the touring All Blacks, stepping onto the field at Kings Park in Durban for his first Test. Over his career, he played just short of half a century of Tests for South Africa, captaining the side in a dozen of them.

But what cemented his legacy as the greatest Springbok ever was his leadership of the 1937 tour to Australia & New Zealand. That team, affectionately dubbed “The Greatest Springboks,” achieved the impossible: they became the only Springbok side to ever win a Test series on New Zealand soil. Under Nel’s steady command, a quiet man with a voice that demanded respect, they swept the Wallabies in the warm-up matches before facing the mighty All Blacks. The series was a brutal, hard-fought affair: a narrow loss in the first Test at Wellington, followed by gritty victories in Christchurch & Auckland. With legendary players like Danie Craven & Boy Louw by his side, they outplayed, outlasted, & outthought the Kiwis, earning South Africa the status of de facto world champions in an era before official World Cups. Nel’s tactical acumen, his ability to rally his men through grueling conditions, & his sheer physical presence made him the heart of that invincible squad. He was the creator of the Springbok mantra to scrum the opposition into the ground, then go on to win the game.

As the ship carried them home from that triumphant 1937 tour, Oom Philip knew his rugby days were drawing to a close. In a poignant gesture that signaled the end of an era, he tossed his boots overboard into the vast ocean, a final farewell to the game that had defined him. It was a simple act, but one that captured the humility & finality of a true legend. Meeting him in that Greytown shop, amidst cabinets & family errands, reminded me that greatness often walks quietly among us, tied to the land & the people we love.

Some years after that serendipitous encounter in the Greytown furniture shop, I crossed paths with Oom Philip once more, this time at the Umvoti Agricultural Show, a bustling affair of farm machinery, livestock parades, & the earthy camaraderie of rural folk. By then, he was an older man, leaning on a cane for support, but his presence still commanded the space around him like the lock forward he’d been on the rugby field. Dad, ever the inventor with his “boer maak ‘n plan” mentality, had set up, showcasing his latest contraption: a tree stumper he’d built from scratch. It was a rugged machine designed to yank stubborn trees right out of the ground, clearing fields for planting with brute efficiency. Oom Philip eyed it with the keen interest of a fellow farmer, tested its heft, & bought one on the spot. Watching the transaction, I couldn’t help but feel a swell of pride in Dad’s ingenuity, Mastelek, the strong man, turning ideas into iron.

What struck me most that day wasn’t just the sale, but Oom Philip’s attire. He wasn’t sporting his Springbok jacket, the one that might have whispered of past glories on the pitch. Instead, he wore the colours of the Umvoti Mounted Rifles, his regiment from the war. It spoke volumes about where his heart truly lay in those later years, the indelible mark left by the conflict that had reshaped so many lives, including his. As they chatted, Oom Philip opened up about the bonds he’d formed with the Australians & New Zealanders during the war. He’d played against them before the guns started firing, in some of the roughest, most brutal rugby matches ever contested, down-and-dirty affairs where anything went, testing men to their limits.

But it was during the war itself that those rivalries transformed into unbreakable alliances. The Springboks, All Blacks, & Wallabies faced off again on makeshift fields across North Africa & beyond, in a series of unofficial tests that blurred the lines between sport & survival. Many of the pre-war greats, & those who’d shine after, donned their boots amid the chaos, playing for morale as much as victory. All of them, volunteers to a man, wore the red tabs on their shoulders as a badge of shared purpose. These games, held in places like near El Alamein or Beirut, weren’t just recreation; they were a way to engage the enemy in future battles, practicing the unconventional methods to win games & applying them to war. This spirit still lives on to this day & is central to the methods of Rassie, the current Springbok coach, who has more tricks up his sleeves than a magician at Boswell-Wilkie circus. They firmly cemented the relationships between our nations, turning former foes into brothers-in-arms.

Oom Philip spoke with a quiet fire about fighting the Germans hard, driven by a thirst for revenge after the fall of Tobruk early on in the war, a bitter defeat where thousands of South Africans, including comrades from his Umvoti Mounted Rifles, were captured. That loss fueled them through the grueling campaigns of North Africa & up into Italy, where he served as a Major, leading with the same steady resolve that had made him a rugby legend. That vengeance drove them all the way right up to the last vicious battles at Monte Cassino. Meeting him there at the show, cane in hand & stories flowing, reminded me that true greatness isn’t just in the tries scored or series won, it’s in the resilience of the human spirit, the plans we make, & the bonds that endure long after the battles end.

Ronald Bartels | LinkedIn | Instagram

My ode to mainly potatoes

For me, food has always been more than sustenance, it’s the thread that weaves together memories, family, & the simple joys that nourish the soul, but also heals it. Growing up on a potato farm under my dad’s watchful eye, those humble tubers became my first love, my ultimate comfort. From an early age, potatoes were the anchor of my meals & life, versatile & forgiving. We grew BP1, Van der Plank & Pimpernel variants. Baked whole until their skins crisped & their insides turned fluffy, or simmered into hearty soups that warmed the bones on chilly evenings, I adored them all. But Sundays were sacred: the potato roast, where we’d slice them thin, layer them in a Pyrex dish, drench them in fresh Jersey cream & cheddar cheese, & bake them in the Defy oven until golden & bubbling. That dish, with its creamy richness & caramelized edges, is what I imagine Heaven tastes like, pure, unadulterated bliss.

Then there’s my unexpected affair with Earl Grey tea. For some reason, it became my favorite, perhaps a nod to my days at Grey College, where the name echoed in the halls. Its bergamot-infused aroma & distinct, floral bite? That’s love in a cup, a soothing ritual that grounds me amid chaos.

Now the tea at Grey was definitely not Earl Grey. They served us tea in big metal urns that was made with bulk tea leaves of an unknown brand, often with some pieces of the leaves still floating on top. We would still rush during breaks in school to have a cup as something is better than nothing.

Steak, oh steak, the rugged star of our braais. A good rump, seasoned simply with salt & pepper, seared over glowing charcoal until medium-rare. We’d cut it straight on the board into juicy slices & devour it with our hands, no forks needed. My mom called it the German way, but to us, it was hors d’oeuvres in a farmer-cowboy style: primal, messy, & utterly satisfying.

Family recipes carry the weight of generations, like Stegen’s stew from my grandma Bertha, she of the Stegen lineage with its undertones of cult fame. It’s a resourceful marvel, born from thrift: gather all your leftover doggie-bag meats, toss in a bounty of vegetables, carrots, onions, celery, whatever’s at hand, & simmer it low & slow until the flavors meld into something magical. Similar to an Irish stew, but with our twist, & potatoes are non-negotiable, cubed & added to thicken & hearten the pot.

Now the stew at Grey was not that grand. As one Greybrak said, it was kameelperd and we referred to it as submarines as you would need to dive bomb the pot to find a piece of meat. It made me appreciate mom’s cooking. It became a memorable toast at supper to have a toast to the memory of the kameelperd who gave up his life for our supper. It was lead by the indomitable Burgermeester of Smithfield, Hansie.

Grandma Bertha’s influence shines brightest in desserts. Her Butterkuchen is the pinnacle of cakes for me, a memory wrapped in sweetness & pleasure. This German yeast cake starts with a soft, enriched dough base, spread thin in a pan, then dotted generously with butter, sprinkled with brown sugar (often infused with vanilla essence), & sometimes almonds for crunch. Baked until the top caramelizes into a golden, buttery crust, it’s simple yet divine, best enjoyed warm, when the butter melts into every bite.

Her German cookies evoke the holidays, though I’d savor them year-round. Syrupkuchen, a lesser-known treat perhaps akin to a syrup-infused butter cake or cookie, involves a yeast dough enriched with butter & sugar, baked & then brushed or soaked in Illovo golden syrup for a glossy, moist finish, sweet & subtly sticky, like a hug from the past. Lebkuchen, those spiced gingerbread delights, are made from a dough of honey, flour, nuts, & warm spices like cinnamon, cloves, & ginger; shaped into rounds or hearts, baked soft or crisp, & often glazed or chocolate-dipped for Christmas cheer. Pfeffernusse, or peppernuts, are tiny, dense spice cookies rolled from a molasses-based dough packed with black pepper, anise, cardamom, & other aromatics; baked hard, then softened over time in a tin, delivering a peppery-sweet bite that’s addictive.

Now when it comes to pastry then my goto is the chocolate croissants available from Fournos in Dunkeld West. Sitting down and enjoying a warm and fresh one with the chocolate dripping down your lips is indeed a treat. Washed down with a flat white.

At Grey we would have doughnuts & a coke from the Tuckshop still standing from the Anglo-boer war. It was far from any fancy pants pastry, but heck beggars cannot be choosers!

Not all family fare appealed, mind you. My dad & brother relished kop en pootjies with afval—those offal stews of sheep’s head & trotters, but I’d steer clear every time. No judgment; it just wasn’t for me. They said Ouma Joey made it the best. Ja, well, no, fine.

But every time Ouma Joey, her full name was Johanna Maria Magdalena, would visit us on Oakvilla farm, she would cook breakfast of stywe pap & wors drowned in gravy. This was the breakfast of champions & forever etched in my mind and triggered as a memory whenever I have a boerewors. As the more conventional alternatives go I like the Irish ones with bacon & eggs paired with black & white pudding. Preferably eaten next to a peat fire in an white-washed old cottage on the Burren.

For watching rugby or embarking on a road trip, nothing beats biltong. That dried, cured meat, spiced & air-dried to chewy perfection, encapsulates being South African, salty, savory, & endlessly snackable. Find one with some yellow fat attached & klopdisselboom.

Then, Mrs. Ball’s Chutney chicken, a staple that turns ordinary into extraordinary. Mrs. Ball’s Chutney, a beloved South African icon since the 19th century, is a tangy-sweet peach chutney born from Amelia Ball’s recipe, blending fruits, vinegar, sugar, & spices into a versatile condiment that’s now a pantry essential worldwide. For the chicken: Place bone-in thighs in a roasting dish, liberally coat & smother them in the chutney until fully covered, then bake in a moderate oven, basting occasionally, until the meat is tender & the sauce caramelizes into a sticky glaze. Served with rice or, naturally, potatoes, soul-soothing simplicity. Kathleen (Kath) would make this often.

A couple of times a week, we’d indulge in penne pasta tossed with a robust sauce of tomatoes, onions, garlic, & slices of chorizo sausage, simmered until the flavours deepened & the pasta absorbed every bit. I like to think it was Julius Caesar’s favorite, after all, what emperor wouldn’t conquer for such a dish?

At Maties I would cycle out to the Strand but halfway there was the Mooiberge strawberry farm. I’d stop to pick up a 1kg pallet, whose price I have since come to realize was as cheap as chips, & shove the box under my riding shirt for the ride back to my digs near the Stellenbosch station. That would be my supper. Just strawberries. Bliksem.

After obtaining my degree & become a sailor stationed in Simonstown, I would still cycle. My favorite route would take me via Scarborough where the ocean spray would soak me via the infamous Cape winds to Hout Bay Harbour. There I’d pop my bike against the wall at Snoekies & walk in for a fish & slaptjips. It was an experience. That became the benchmark for a good fish & slaptjips. The batter was crisp, the fish white & flaky & a decent portion of slaptjips that was soaked in paper. It was moerse because slaptjips=potatoes!

Now undeniably I’m a sucker for a Peppermint Crisp. You can literally bribe me to do anything by offering me one. I’d kill the bull.

One of the best meals is always a braai. Not only the eating but the fire process and the cooking on charcoal. That is therapeutic. I enjoy lamb chops on the braai and that is what Duncan and me would have each time he popped around for a braai. During Covid Duncan passed on via his own hand as he was suffering from mental health issues but he was a good mate. I still have lamb chops on the braai and think about how they still taste just as good and how that friendship still lingers.

Now every Friday we have a traditional pizza takeaway. Who cannot love a piazza and yes, pineapples are fine on pizza. At Grey we would often sneak away for takeways and have a Dagwood at Angelos. For the price of the pizza we could buy 20 Dagwoods as well as Cokes.

At Grey we ate in Hamilton Hall in a mass gathering of the hostels of Murray, Brill & Leith Houses. It was a syssitia, that ancient Greek communal meal that reinforced social bonds, discipline, and loyalty to the our alma mater. The syssita was found at more than just Grey but in many other gatherings centered around food. The syssita has been assimilated by the Christian faith which adopted and found inspiration in many Greek habits and ceremonies. The communion is based on the syssita. Another common one is the Oktoberfest with its long tables and swaying bodies. And, damn, do I love a good Oktoberfest with good helpings of pork like any German. The syssitia is as complex as its controlling and has assimilated into our lifestyles as breaking bread. One day I’ll open a restaurant chain, named SYSSITIA. Long communal tables and potatoes treated like a deity.

These foods aren’t just meals; they’re portals to the past, reminders of love, laughter, & experiences that shaped me. In them, I find nourishment for the body &, more importantly, the soul. Sometimes food is better than talking heads.

Ronald Bartels | LinkedIn | Instagram

Chapter 1: The Congratulations That Took Me Too Long

It was almost midnight when I saw the announcement. Someone I know had received an opportunity I had quietly hoped might come my way. I read the kind messages beneath it, watched the little hearts gather, and felt something I did not want to admit. I was glad for this person, but I was also disappointed for myself. I set my phone facedown on the bed, as though hiding the screen might hide the comparison that had already started in my mind.

I thought of a line associated with Jimmy Stewart, spoken by the character portraying him in a film about his life. He says he does not want fame to make him like a god; he wants to see a good man when he looks in the mirror. I explore that thought in Jimmy Stewart’s reflection on fame and being a good man, but what unsettles me is how easily I can want to be seen as good without wanting to face everything happening inside me. Nobody else knew I felt jealous. I could have typed a lovely congratulations and still carried bitterness into tomorrow.

That is why learning to follow Jesus when comparison steals your peace is not only about finding confidence. It is about letting God speak to parts of us we normally keep private. It is possible to behave politely while secretly resenting another person's happiness. I know because I have caught myself doing exactly that. The uncomfortable question is not whether I can appear gracious. It is whether I am willing to become gracious when there is no audience to reward me.

After His resurrection, Jesus spoke with Peter about the life ahead of him. Peter noticed another disciple and asked, in effect, what would happen to that man. Jesus answered with a question of His own: “What is that to thee? follow thou me” (John 21:22, KJV). I do not hear those words as Jesus scolding a person for being curious. I hear a loving invitation to stop measuring my calling against someone else's. Peter had his own work to do. So do I.

The next morning, I could have made another cup of coffee and searched for reasons that person's success was less impressive than it looked. That would have been an easy way to protect my pride. Instead, I could pray honestly: Lord, I am disappointed. I wanted that door to open for me. Please help me be glad that it opened for someone else. Then I could write the congratulations I had been avoiding and mean it, even if my feelings needed a little time to catch up.

I am learning that goodness is not always a warm feeling that arrives before we act. Sometimes it begins when we notice a small, ungenerous thought and refuse to build a home for it. We bring it to Jesus without pretending, and we ask Him to enlarge our hearts. The person on the other side of the screen never needs to know how long that prayer took. What matters is that I did not let a private disappointment decide what kind of friend I would be.

Chapter 2: The Words I Wish I Had Interrupted

The kitchen is crowded, and everyone seems to be enjoying themselves. Someone makes a joke about a person who is not there. A few people laugh, and the conversation continues. Nothing about the moment appears especially serious. Yet something inside me becomes uncomfortable. I know the person being discussed, and I know they have been going through a difficult time. I also know that speaking up might make everyone look at me as though I have forgotten how to enjoy a harmless conversation.

I think many of us have experienced that quiet conflict. We recognize something unkind, but we hesitate because we want to belong. We tell ourselves that remaining silent is not the same as agreeing. Sometimes that is true. Other times, our silence becomes a way of protecting our comfort while somebody else's dignity is being diminished.

What bothers me about these moments is how ordinary they are. I might spend the morning thinking about the importance of treating people with compassion, then spend the evening struggling to practice it. I can understand the teachings of Jesus and still become surprisingly timid when following them might make a conversation uncomfortable.

In John chapter 4, Jesus meets a Samaritan woman beside a well. The encounter crosses social and religious boundaries that mattered deeply in His time. Jesus knows uncomfortable truths about her life, yet He does not treat her as someone unworthy of conversation. He speaks with her about living water and reveals something extraordinary about Himself. Where others might have seen reasons to keep their distance, Jesus saw a person worth reaching.

I return to that encounter when I am tempted to reduce someone to a story I have heard about them. People are always more complicated than the worst thing someone knows about their lives. The neighbor who appears unfriendly may be caring for a sick spouse. The coworker who seems distracted may be struggling to keep a family together. I do not need to invent explanations for their behavior, but I can remember that I rarely know everything another person is carrying.

If the conversation in that kitchen turned unkind, I could say something simple. Perhaps I could remind everyone that the person being discussed has had a difficult year. I would not need to embarrass the speaker or deliver a lecture. A little courage, offered gently, might be enough to change the direction of the conversation.

I am beginning to understand that following Jesus requires me to care less about appearing agreeable and more about being loving. Those are not always the same thing. Sometimes goodness asks us to risk a little awkwardness so another person does not have to stand alone.

Later, when the kitchen is empty and the conversation is over, I want to remember that I treated an absent person with the same respect I would have offered if they had been standing beside me.

Chapter 3: The Honest Answer I Almost Didn't Give

The church parking lot was almost empty when a friend caught up with me beside my car. He asked how I was doing, and I already knew the answer I usually gave. I could smile, mention how busy the week had been, and ask about his family. It would be pleasant, and neither of us would have to linger. But I had spent much of that week feeling discouraged, and for some reason I was tired of pretending that being dependable meant never admitting it.

I told him I was having a hard time. I did not give him a dramatic story or ask him to solve anything. I simply said that some things I had hoped for were not working out, and I had begun questioning myself more than I wanted to. He listened without hurrying me. Then he asked whether we could pray together before we left. I had come outside expecting to offer someone an encouraging word, not to be the person receiving one.

For years, I have been tempted to think that goodness is something I should be able to display without showing any weakness. I want to be patient, useful, and steady. Those are worthwhile hopes, but I can turn them into another performance if I am not careful. Even the wish to see a good man in the mirror can become a demand that I never let anybody witness my unfinished places.

Jesus gives me another way to live. In Matthew 11:28, He invites those who labor and carry heavy burdens to come to Him for rest. He does not tell them to make themselves admirable first. He knows what they are carrying. He offers rest before they have learned to carry everything gracefully.

I think that invitation changes the way I understand character. I still need to choose kindness when I feel overlooked, and I still need to defend the dignity of someone who is absent. But I also need enough honesty to say when I am struggling. Otherwise, I may spend my whole life protecting the appearance of strength while refusing the love that could actually strengthen me.

My friend and I prayed beside the car, with the evening air growing colder around us. Nothing about my circumstances changed in those few minutes. The things that disappointed me were still there. But I drove home less alone, and I understood something I had missed before.

I do not need to look into the mirror tomorrow and find a man who has finally made himself good. I want to find a man who is still willing to be taught by Jesus, still willing to tell the truth, and still willing to love without needing to be admired for it.

Your friend,

Douglas Vandergraph

Explore the complete Douglas Vandergraph Master Index: https://douglasvandergraph.com/douglas-vandergraph-master-index/

Watch Douglas Vandergraph’s faith-based videos on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@douglasvandergraph

I just finished watching 'The End of Oak Street'. It's a very simple movie, but parts of it made me smile. My favorite part is the color scheme with its dreamy blur. It captured the feeling of the early 80s properly. I would have been ten. I was always, and still am, enamored by the variety of green that exists in nature. My second favorite part is the feathers on the dinosaurs. And my third favorite part is the Sagan quote. The movie only shares part of it. I will share the entire quote as follows:

“What does seventy million years mean to beings who live only one-millionth as long? We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.” —Carl Sagan

If that quote is kept in mind while watching the movie, it really shifts the tragedy. Doesn't it?

© 2026 AnOublietteofThought. All rights reserved.

The error codes were lying, and the machine was very sure of itself.

In the 1980s, a Xerox field service technician was called out to a photocopier. It produced, in the words of the researchers who later wrote the episode up, “copious raw information in the form of error codes” and “obligingly crashed when tested”. The trouble was that the error codes and the crashes did not tally. The company's training and its directive documentation tied each error to a code and each code to a fix, so once the codes stopped telling the truth, the official procedure had nothing left to offer except replacing the machine. The technician called in a specialist. The specialist was baffled too.

What happened next was recorded by Julian Orr, an anthropologist then working with Xerox PARC, and later retold by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid in a 1991 paper that became one of the founding texts of organisational learning. The two men did not consult a manual. They told stories. Through the morning, over lunch, and back in front of the machine all afternoon, they swapped memories of other copiers with overlapping symptoms, testing each story against the machine's behaviour. Orr's account describes “a five hour effort” that “yielded a dozen anecdotes”. The diagnosis finally came out of what Orr called an “antiphonal recitation”, in which the two men told different versions of the same encounter until the versions converged on the fault.

Keep that scene in mind, because it is the most precise description available of the thing Pearson says the skilled trades are about to lose. It is not information. The machine had plenty of information. It is the judgement to know when the information is wrong, and that judgement lived in two people talking to each other beside a broken machine.

On 24 September 2026, at the WorldSkills International Conference in Shanghai, Pearson launched research warning that a “triple capability gap” is opening across the skilled trade, technical and service occupations that keep hospitals, factories and infrastructure running. AI is reshaping those jobs faster than education and training systems can adapt, the report argues, just as experienced workers retire and take decades of practical knowledge with them. The result is a generation of early-career workers at risk of becoming, in Pearson's phrase, “AI-rich but experience-poor”.

Which raises two uncomfortable questions. What happens to a trade when the apprentice turns up holding an AI assistant, but the mentor who was supposed to teach the difference between right and almost-right has already gone? And can the knowledge that lives in a plumber's hands and a technician's instincts be written into training systems at all, or does some of it only ever travel from one person to another?

What Pearson Actually Found in Shanghai

The report is titled For Every Future: Preparing Early-Career Skilled Trade, Technical and Service Talent for an AI-Infused World. It combines labour market and AI exposure analysis across the United States, the United Kingdom and China with surveys, interviews and roundtables involving employers, educators, industry bodies, workforce experts, students and early-career workers. It also looks closely at two occupations: pharmacy technicians and industrial machinery mechanics.

The core argument is that these workers now need three things at once. The first is role-specific AI literacy and the critical judgement to use AI safely. The second is a set of human capabilities, including communication, collaboration, adaptability, emotional intelligence and learning agility. The third, and the one this article is about, is the practical and institutional knowledge traditionally developed through experience and handed down by experienced colleagues. Pearson's framing is that AI is more often changing day-to-day tasks than eliminating roles altogether, which makes the gap harder to see: nobody gets a redundancy letter, but the job underneath them quietly changes shape.

Some of the numbers are stark. Across the UK occupations covered by the research, 99 per cent of openings are expected to come from replacement demand, meaning workers who retire, change careers or leave the labour market, rather than from new jobs. The US figure is 98.5 per cent. Fewer than half of the industrial machinery mechanics surveyed felt their training was preparing them for AI-enabled work. One UK pharmacy industry participant told the researchers that it takes two to three years to revise pharmacy technician education and training standards, which is a long time in a field where the tools can change within a single product cycle. And the stakes are not abstract. Among pharmacy technicians, 98 per cent rated exactness and accuracy as extremely important, and 44 per cent rated the consequences of error as extremely serious.

Sharon Hague, Pearson's President of English Language Learning and its UK chief executive, put the problem plainly at the launch. “The challenge is that demand for these workers is rising just as many experts are retiring and taking decades of practical knowledge with them,” she said. “If we don't rethink how expertise is developed, the gap between what employers need and what workers can do will continue to grow.”

It is worth being clear about what kind of document this is. Pearson is an education and assessment company, and a report concluding that training systems need rethinking is also, inevitably, a report about a market Pearson sells into. That does not make its findings wrong, and its replacement-demand figures sit comfortably alongside independent labour data. But its most interesting claim is not a statistic. It is the idea buried in the third capability: that there is a category of knowledge that cannot simply be bought, downloaded or prompted into existence, and that its main carriers are leaving.

The Arithmetic of Replacement

Start with the people who carry that knowledge, and the rate at which they are leaving.

In construction, the Construction Industry Training Board's Construction Workforce Outlook for 2026 to 2030, published on 17 June 2026, estimates that the industry will need an average of 41,200 extra workers a year, roughly 206,000 over five years. CITB's diagnosis is blunt: too few people are entering the sector, too many experienced workers are leaving, and productivity improvements have not been enough to close the gap. In US manufacturing, Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute projected in 2024 that as many as 3.8 million additional employees could be needed between 2024 and 2033, and that as many as 1.9 million of those jobs could go unfilled if the skills and applicant gaps are not addressed.

Plumbing makes the pattern concrete. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics counts 510,600 plumbers, pipefitters and steamfitters, projects around 42,000 openings a year over the coming decade, and notes that many of those openings will come from the need to replace workers who move to other occupations or leave the labour force, for example to retire. The same entry explains how the trade is learnt: most plumbers learn on the job through an apprenticeship lasting four to five years, with 2,000 hours of paid on-the-job training each year alongside technical instruction. In England, the Level 3 Plumbing and Domestic Heating Technician apprenticeship standard has a typical duration of 48 months.

Those durations are the real point. Four years is not how long it takes to learn the facts of plumbing, which would fit in a decent textbook. Four years is how long it takes to be around enough jobs, enough awkward pipework, enough customers and enough mistakes, in the company of someone who already knows, for the facts to turn into judgement.

And the pipeline feeding that process has been narrowing. Department for Education figures published on 27 November 2025 recorded 353,500 apprenticeship starts in England in the 2024/25 academic year, up from 340,000 the year before. But in 2016/17, the year the apprenticeship levy was introduced, there were 494,900. The mix has shifted too. Higher-level apprenticeships now make up around 40 per cent of starts, while intermediate apprenticeships, the traditional entry route for young people into a trade, have fallen from 43 per cent of starts in 2017/18 to 19 per cent. The system is producing more graduate-style apprenticeships and fewer people at the bottom of the ladder, which is precisely where the long, slow, person-to-person transfer of craft knowledge has always happened.

Put the two trends together and you get Pearson's scenario in its simplest form. The mentors are leaving faster than they can be replaced, and the replacements are arriving through a narrower door, into jobs whose tools are changing underneath them.

Knowing More Than We Can Tell

To understand why the loss of mentors matters more than the loss of workers, you have to go back to a Hungarian-British chemist turned philosopher.

In The Tacit Dimension, published in 1966, Michael Polanyi compressed a lifetime of thinking about scientific practice into a single sentence: “we can know more than we can tell.” We recognise a face among thousands without being able to say how. Polanyi's claim was stronger than the observation that some knowledge is hard to describe. He argued that all knowledge rests on a tacit foundation, a set of skills, habits and perceptions that we rely on without attending to them.

The idea might have stayed in philosophy if a young sociologist had not put it to the test. In the early 1970s, Harry Collins, now a distinguished research professor at Cardiff University, studied laboratories trying to build a then-new device called the TEA laser. His finding, published in 1974 and followed up in 1975 with his co-author R. G. Harrison, was striking. No scientist he studied succeeded in building a working laser using only published papers or other written sources. Every group that managed it had obtained some crucial part of the knowledge through personal contact: phone calls, visits, someone who had built one standing in the room. The written account was complete in every respect except the one that mattered.

Collins spent decades refining what that means, and his 2010 book Tacit and Explicit Knowledge offers the most useful map we have for Pearson's question. He splits tacit knowledge into three kinds.

The first is relational tacit knowledge. This is knowledge that could in principle be written down but in practice is not, because nobody has bothered, because it seems too obvious, or because someone would rather keep it to themselves. The torque setting a senior fitter uses on a particular flange, which differs from the manual for good reasons nobody recorded, is relational. So is the knowledge that a particular customer's boiler has a history.

The second is somatic tacit knowledge, which lives in the body. Balancing a bicycle is Collins's classic example. For the trades, think of the feel of a pipe cutter biting cleanly, the sound of a pump running slightly wrong, the resistance of a fitting that is about to strip. This is knowledge whose limits come from the nature of bodies and brains, not from social choice.

The third, and for Collins the deepest, is collective tacit knowledge. This is knowledge that belongs to a community rather than to any individual: the sense of what counts as a proper job, which rules can be bent on site and which cannot, when a shortcut becomes a hazard. You acquire it by being socialised into the group that holds it, and for Collins it is the hardest kind of tacit knowledge to make explicit, because it lives in the group rather than in any one head.

That three-way split turns out to answer most of the question in the headline, but before getting there it is worth seeing what happens when a society forgets that the split exists.

When the Recipe Loses Its Impurity

In the 2000s, the US National Nuclear Security Administration set out to refurbish the W76 warhead carried on Trident submarine-launched missiles. One component needed a classified material code-named Fogbank. The facility that had produced it had long since closed. According to a 2009 article in Los Alamos National Laboratory's Nuclear Weapons Journal, most of the personnel involved in the original production process were no longer available, and the agency had to reconstruct the process from historical records.

The reconstruction did not work. According to the Los Alamos account, as reported by the defence publication The War Zone, the new process made a purer material than the old one, and the purity was the problem. The original batches had contained an impurity that the weapon's performance had quietly come to depend on. Nobody had documented it because nobody had known it mattered, and the people who might have noticed the difference were no longer there.

The Government Accountability Office report GAO-09-385, released on 2 March 2009, documented the cost. The planned first refurbished W76 slipped from September 2007 to September 2008, and NNSA spent $69 million addressing Fogbank production problems.

Fogbank is an extreme case, but it shows plainly what Pearson is warning about. The written record was, as far as anyone knew, complete. What was missing was not a fact but a relationship between facts, the kind of thing an experienced operator notices because something looks or feels different from last time. In Collins's terms, it was relational knowledge that had never been told, and the only people who could have told it were gone.

The Assistant That Talks Like a Journeyman

Now introduce the AI assistant.

The tools arriving on shop floors and in vans are not speculative. In May 2025, Siemens announced that its Maintenance Copilot Senseye would give maintenance teams “expert-level equipment diagnostics” without their needing specialist technical knowledge, citing pilot implementations with an average 25 per cent reduction in reactive maintenance time. In September 2025, ServiceTitan, whose software is widely used by US plumbing, heating and electrical contractors, launched Atlas, an AI assistant that gives technicians in the field instant answers through its mobile app. Its co-founder and president, Vahe Kuzoyan, described it as “a trusted co-pilot or even a chief of staff that adapts to the specific workflows” of each business.

There is real evidence that such tools help people who are new to a job. The best-known study, by Erik Brynjolfsson, Danielle Li and Lindsey Raymond, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2025, tracked 5,179 customer support agents as a generative AI assistant was rolled out. Productivity rose by 14 per cent on average and by 34 per cent for novice and low-skilled workers, with minimal effect on the most experienced. The authors offer suggestive evidence that the tool worked by spreading the best practices of more able workers and helping newer ones move down the experience curve. In other words, some relational tacit knowledge, the kind that top performers had but had never written down, had been captured in the data and handed on.

That is a genuine counterweight to the gloomier reading of Pearson's report. But notice what it measured: speed and resolution in conversations, in a domain made of language. The question for the trades is what happens outside that domain, where the work is physical, the stakes are safety-critical, and the machine can be confidently wrong.

Collins has a concept that fits the new assistants almost too neatly. In Rethinking Expertise, written with Robert Evans and published in 2007, he distinguishes contributory expertise, the ability to actually do the work, from interactional expertise, the ability to speak the language of a practice fluently without being able to practise it. Specialist journalists and good peer reviewers have interactional expertise. They can talk the talk. In a 2024 paper in AI and Society, Collins argued that large language models learn from the internet rather than being socialised into communities, and that the result is systems that answer with fabrications as fluently as with facts.

An AI assistant is, in this sense, the most complete interactional expert ever built. It speaks the language of every trade. It can explain a pressure test, describe a failed seal, list the causes of a tripping breaker. What it lacks is the thing that made the Xerox specialist valuable: a body of experience against which to notice that the story it is telling does not fit the machine in front of it. Hand that fluency to an apprentice who has no such experience either, and you get Pearson's phrase exactly. AI-rich. Experience-poor.

Right Versus Almost Right

The danger is not that the machine is usually wrong. It is that it is usually right, and people learn to stop checking.

Researchers have been measuring this for decades. In a 2010 review in Human Factors, Raja Parasuraman and Dietrich Manzey described automation bias as the tendency to over-rely on automated aids, producing errors of omission, where people miss problems the system fails to flag, and errors of commission, where they follow advice that is wrong. Two findings from that review should worry anyone designing AI-assisted apprenticeships. Automation bias occurs in experts as well as novices. And it cannot be prevented simply by training or instructions.

Recent studies show what happens when AI enters that picture. In the field experiment with 758 Boston Consulting Group consultants reported by Fabrizio Dell'Acqua and colleagues at Harvard Business School, Wharton, MIT Sloan and Warwick, AI help made people substantially faster and better on tasks within the model's capabilities. But on a task deliberately chosen to fall outside what the AI could do well, consultants using AI were 19 percentage points less likely to reach the correct answer than those working without it. The researchers' metaphor for this is a jagged frontier: the boundary of what the AI can do well is irregular and hard to see, which makes it easy to cross without noticing.

Then there is the question of what reliance does to the learner. In January 2026, Anthropic published a randomised controlled trial of 52 mostly junior software developers learning an unfamiliar Python library. Those who used AI assistance scored 50 per cent on a follow-up quiz, against 67 per cent for those who coded by hand. The largest gap was on debugging questions, which is to say on the ability to recognise when code is wrong and why. Code is not copper pipe, but the skill that suffered is exactly the one the Pearson report is worried about: knowing when the output in front of you is almost right, and therefore wrong.

The most sobering evidence comes from medicine, where the consequences are measured in missed cancers. A multicentre observational study led by Krzysztof Budzyń and published in The Lancet Gastroenterology and Hepatology in August 2025 looked at 19 experienced endoscopists, each with more than 2,000 colonoscopies behind them. After AI-assisted detection was introduced, their adenoma detection rate in procedures performed without the AI fell from 28.4 per cent to 22.4 per cent. These were not novices. They were experts whose unaided performance appeared to decline after routine exposure to the machine. If skilled professionals can lose ground that quickly, the question for a trainee who never builds that ground in the first place answers itself.

Lisanne Bainbridge saw all of this coming in a short paper published in Automatica in 1983. “Ironies of Automation” observed that efficient retrieval of knowledge from long-term memory depends on frequency of use, and that some knowledge “develops only through use and feedback about its effectiveness”. Then she wrote the sentence that reads like a summary of the Pearson report forty-three years early: “There is some concern that the present generation of automated systems, which are monitored by former manual operators, are riding on their skills, which later generations of operators cannot be expected to have.”

That is the mechanism. Today's AI-assisted workplaces look safe partly because the people supervising them learnt their trade before the assistant arrived. They can tell when the answer is off because they once had to work it out themselves. Remove them, and the safety margin goes with them, without anyone noticing, until the error codes stop matching the crashes.

How Apprenticeship Actually Transmits Judgement

If the mentor's value is not information, what exactly is being transferred when an apprentice works alongside one?

In 1991, the anthropologist Jean Lave and the educational theorist Etienne Wenger published Situated Learning, built partly on studies of Vai and Gola tailors in Liberia. They found that the apprentices were not formally taught tailoring in any conventional sense. They learnt through what Lave and Wenger called legitimate peripheral participation: doing real but low-risk parts of real work at the edge of a community of practitioners, gradually moving towards the centre as their competence grew. The learning was inseparable from belonging. You did not learn tailoring and then join the tailors. You became a tailor by being among them.

Richard Sennett, the sociologist, made a related case in The Craftsman, published in 2008. He describes craft as “a dialogue between concrete practices and thinking; this dialogue evolves into sustaining habits, and these habits establish a rhythm between problem solving and problem finding.” Problem finding is the key phrase. A manual or an assistant can solve a problem you have already identified. Knowing that there is a problem, that the joint looks fine but is not, that the reading is plausible but wrong, is the skill that comes from the rhythm Sennett describes, and it takes time. “By one commonly used measure,” he notes, “about ten thousand hours of experience are required to produce a master carpenter or musician.”

Sennett also noticed what happens when a tool takes over the part of the work where that rhythm develops. Writing about computer-aided design, he recalls the physicist Victor Weisskopf telling MIT students who presented him with computer-generated results: “When you show me that result, the computer understands the answer, but I don't think you understand the answer.” His conclusion is blunt: “when the head and the hand are separate, it is the head that suffers.”

The most careful modern study of this problem comes from Matt Beane, who researches technology and work in the Technology Management department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and whose 2024 book The Skill Code draws on years of fieldwork in robotic surgery. In traditional open surgery, residents learnt by doing progressively more of each operation with a senior surgeon's hands beside theirs. The surgical robot changed that. “My research shows that the lead surgeon controls the robot, and the trainee has become completely optional,” Beane said when the book was published. The few residents who became genuinely skilled did so through what he calls shadow learning, bending the rules to get practice, including spending hundreds of hours watching recorded procedures. Beane frames the conditions for building skill as challenge, complexity and connection, and it is the third, the bond of trust between novice and expert, that intelligent machines most easily sever.

The pattern in Beane's operating theatres is the pattern Pearson is warning about in plant rooms and pharmacies. The technology does not attack the apprentice directly. It makes the apprentice unnecessary to the expert's work, and in doing so quietly removes the apprenticeship.

What Can Be Written Down and What Cannot

So, back to the second question. Can a plumber's hands and a technician's instincts be written into training systems?

The honest answer is some of it, more than sceptics assume, and less than vendors claim. Collins's three categories show where the lines fall.

Relational tacit knowledge can be captured, and there is a famous proof. In his 1991 Harvard Business Review article “The Knowledge-Creating Company”, Ikujiro Nonaka described how Matsushita's engineers struggled to design a home bread-making machine that kneaded dough properly. A software developer, Ikuko Tanaka, proposed a solution: she trained with the head baker at the Osaka International Hotel, whose bread was reputed to be the best in the city, to study his kneading. She noticed that he had a distinctive way of stretching the dough. After a year of trial and error with the project's engineers, she produced specifications, including special ribs inside the machine, that reproduced the baker's technique. The resulting “twist dough” method gave Matsushita a product that set a record for first-year sales of a new kitchen appliance.

It is often told as proof that tacit knowledge can be made explicit. Look closely, though, at how it was done. The knowledge was not extracted by interview or questionnaire. Tanaka had to apprentice herself to the baker, learning by observation, imitation and practice, as Nonaka put it, before she could translate anything. The conversion ran through a person. And it took a year.

That suggests a practical route for the trades. Much of what a retiring engineer knows is relational: the history of a particular plant, the quirks of a particular model, the workarounds that never made it into the manual. That knowledge can be captured, and AI can help, by transcribing, indexing and retrieving it. The Brynjolfsson study suggests AI can even spread the habits of top performers to newcomers. But capture has a deadline. It has to happen while the experts are still at work, alongside the people who will inherit the job, because the Tanaka story suggests the most valuable capture happens through apprenticeship rather than interview. Fogbank shows what happens when nobody does it.

Somatic tacit knowledge is harder. Simulation, haptic training rigs, augmented reality overlays and video can all accelerate it, and Beane's finding that some surgical trainees built real skill through intensive video review shows that recorded expertise has value. But a body still has to do the thing, repeatedly, with feedback. No amount of fluent explanation from an assistant will teach an apprentice how a compression fitting feels when it is right. At best, the machine can tell them what to practise.

Collective tacit knowledge is the category where the answer is closest to no. The sense of what counts as a proper job, when to stop and ask, which risks the trade tolerates and which it never does: this is the property of a community, and it passes by socialisation. Orr's copier technicians illustrate it. Their diagnosis came from a shared stock of stories that belonged to the group rather than to either man, and it was the group's norms, including the loss of face that came with simply swapping out the machine, that pushed them to keep going. Brown and Duguid made the point that the training and documentation were about maintaining machines, while much of the real work was about maintaining the social setting. An AI can summarise the stories. It cannot make an apprentice a member of the community that tells them.

Designing for the Mentor's Absence

None of this means the AI-equipped apprentice is doomed. It means the assistant has to be designed and deployed as part of an apprenticeship, not as a replacement for one.

The evidence points to some fairly concrete principles. The first concerns how the tool is used. In Anthropic's trial, the developers who retained the most were the ones who used AI to build understanding, and the highest-scoring group asked only conceptual questions and then relied on their own improved understanding to do the work. At the WorldSkills conference in Shanghai, Pearson's chief technology officer, David Treat, made the same point from the other side: “If you are using AI as an answer engine, you're not engaging the brain in the struggle that learning requires.” An assistant that makes the apprentice explain why a reading looks wrong before offering its own view is a different educational instrument from one that simply supplies the fix.

The second concerns mentors. Pearson's own recommendations call for expanding opportunities to develop practical know-how through mentoring, observation, feedback, simulation and hands-on experience. That sounds obvious, but it runs against the economic logic of the tools themselves, which are sold on making experts more productive and novices less dependent on them. If an assistant frees up a senior engineer's time, some of that time has to be deliberately spent with the apprentice, or Beane's operating-theatre pattern repeats itself on the factory floor. Bainbridge's final irony applies directly: “it is the most successful automated systems, with rare need for manual intervention, which may need the greatest investment in human operator training.”

The third is the unglamorous one. Apprentices need structured practice without the machine, which is what the endoscopy study implies clinicians now need too. The point is not nostalgia for doing things the hard way. It is that the ability to notice when the assistant is wrong is built by doing the work without it, and cannot be built any other way.

Go back, one last time, to Orr's copier. The machine gave its technicians more information than they could use, and none of it added up. What saved the job was not better data. It was two people with long memories, a shared language of experience, and a professional pride that would not let them give up. Today's AI assistants are, in a sense, error codes that can talk: fluent, confident, usually right, occasionally and invisibly wrong. The apprentice holding one needs what the Xerox technician had, someone who has seen this before.

The uncomfortable arithmetic of the Pearson report is that for many apprentices, that someone is already retiring. Some of what they know can be written into training systems, and the effort should begin now. The rest will travel the way it always has, from one person to another, beside a broken machine, or it will not travel at all.

References and Sources

1. Pearson. “Pearson research warns of a 'triple capability gap' emerging as AI adoption outpaces education and training in skilled occupations.” Press release, PR Newswire, Shanghai, 24 September 2026, launching For Every Future: Preparing Early-Career Skilled Trade, Technical and Service Talent for an AI-Infused World; also reported by FE News, StockTitan, People Matters and ChannelLife, 24 to 25 September 2026. Accessed 25 September 2026.
2. Pearson plc. “Pearson Appoints Experienced Company Executive Sharon Hague as President of English Language Learning.” Press release, 28 February 2025.
3. WorldSkills Conference 2026. “WorldSkills Shanghai 2026 outlines a human-first approach to AI.” Conference news, National Exhibition and Convention Center, Shanghai, September 2026. Accessed 25 September 2026.
4. Polanyi, Michael. The Tacit Dimension. Doubleday, 1966; reissued University of Chicago Press, 2009.
5. Collins, H. M. “The TEA Set: Tacit Knowledge and Scientific Networks.” Science Studies, volume 4, 1974, pages 165 to 186; and Collins, H. M. and Harrison, R. G. “Building a TEA Laser: The Caprices of Communication.” Social Studies of Science, volume 5, number 4, 1975.
6. Collins, Harry. Tacit and Explicit Knowledge. University of Chicago Press, 2010.
7. Collins, Harry and Evans, Robert. Rethinking Expertise. University of Chicago Press, 2007.
8. Collins, Harry. “Why artificial intelligence needs sociology of knowledge: parts I and II.” AI and Society, volume 40, 2025 (published online 18 May 2024), pages 1249 to 1263. DOI: 10.1007/s00146-024-01954-8.
9. Sennett, Richard. The Craftsman. Yale University Press and Allen Lane, 2008; extract published as “The Troubled Craftsman”, Arquitectura Viva.
10. Nonaka, Ikujiro. “The Knowledge-Creating Company.” Harvard Business Review, November to December 1991; reprinted July to August 2007.
11. Lave, Jean and Wenger, Etienne. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge University Press, 1991.
12. Orr, Julian E. Talking About Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job. Cornell University Press, 1996.
13. Brown, John Seely and Duguid, Paul. “Organizational Learning and Communities-of-Practice: Toward a Unified View of Working, Learning, and Innovation.” Organization Science, volume 2, number 1, 1991, pages 40 to 57.
14. Bainbridge, Lisanne. “Ironies of Automation.” Automatica, volume 19, number 6, 1983, pages 775 to 779.
15. Parasuraman, Raja and Manzey, Dietrich H. “Complacency and Bias in Human Use of Automation: An Attentional Integration.” Human Factors, volume 52, number 3, 2010. DOI: 10.1177/0018720810376055.
16. Budzyń, Krzysztof et al. “Endoscopist deskilling risk after exposure to artificial intelligence in colonoscopy: a multicentre, observational study.” The Lancet Gastroenterology and Hepatology, August 2025. PubMed ID 40816301.
17. Anthropic. “How AI assistance impacts the formation of coding skills.” Anthropic Research, 29 January 2026.
18. Brynjolfsson, Erik, Li, Danielle and Raymond, Lindsey. “Generative AI at Work.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, volume 140, number 2, 2025, pages 889 to 942.
19. Dell'Acqua, Fabrizio, McFowland III, Edward, Mollick, Ethan, Lifshitz-Assaf, Hila, Kellogg, Katherine C., Rajendran, Saran, Krayer, Lisa, Candelon, François and Lakhani, Karim R. “Navigating the Jagged Technological Frontier: Field Experimental Evidence of the Effects of AI on Knowledge Worker Productivity and Quality.” Harvard Business School Working Paper 24-013, September 2023.
20. Beane, Matt. The Skill Code: How to Save Human Ability in an Age of Intelligent Machines. Harper Business, 11 June 2024; and University of California, Santa Barbara, “How to build and protect skills in our modern workplace, a world filled with AI and robots”, The Current, 2024.
21. US Government Accountability Office. “Nuclear Weapons: NNSA and DOD Need to More Effectively Manage the Stockpile Life Extension Program.” GAO-09-385, 2 March 2009; and The War Zone, “Fogbank Is Mysterious Material Used In Nukes That's So Secret Nobody Can Say What It Is”, citing Los Alamos National Laboratory's Nuclear Weapons Journal, 2009.
22. Siemens AG. “Siemens introduces AI agents for industrial automation.” Press release, May 2025; and Contractor Magazine, “ServiceTitan Brings AI Automation to the Trades With Atlas”, 19 September 2025.
23. US Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Plumbers, Pipefitters, and Steamfitters.” Occupational Outlook Handbook, accessed 25 September 2026; and Skills England, “Plumbing and domestic heating technician” apprenticeship standard ST0303, Level 3.
24. Department for Education. “Apprenticeships, Academic year 2024/25.” Explore Education Statistics, 27 November 2025; and House of Commons Library, “Apprenticeship starts: has there been a big fall?”
25. Construction Industry Training Board. “CITB publishes Construction Workforce Outlook 2026-2030.” 17 June 2026, with figures reported by Construction News and Building; and Deloitte and The Manufacturing Institute, “US Manufacturing Could Need as Many as 3.8 Million New Employees by 2033”, April 2024.

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

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Inbetweeners 42- Xalatra Questline Part 3- The Substructure Warrens and Cult of Vecna

The lift in the Gutworks took the players to a lower part of Sigil called the Reconfiguring Channel. This is literally where entire sections of the city are broken down or fabricated. Other than Dabus, no sentient beings inhabit this layer as it is extraordinarily dangerous. Sections of building, road, etc fly at high speeds like a vortex of city sections. Failing a Dex Save of 15 leads to massive bludgeoning damage. The players had to dodge pieces to head to essentially a manhole/service ladder even deeper into Sigil. Xalatra left some unstable glyphs behind on the manhole cover that caused a mini volcanic eruption if triggered. The players activated it from a safe distance before proceeding down to the Substructure Warrens.

The Substructure Warrens are inspired by decommissioned or abandon subways and tunnels beneath cities like New York or Paris. It is a series of passages, tunnels and rooms that were formally like the Gutworks but no longer serve a functional purpose to Sigil. These layers are essentially relics, vestigial organs of Sigil left behind as the city continued to grow and evolve. For a long time, no living creature inhabited these layers. However, after the Faction War, which saw Vecna try to seize control of Sigil, his surviving followers in the city had to flee. In my version of events in the faction war, Vecna never really posed any sort of threat to the Lady of Pain, as her power eclipsed his by many orders of magnitude. More she was irritated by the impertinence of his actions, and the sheer delusional egotism that he thought he could actually challenge her control of the city. Of course, had he succeeded, Vecna would have catapulted himself to a power level beyond any other deity save Primus or the Overgods. He was convinced he could exploit loopholes in how Sigil worked and sieze the Lady of Pain's power from her. This would be like a hummingbird thinking it could outsmart a tornado, and it went about as well as that scenario would for the hummingbird.

Once Vecna was imprisoned, his followers/worship was strictly outlawed across Sigil. Any of his surviving followers were rounded up and placed in endless labyrinths and four dimensional prisons from which they would never leave. To the Lady, death was not an appropriate response for what Vecna had done. Death has little meaning in this multiverse, and his being a cult of death and undeath, would mean even less. But trapping an entity in a fractal fracture between realities where it will be slowly unmade over millennia is far mroe suitable. Many of Vecna's followers abandon worshipping after his fall. Others managed to escape Sigil. But some decided to embed themselves deep underneath Sigil as they bided their time until they found a way to free their vaunted master. The Gutworks wouldn't be low enough, they were still frequently patrolled by the Dabus. However, these substructure warrens are so low, so forgotten, that not even the Lady would notice their presence. The substructure warrens' proximity to the maw only helped in this regard.

So as soon as the players went down into this level, they were discovered by a patrol from Vecna's followers. The patrol consisted of 2 Elite Doom Guards Lords and 4 Deathlock Masterminds. That is two CR 12s and 4 CR 8s. At the Inbetweener's current level, they could potentially defeat such a group but at grave loss of resources and hit points. That's a combined total of 844 hitpoints worth of enemies and A LOT of necrotic damage. And even if the players were successful, this was simply a patrol. They were never meant to fight there way through this level... it was more about diplomacy, stealth or creativity. Vecna may have been a chump compared to the Lady of Pain, but he was still a deity, and these are his most loyal and powerful remaining followers.

The players were brought to the “court” where they were essentially interrogated by the “judge” (a lich). In attendance at the court where a number wights, wraiths, cultists, vampires and a spirit naga. My plan was if the players died, they would be resurrected by the lich but under an intense form of Gaes to free Vecna. Instead, the players spoke to the lich, and they tried to withhold information and deceive him but he cast dominate monster on Bruce who then spilled everything. Their quest, why they were seeking out Xalatra, and their connection to the Lady of Pain. The connection to the Lady was of particular interest to him, since she was their sworn enemy and they were constantly living under a sort of Sword of Damocles that if she discovered them they'd be wiped out. However, the Lich picked up on the groups importance to the Lady of Pain, and immediately realized it was in his best interest if the players succeeded in their quest. Should they die, it could draw the attention of the Lady to their sequestered court and their imminent demise. So, the Lich made a sacrifice. He cast a spell that destroyed his phylactery and instead made Bruce his phylactery. He would live inside Bruce and could only be removed when Vecna was freed. This would bind the group to his cause, and since the Inbetweeners were so important to the Lady of Pain, she might be willing to free Vecna in return for their assistance. It was a long shot, but the remaining followers were dwindling, either by leaving or other forms of attrition. It was clear Vecna wasn't going to be freed on the current course,

The way this worked mechanically is that the lich could perceive anything Bruce perceived, and take control of Bruce through a contested wisdom save if Bruce did anything not in his best interest. His soul was tied to Bruce's, so any attempt to dislodge or remove him would risk destroying Bruce's soul. The only way to get the lich out was for him to voluntarily leave. Hence, new side quest for the group—deal with Bruce's possession. It wasn't all bad though, Bruce could tap into some of the Lich's powers if the Lich agreed to it and also the Lich would act to ensure Bruce didn't die. The Lich instructed his group to wait for further instruction, and stay hidden here in the meantime. This was the best leverage they've had on the Lady of Pain, and he would make the most of it.

After that, the followers of Vecna provided the players instructions and let them know they saw Xalatra pass through months ago. She was headed deeper... towards The Maw. Her mental state was fractured, and she was so dangerous that even the entire court of powerful undead did not want to test her, and they instead let her pass through and disabled her potent glyphs left behind.

And I think I'll leave it there. Bruce is the phylactery of the head surviving lich of Vecna (surviving is a funny word here but... you get the idea).

Shorter post, but I've been dragging my feet on writing these and I have a lot in the backlog so I figure I will get some down when I can to keep up the momentum. Next up, the showdown with Xalatra!

Sometimes we are guided to a person, place, or thing to learn that we don’t want those things. Will you recognize the pattern and take action to break the cycle? Or will you stay stuck in self-pity or blame others for your misfortune? It’s up to us.

S.N.I.t. ; Vijftien Minuten Roem voor Vijf Euro

Ik heb mijn vijftien minuten voor een vijfje te koop gezet op marktplaats er heeft nog niemand naar de aanbieding gekeken iedereen denkt dat er voldoende plaats is voor hun eigen talenten maar als ik al niet aan de bak kom dan is de kans dat jij het wel komt bijzonder klein minimaal ze zijn niet in voor roekeloos spelen met taal je zal moeten doen wat anderen voor je hebben gedaan dan voor een zakcentje extra zien ze je even in hun schaduw staan laat maar lopen dan los laten en door gaan ik doe het wel zonder loon naar werken zonder applaus, uitgesproken waardering en een nummertje in de bovenhoek je mag mijn vijftien minuten hebben met bonus schrikkel seconde ik laat de prijs voor je zakken nog even en je kan het zo meepakken voor nop zoals ik alles weggeef en ook naar leef zonder belang, zonder opsmuk, zonder doel alleen op gevoel op puur instinct zeg ik alles wat ik denk laat maar gaan van voor naar achter en weer terug twee handen op een buik, alles mijn eigen en geen zwaar houten kruis als loden last op de rug van links naar rechts van onder naar boven van boven naar rechts en van links naar beneden schitterend in volstrekt onbekend verleden en heden voor iedereen onopvallend in erkers en nissen optreden diep verborgen in de donkerste schaduwen ben ik voor eeuwig de uwe niemand die me hoeft te kennen die de kost voor mij moet winnen of ermee die ruimte voor mij moet vrij maken in een media kast geld moet uitgeven voor mijn nabijheid me niet hoeft mee te torsen als stoffig omhulsel dat amper om het moede lijf past je mag me gerust vergeten, hoeft mijn naam nooit te droppen geen credtis te geven en geen royalties ik ben gewoon je beste onzichtbare vriend die iedere keer als ik zelf wil en kan je met lappen tekst op een wit gelijkend blaadje bediend je mag alles over me zeggen, ik hoor het niet en als ik dat wel doe dan negeer ik het anderen gaan niet voor mij en ik ga zelf ook niet rond met de pet daar gooi ik wel zo nu en dan mee maar ik denk dat u mij dat voor het gemak wel vergeeft niet waar over waar gesproken, de vijftien minuten gaan nu voor 1 en negenennegentig euro cent weg het is het toppunt van de roem, nooit slecht vers, heeft bijna tien jaar op de bovenkamer stil gestaan in een oude loopschoenendoos bij de hoge stapel bewaard oefenmateriaal, compleet zinloos klik het tenminste even aan doe dan even alsof je interesse hebt in mijn kwartier spotlicht beschouw het als je minst vervelende plicht als roem als handelswaar al niet voldoet komt het dan ooit nog een keer goed zoals iets schijnt te doen als je iets anders een keertje per ongeluk goed doet onbewust van het goede van je daad maakt mij niet uit als je maar even op die flikkerende link staat die ik voor je heb aangemaakt mijn roem is de beste ooit in ieder geval beter dan nooit ik stuur het vanaf daar rechtstreeks op naar je waarschijnlijk zeer aantrekkelijk kop om over de rest maar niet te zwijgen hiermee kun je voor 900 tellen de successen aaneenrijgen één vijftig, lager ga ik niet, inpakken en wegwezen het nut er van, er in opgenomen, geabsorbeerd, zal je worden bewezen je hoeft niet eens kleine lettertjes te lezen en ook niet drie handtekeningen op een formulie neer te pinnen gewoon inloggen digitaal betalen en drukken op accepteren en jij zal zijn wat men anders over mij zou beweren goeie deal of niet dan een soepele overgang naar een gewenste toestand jij mijn roem ik jou één tien en we hoeven elkaar nooit in de ogen te zien allemaal voordelen voor ons allebei ik krijg een grijpstuiver van jou en jij alles van mij voor vijftien vette minuten ben jij hipper dan ik ooit zal zijn

i spoke too soon about fixing my sleep schedule. im back to sleeping at ridiculous hours and waking up when the rest of the world has finished its day. maybe daylight isnt for me anymore. ive tried to make it work, but i don’t think we’re getting along anymore. maybe we will later on. anyway, ive been having a harder time controlling myself lately. my emotions, mostly. anger, fear, jealousy, all of them. i cant seem to keep any of it under control, and its getting irritating. i thought id gotten past this but apparently i didnt. ive changed, for the better, id like to think. i dont miss the person i used to be. i know exactly what im capable of becoming, and i have no interest in going back to that. i wouldnt want to see that version of myself again, let alone become him. but lately it feels like im having to fight myself over the most basic things. i dont know how much longer i can keep doing that.

Theres something i need to do. i might regret it later, but thats a problem for later. id rather deal with that than become someone ive spent so long trying not to be. thats it.

Sincerely, My own worst company.

In Summary: * Listening to relaxing music as I eat fresh apple chunks, prepare to enter the night meds and night prayers phase of my evening, and wait patiently for the pregame programming for the night's college football game to start broadcasting.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night.

Health Metrics: * bw= 216.49 lbs. * bp= 151/78 (64)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, toe raises, wall push-ups, BP breathing exercises, pilates

Diet: * 05:05 – 1 banana * 05:30 – pizza * 10:00 – snacking on m&m chocolate candies * 12:00 – 1 peanut butter sandwich * 13:45 – pizza, Mongolian beef lunch order, fried rice, egg roll * 16:40 – 1 fresh apple

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 02:00 – listen to local news talk radio * 04:30 – bank accounts activity monitored * 05:10 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, take daily meds, unpack, organize, and nap * 15:00 – watching old episodes of Classic Doctor Who * 16:30 – listen to relaxing music

Chess: * 11:50 – moved in all pending CC games, winning 1, declined an invitation to a new tournament

Ingezonden stukje ; Generaal Pardon

Hi, ik ben Generaal Pardon, ik heb een mededeling voor u aangaande de inhoud van mijn excuses gemaakt over vele op dit moment urgente zaken als ook eerdere. Er is mij opgewezen dat niet alles wat ik heb geschreven betreffende deze onderwerpen even duidelijk is, zo heb ik gezegd dat ik spijt heb als haren op mijn hoofd, terwijl ik niet meer zoveel haren op mijn hoofd heb, maar toen het gebeuren waarnaar ik in dat ingezonden stuk verwijs plaatsvond had ik nog een hele dikke bos haar. Tevens heb ik gezegd dat ik ernstig gegrieft was waarbij ernstig niet echt duidelijk werd gedefinieerd, was het ernstig zoals turend naar een onwillig, hakkelend object, een staafje dat niet in een gaatje wil, of zeer ernstig in geval van een vreselijk falen, zoals bij een humane ramp veroorzaakt door persoonlijke fouten, ik bedoelde het laatste meer dan het eerste. Er is ook gezegd dat ik voor lang niet alles wat erg is sorry heb gezegd, dat ik zeker vijf procent van de delicten waarvoor ik min of meer zijdelings verantoordelijk zou kunnen zijn niet ter sprake heb gebracht, geen afstand heb genomen van deze toch zeer kwalijke zaken waarin onnodig veel schade is berokkend aan heel veel mensen, het merendeel verkerend in onmacht. Daarom zeg ik u nu dat dit allemaal niet de bedoeling was, abusievelijk nam ik aan dat het duidelijk was dat ik voor alles waarvoor ik heel zacht ter verantwoording kon worden geroepen ook mijn verantwoording heb genomen ook al heb ik dit niet nadrukkelijk gezegd. Ik hoop dat ik hiermee en ook met de komende vijf ingezonden stukken binnenkort te lezen op mijn weblocatie generaalpardon.com aan ieders excuus wensen zal hebben voldaan zodat iedereen verder kan en ik dus ook met het aansturen van mijn vele meelijopwekkende divisies vol dappere doch empathische para-soldaten, het excuus voor een leger. Sorry, sorry, en nogmaals sorry.

Ik wens u veel sterkte de komende minuten.