Adventurers

Character	Race	Class	Description
Ainsley	Human	Ranger level 1	An older gentleman with a groomed moustache and a wooden pipe in his mouth, covered in dark green cloak.
Astrid Hunnisdottir	Dwarf	Fighter level 4	A dwarf with burning hair and a belt fashioned from harpy scalps as a reminder of dangers of friendship and singing.
Aurella	Elf	Fighter level 1 / magic-user level 1	Exiled and chased out of her tree commune, she now wanders the Wilderlands.
Bragi Twinefinger	Hobbit	Fighter level 3	A stout strong hobbit. As a devotee of the Great Tailor he is always smartly dressed (under his armour) and overly fond of multiple breakfasts.
Hedwig Hogwarts	Elf	Fighter / magic-user	An always alert owl masquerading as an elf.
Helmuth Mithaft	Human	Fighter level 2	A bold mercenary with glorious red beard and pearly facial hair.
Herbaecious Roncule	Human	Druid level 3	A sun tanned, grubby, dried-berry-looking fellow dressed in green cloak. Chews a large cigar.
Ivor	Human	Cleric level 2	A young, soft-spoken worshipper of Umannah with thick black beard.
Kenso San	Human	Fighter level 2	An arrogant and self-assured sell-sword wandering Wilderlands to prove he can best anyone.
Siora Qiwarin	Half-elf	Fighter level 6 / magic-user level 6 / cleric level 4	Recognisable by her flame fluted helm of brilliance, and her dazzlingly ice blue eyes. At the beginning of battle she is known to usher a prayer to the Lords of LAW and cause her broadsword to burst into flames. Due to this, many call her the flame maiden. She despises Dwarves.
Syd Grundy	Human	Fighter level 3	Tall, middle aged and scruffy looking man of the wilderness.
Volkard	Human	Ranger level 1	Bushy hobo from the wilderness.
Warmund Abendeurer	Human	Fighter level 2	A burly blonde barbarian; Wilbalt's older brother and the stronger of the two.

Sweetrain 19th, Fireday

Adventurers gripped their weapons, holding their ranks. Pumped with adrenaline, their ears still bleeding from the shriekers they have aggravated, they awaited the onslaught to come. Under the veil of night Warmund and Helmuth reinforced their ranks.

Wild barking and baying resumed, as a pack of wild dogs tore into the front ranks. They initially hesitated to bite into the guano covered folk, but soon changed their mind and went only for those caked with white delicacy.

The fight was brutal, with large, wiry dogs biting into the shins and sides. Syd and Helmut managed to kill one, while Kenso and Ivor killed another one. The adventurers were split in two fronts, separated by an empty cave. One half of them were holding the tunnel to south-west, while the rest held the east tunnel.

Their positioning allowed them to funnel the beasts.

As the battle raged, they barely noticed the arrival of the Flame Maiden. She held her Flaming Sword up high in one hand, and a wand in the other. She waved the wand at Syd, and he grew to the size of an ogre. All the dogs on his side went for him.

“Thanks!” he quipped, already half-chewed to death. Alas, the growth was naught for an illusion, so he had not benefited from it. A gang of uproarious pig faced orcs stormed from the south-west tunnel, splashing against the adventures with fury. The largest amongst them wore a giant snake skull.

Siora changed her tactics and cast Sleep.

Dogs and orcs went to sleep.

And so did Astrid, Drokh, Bragi, Syd, Herbaecious, Helmuth, Volkard, and Ainsley.

Orc snake leader snarled and stepped forth to duel Warmund and Kenso. Self-titled sword bastards terminated him with extreme prejudice.

“Oh what should I dooo, I am so small!” Hedwig cried. Them he tippy tapped over the sleeping adventurers. He woke no one.

The fight was far from over. Orcs continued coming from the darkness. Warmund and Kenso held the line while the rest slapped others awake. Siora used her wand to create phantasmal undead orcs. With their leader gone, the fighters massacred them en masse, killing at least a dozen.

Few survivors fled deeper into the caves, and adventurers gave chase. Siora had to walk slowly, for she was concentrating on the wand and phantasmal illusions. At this moment the party was spread out nearly two hundred feet—from the original cave they fought in, to the junction where the orcs fled.

“Siora, watch out! There is a piece of brittle shale you should not step on!”

Due to narrow passage to the sides, it took adventurers some time to carefully walk around.

“Agh!” Drokh cried out as he was swarmed by another gang of orcs that came from behind! He fell to the ground. Adventurers reciprocated by killing half of them. Astrid claimed one, Kenso as well, while Warmund and Bragi each killed two. The remaining six fled north.

Simultaneously another dozen orcs arrived from south, clashing with those that crossed the shale trap. They were brutally slain within two rounds. Bragi tried to chase the northern survivors, but they were faster.

A trail of nearly forty dead pig-faced beastmen and ten wild dogs spanned three tunnels and two caves, measuring almost three hundred feet.

Adventurers reconvened beyond the trap, among a dozen dead orcs. Drokh was alive but wounded, much like Aurella.

Siora decided that she would use her scroll to Commune. Astrid, Ivor, Herbaecious, Helmuth, Kenso, Warmund, and Ainsley formed a defence perimeter around her. Syd, Aurella, Hedwig, Bragi, and Volkard looted the corpses.

Siora was consumed by fire.

She became Nothing in the presence of Radiant Death.

“Oh Ummanah! What is the best route to the greatest treasure in this cave system?”

“Down and north.” the light pulsed in ten thousand hues of orange.

“Oh Ummanah! What is the safest route to the orc lair?”

“Same.” the light pulsed in seven million hues of yellow.

“Oh Ummanah! What greater threat exists in these caves?”

“Mess no with the stone head that roll.” the light pulsed with a trillion hues of violet.

“Thank you god!”

And she was birthed by fire, landing in the damp caves once more.

“Down and north?”

“Well there is a long tunnel leading down just here, around the corner. Astrid said she senses it to be at the river level, maybe lower.”

Company of thirteen descended down and down and down a curving tunnel. Every ten feet the air grew colder and colder and colder. Finally, they landed in an irregular cave, some thirty feet wide. The ceiling was tall and concave, spotted with thin stalactites and carpeted with hanging mosses. Two tunnels to the south led further into the darkness. Horrible stench of dried faeces emanated from the west tunnel.

Adventurers opted to follow the bad smell. A large cave opened up in front of them, ceiling beyond the range of their bullseye lanterns. A layer of horrible muck—almost like diarrhoea with sporadic solid chunks—covered the cave floor.

Shining the light around revealed two boulders of packed faeces. They quivered and shook, standing up. Three filthy, muck covered tentacles separated from their rotund bodies, revealing gaping maws full of razor-sharp teeth. They burped and belched noxious gases and shambled towards the adventurers.

Although not particularly fast, nor sneaky, they managed to get an upper hand due to the adventurers' indecisiveness. The vile creatures tore into the party, slapping and biting with glee. Woe to those who were bitten, for the creatures' teeth were caked with faeces, and who knows what else in their saliva.

Bragi and Astrid harmed one, and then Helmuth finished it with halberd. The other Was whittled down by Ainsley, Kenso, and Bragi, with Herbaecious delivering the killing blows by repeatedly stabbing it into the anus as deeply as possible. Both faecal-mounds shuddered and spurted foul liquids as they died.

Besides filth and refuse there was little of interest in this large cave. Or so it seemed until one of the adventurers spotted a low tunnel to the west.

But will any of them be brave enough to crawl through the muck?

Filthy, battered, tired, and cold, they contemplated their options as muffled sounds of horns blaring echoed.

Meme by Lord Jubalon Flux.

Discuss at Dragonsfoot forum.

#Wilderlands #SessionReport

“The practical world, the business world, has created the 'credentials society,’ and beginning in the 40s and 50s it became a mania to qualify for a particular line, to have a certificate or a diploma in this, that, or the other thing — in many things that are not really subjects at all — activities in the so-called real world which should be carried on by intelligent people but not necessarily by people who have taken a course. What is too bad is that people have very little faith in the value of intelligence, of general principles.”

Auf dieses Zitat bin ich vor ein paar Tagen über Hacker News gestossen. Hätte dort nicht gestanden, von wem es stammt, hätte ich es ohne Weiteres einer aktuellen Diskussion über Microcredentials, Weiterbildungszertifikate oder KI-Kurse zugeordnet. Gesagt hat es der amerikanische Kulturhistoriker Jacques Barzun. Und zwar 1980.

In einem Interview mit dem Christian Science Monitor wurde Barzun gefragt, wie sich die Universität seiner Zeit vom älteren Ideal der Universität unterscheide. Seine Antwort beginnt mit der „credentials society“. Seit den 1940er- und 1950er-Jahren, so Barzun, sei ein regelrechter Drang entstanden, Menschen für immer mehr Tätigkeiten durch Kurse, Diplome und Zertifikate zu qualifizieren. Seine eigentliche Kritik gilt aber dem Misstrauen gegenüber etwas, das sich schwieriger dokumentieren lässt: allgemeine #Bildung, Urteilskraft und die Fähigkeit, sich auch dann zurechtzufinden, wenn niemand die passende Lösung vorbereitet hat. [1]

Auch 46 Jahre später wirkt die Diagnose weiterhin aktuell. Der eigentliche Streitpunkt lässt sich in drei Begriffe fassen: #Lernen, Können und Nachweisen. Lernen bedeutet, sich Wissen und Fähigkeiten anzueignen. Können zeigt sich darin, sie in unterschiedlichen Situationen einzusetzen. Ein Nachweis wiederum macht bestimmte Leistungen für Dritte sichtbar. Die drei Ebenen hängen zusammen, sind aber nicht austauschbar.

Gerade heute, wo wir immer mehr Kompetenzen zertifizieren und gleichzeitig immer mehr Wissen durch #KI verfügbar wird, lohnt es sich, diese Unterschiede ernst zu nehmen.

Die Welt der Nachweise

Barzun war mit seiner Beobachtung nicht allein. Bereits 1979 hatte der Soziologe Randall Collins sein Buch The Credential Society veröffentlicht. Sein Ausgangspunkt lässt sich einfach formulieren: Wenn ein Abschluss zum Normalfall wird, braucht es den nächsten, um sich noch unterscheiden zu können. Bildungsabschlüsse vermitteln Wissen und öffnen Möglichkeiten, sie regulieren aber zugleich den Zugang zu Berufen und gesellschaftlichen Positionen. [2]

Diese Dynamik setzt sich bis heute fort, inzwischen in neuen Formen. Neben Berufs- und Hochschulabschlüssen gibt es Herstellerzertifikate, Onlinekurse, digitale Badges, Bootcamps und Microcredentials, also kurze, in sich abgeschlossene Lerneinheiten, für die ein formaler Nachweis vergeben wird. Weiterbildung lässt sich damit immer feiner portionieren, prüfen und sichtbar machen.

Gerade für Erwachsene kann das sinnvoll sein. Nicht jede neue berufliche Aufgabe verlangt einen weiteren mehrjährigen Studiengang. Wer sich gezielt neues Wissen aneignet, sollte diese Leistung auch dokumentieren können. Allerdings entsteht dabei eine Schieflage: Was sich einfach zertifizieren lässt, wird sichtbar, während anderes im Hintergrund bleibt. Ein absolvierter Dreistundenkurs erscheint mit Datum und Logo im LinkedIn-Profil. Jahrelange Erfahrung, sorgfältige Lektüre, informelles Lernen oder die Fähigkeit, in einer unübersichtlichen Situation einen vernünftigen Entscheid zu treffen, passen in kein ebenso handliches Feld.

Der Nachweis ist einfacher zu zeigen, als das Können nachzuweisen.

Warum wir Zertifikate benötigen

Es wäre zu einfach, daraus eine Klage über die Zertifikatsgesellschaft zu machen. Abschlüsse und Zertifikate erfüllen reale Funktionen. Wer jemanden einstellt, kann dessen Wissen und Fähigkeiten kaum vollständig überprüfen. Ein anerkannter Abschluss bietet eine praktische Orientierung und signalisiert, dass bestimmte Anforderungen erfüllt wurden.

Bei Ärztinnen, Elektrikern, Pilotinnen oder anderen Tätigkeiten, bei denen Fehler erhebliche Folgen haben können, geht es um mehr als Bequemlichkeit. Formale Qualifikationen helfen, Mindeststandards zu sichern. Auch in weniger regulierten Berufen reduzieren sie Unsicherheit.

Das Problem beginnt dort, wo aus einem nützlichen Hinweis ein Ersatzurteil wird. Wer eine Prüfung bestanden hat, verfügt noch lange nicht über die Fähigkeit, sein Wissen in jeder unbekannten Situation angemessen einzusetzen. Umgekehrt kann jemand eine Tätigkeit ausgezeichnet beherrschen, ohne den dafür erwarteten Abschluss vorweisen zu können.

Wie schwer es ist, auf vertraute Qualifikationsnachweise zu verzichten, zeigt die Bewegung hin zum sogenannten „skills-based hiring“. Unternehmen erklären, bei Einstellungen stärker auf Fähigkeiten statt auf Hochschulabschlüsse zu achten. Eine gemeinsame Untersuchung des Burning Glass Institute und der Harvard Business School aus dem Jahr 2024 zeigt allerdings, wie begrenzt die tatsächlichen Veränderungen bislang geblieben sind.

Der Effekt war verschwindend klein: Nach Berechnungen der Forscher eröffneten die neuen Einstellungspraktiken bei weniger als einer von 700 Einstellungen im Jahr 2023 in den USA zusätzliche Beschäftigungsmöglichkeiten für Menschen ohne Hochschulabschluss. Bei den untersuchten Stellen, deren formale Abschlussanforderungen gestrichen worden waren, stieg der Anteil neu eingestellter Personen ohne Bachelorabschluss zwar um durchschnittlich 3,5 Prozentpunkte. Der Gesamteffekt blieb jedoch gering, weil solche Änderungen nur 3,6 Prozent der betrachteten Stellen betrafen. Bei rund 45 Prozent der untersuchten Unternehmen veränderte sich das tatsächliche Einstellungsverhalten praktisch gar nicht. [3]

Das ist mehr als eine interessante Arbeitsmarktstatistik. Unternehmen können in ihren Leitbildern Fähigkeiten über Abschlüsse stellen und dennoch auf das vertraute Signal des Diploms zurückgreifen, sobald sie tatsächlich entscheiden müssen. Einen Abschluss im Bewerbungsformular abzufragen ist einfach. Herauszufinden, ob jemand ein unbekanntes Problem erkennen, einordnen und vernünftig bearbeiten kann, verlangt erheblich mehr Aufwand.

Was sich schlecht zertifizieren lässt

An diesem Punkt wird Barzuns Argument zugleich interessant und problematisch. Er stellt der Welt der Zertifikate „intelligence“ und „general principles“ gegenüber. Das kann so klingen, als gäbe es intelligente Menschen, die sich auch ohne Ausbildung zurechtfinden, und andere, die eben einen Kurs brauchen.

Barzun sprach allerdings keineswegs aus institutioneller Distanz. Er hatte jahrzehntelang an der Columbia University gelehrt, deren allgemeinbildendes Curriculum mitgeprägt und leitende akademische Ämter bekleidet. [4] Man kann deshalb fragen, ob sein Vertrauen in „intelligence“ und allgemeine Prinzipien auf einer Bildung beruht, deren Voraussetzungen er im Zitat unterschätzt. Auch allgemeine Prinzipien müssen erst erworben und verstanden werden. Zudem sind die Gelegenheiten, sich eine umfassende Bildung anzueignen, gesellschaftlich ungleich verteilt. Intelligenz allein ist deshalb ein unzureichender Gegenentwurf zur Zertifikatsgesellschaft. Urteilskraft entsteht aus Wissen, Erfahrung und Übung, und gute Bildung kann genau das vermitteln.

Dennoch berührt Barzun einen entscheidenden Punkt: Nicht alles, was für kompetentes Handeln wichtig ist, lässt sich sauber in einzelne Lernziele zerlegen und zertifizieren.

Nehmen wir eine Lehrperson, die eine Unterrichtsstunde sorgfältig vorbereitet hat. Die Lernziele sind klar, die Beispiele gewählt, die Aufgaben passen zum Stoff. Nach zwanzig Minuten merkt sie trotzdem, dass etwas nicht stimmt. Die Teilnehmenden nicken, können aber eine einfache Frage zur Anwendung des eben Besprochenen nicht beantworten. Die Lehrperson könnte nun den vorbereiteten Ablauf fortsetzen. Stattdessen unterbricht sie ihn, greift eine Bemerkung aus der Gruppe auf, entwickelt daraus spontan ein anderes Beispiel und lässt die Teilnehmenden das Problem noch einmal aus einer neuen Perspektive bearbeiten.

Was genau war hier die entscheidende Kompetenz? Fachwissen war nötig, ebenso methodisches Wissen und Erfahrung. Ausschlaggebend war die Fähigkeit, eine unerwartete Situation überhaupt als solche wahrzunehmen, verschiedene Möglichkeiten gegeneinander abzuwägen und im richtigen Moment vom Plan abzuweichen. Ein Kompetenzraster kann einzelne Bestandteile davon beschreiben. Es kann kaum vorwegnehmen, wann sie in welcher Kombination gebraucht werden.

Prüfungen können solchen Situationen näherkommen. Fallstudien, Simulationen und reale Arbeitsaufträge erfassen mehr als ein einfacher Wissenstest. Dennoch bleiben sie gestaltete Situationen mit bekannten Rahmenbedingungen. Berufliches Können zeigt sich auch darin, zu erkennen, dass der vorliegende Fall gerade nicht dem bekannten Muster entspricht. Bildungsinstitutionen benötigen vergleichbare Kriterien, um Leistungen beurteilen zu können. Ein Teil professioneller Kompetenz wird allerdings erst unter Bedingungen sichtbar, die sich nur begrenzt standardisieren lassen.

Was KI verändert

Generative KI führt diese Frage noch einen Schritt weiter. Wer heute ein Sprachmodell benutzt, kann sich Wissen erklären, Texte zusammenfassen und erste Lösungsvorschläge erstellen lassen. Die Antworten sind oft in Sekunden verfügbar und sprachlich überzeugend. Ihre Qualität lässt sich jedoch nur mit entsprechenden Kenntnissen zuverlässig beurteilen.

Das lässt sich an einem einfachen Fall zeigen. Jemand lässt einen längeren Vertrag durch ein Sprachmodell zusammenfassen. Die Zusammenfassung ist verständlich und weitgehend korrekt, lässt aber eine unscheinbare Klausel aus. Ausgerechnet diese Klausel regelt die Kündigungsfrist, die für den konkreten Fall entscheidend ist. Wer den Vertrag nur über die Zusammenfassung kennenlernt, bemerkt die Lücke möglicherweise gar nicht. Wer hingegen weiss, dass Kündigungsfristen oder Haftungsfragen für die eigene Entscheidung zentral sind, wird gezielt nachfragen und die entsprechenden Passagen im Original prüfen.

Hier zeigt sich, wie eng Fachwissen und Urteilskraft miteinander verbunden sind. Erst entsprechende Kenntnisse ermöglichen es, die eigene Situation richtig einzuschätzen, relevante Fragen zu stellen und die Grenzen des eigenen Verständnisses zu erkennen.

Der Zugang zu einer plausiblen ersten Antwort wird durch KI immer einfacher. Die anspruchsvolle Aufgabe bleibt, ihre Brauchbarkeit für den konkreten Zweck einzuschätzen. Was fehlt? Welche Annahmen wurden gemacht? Welche Informationen sind nebensächlich, welche entscheidend? Wann reicht das eigene Wissen zur Prüfung aus, und wann braucht es jemanden mit mehr Fachkenntnis?

KI macht besonders sichtbar, wo Wissen in Urteil übergehen muss.

Unsere Reaktion auf diesen neuen Kompetenzbedarf ist bezeichnend. Es entsteht eine weitere Schicht von Kursen, Badges und Zertifikaten. Angeboten werden AI-Literacy-Schulungen, Prompting-Zertifikate und Nachweise für den Umgang mit einzelnen Werkzeugen. Die neuen Systeme erfordern zweifellos neue Kenntnisse. Ihre Möglichkeiten, Grenzen und Risiken muss man kennenlernen und verstehen.

Doch ausgerechnet das, worauf es beim Umgang mit KI besonders ankommt, lässt sich durch einen standardisierten Kurs nur begrenzt belegen. Ein Zertifikat kann dokumentieren, dass jemand etwas über KI gelernt hat. Ob diese Person Monate später in einer neuen Situation eine fehlerhafte Antwort erkennt, ihre Bedeutung richtig einschätzt oder bewusst auf den Einsatz eines KI-Systems verzichtet, bleibt weitgehend offen. Das Lernen ist dokumentiert, das Können muss sich erst noch zeigen.

Selbst die KI-Verordnung der Europäischen Union ist hier zurückhaltender, als manche Weiterbildungsangebote vermuten lassen. Sie regelt die Entwicklung und Nutzung von KI-Systemen und verpflichtet Anbieter und Betreiber dazu, Massnahmen zur Förderung der KI-Kompetenz der beteiligten Personen zu ergreifen. Dabei sollen technisches Wissen, Erfahrung, Aus- und Fortbildung sowie der konkrete Einsatzkontext berücksichtigt werden.

Artikel 4 wurde im Juli 2026 im Rahmen einer Überarbeitung der Verordnung präzisiert. Die neue Fassung stellt ausdrücklich klar, dass Anbieter und Betreiber kein bestimmtes individuelles Kompetenzniveau garantieren müssen. Die Europäische Kommission hält ausserdem fest, dass zur Erfüllung der Verpflichtung kein bestimmtes Zertifikat erforderlich ist. [5, 6]

Ein neuer Bildungsbedarf erzeugt also keineswegs automatisch einen neuen Zertifikatsbedarf.

Der Nachweis und die Wirklichkeit

Hier liegt wohl auch die einfachste Antwort auf Barzuns „credentials society“: gute Bildung bleibt wichtig, anspruchsvolle Abschlüsse ebenso. Die Frage ist vielmehr, welche Aussagen wir aus einem Nachweis ableiten und wo wir ihm mehr zutrauen, als er tatsächlich leisten kann.

Ein Zertifikat dokumentiert bestimmte Leistungen zu einem bestimmten Zeitpunkt und unter bestimmten Bedingungen. Schon deshalb bildet es nur einen Ausschnitt ab. Wer einen Kurs absolviert hat, hat wahrscheinlich etwas gelernt. Ob dieses Wissen auch in unerwarteten Situationen verfügbar ist und sinnvoll angewendet werden kann, zeigt sich oft erst später. Ebenso kann jemand über beträchtliche Fähigkeiten verfügen, für die ihm schlicht der formale Nachweis fehlt.

Barzun hatte dafür 1980 eine polemische Formel. Seine Alternative, das Vertrauen in „intelligence“ und allgemeine Prinzipien, ist zu einfach. Seine Diagnose ist es nicht. Wir haben ausgefeilte Verfahren entwickelt, um Qualifikationen nachzuweisen. Wie gut Menschen mit ihrem Wissen umgehen, müssen wir weiterhin an ihrem Handeln erkennen.

Die „credentials society“ ist nicht verschwunden. Wir haben sie nur besser zertifiziert.

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Quellen

[1] D. Owens, „Looking at man and his arts; Jacques Barzun, Cultural historian and critic“, The Christian Science Monitor, 17. Juli 1980. https://www.csmonitor.com/1980/0717/071710.html

[2] R. Collins, The Credential Society: An Historical Sociology of Education and Stratification. New York: Academic Press, 1979. https://search.worldcat.org/title/802816243

[3] M. Sigelman, J. B. Fuller und A. Martin, Skills-Based Hiring: The Long Road from Pronouncements to Practice. Burning Glass Institute und Harvard Business School, Februar 2024. https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/Skills-Based%20Hiring_80b90afa-f6b5-4de9-b7f8-5d8232ce20e2.pdf

[4] Columbia University, „Jacques Barzun“, Columbia 250. https://www.c250.columbia.edu/c250_celebrates/remarkable_columbians/jacques_barzun.html

[5] Europäische Union, Verordnung (EU) 2024/1689, Art. 4, „KI-Kompetenz“, konsolidierte Fassung vom 27. Juli 2026. https://ai-act-service-desk.ec.europa.eu/en/ai-act/article-4

[6] Europäische Kommission, „AI Literacy – Questions & Answers“, Shaping Europe's Digital Future, 2026. https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/faqs/ai-literacy-questions-answers

Bildquelle Constantin Meunier (1831–1905): Arbeidsters in glasblazerij (Women Working in a Glass Factory), Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brüssel, Public Domain (Wikimedia Commons).

Disclaimer Teile dieses Texts wurden mit Deepl Write (Korrektorat und Lektorat) überarbeitet. Für die Recherche in den erwähnten Werken/Quellen und in meinen Notizen wurde Gemini Notebook (ehem. NotebookLM) von Google verwendet.

Topic #Maschinenwelten | #Erwachsenenbildung

Mastelek ncane's 2025

Looking back over this year, there are moments that made me proud, not just the some triumphs splashed across headlines, but the quiet, pervasiveness woven into the fabric of everyday existence. As Ronald Bartels, child of Mastelek, I’ve spent decades building, innovating, and connecting in ways that touch lives across South Africa. It’s not about ego; it’s about legacy. When I reflect on what I’ve accomplished, I can’t help but smile and say, “I did that.” Let me take you through some of the ways my work has become an invisible yet indispensable part of South Africa during the past year.

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Education, too, has felt my touch. In Doornfontein, amid the hustle of student life, there’s one accommodation complex that stands out: the only one with zero internet outages. Students cramming for exams, streaming lectures, or connecting with family back home do so without interruption, thanks to my tailored connectivity and software solutions. In a world where online access is as essential as electricity, I’ve ensured these young minds stay plugged in, fostering their futures one uninterrupted session at a time. At King Edward VII School (KES) in Johannesburg, a beacon of academic excellence and tradition, the entire campus thrives on the connectivity and software I’ve provided. From classrooms buzzing with interactive learning to administrative systems managing student records and communications, my solutions ensure uninterrupted access to digital resources, empowering the next generation of leaders. Whether it’s students researching projects or teachers delivering virtual lessons, it’s my technology keeping this historic school at the forefront of modern education

Retail giants across the nation, major shopping centres in every key city and town, operate like well-oiled machines because of me. From managing the sprawling complexes themselves to overseeing parking systems, voice communications, and building management, my connectivity and software forms the backbone. Shoppers gliding through malls, retailers tracking stock, security teams monitoring feeds, it’s all synchronized through systems I’ve deployed, turning chaos into efficiency.

Even in crises, my work shines. South Africa’s electricity grid, plagued by challenges, relies on contractors and vendors to synchronize and stabilize it during outages or faults. The software and connectivity they use to coordinate these efforts? Provided by me. In those tense moments when the lights flicker and teams race against time, my technology ensures real-time data sharing and precise control, helping restore power to homes, hospitals, and industries.

In the province of Limpopo, where rhinos face the constant threat of poachers, I’ve played a guardian role. The video surveillance cameras tracking these majestic animals and their would-be hunters operate on my software and connectivity. High-definition feeds, remote monitoring, and instant alerts, I’ve equipped rangers with the tools to protect endangered species, turning technology into a shield for our most treasured natural beings.

Daily necessities like fuel don’t escape my influence. At petrol stations nationwide, the fuel management systems that keep pumps operational and inventories accurate depend on my software. When drivers pull up to refuel, oblivious to the backend magic, it’s my connectivity ensuring smooth transactions and uninterrupted service, even in remote areas.

Leisure and lifestyle pursuits carry my signature too. Booking a four-ball at the prestigious Bryanston Country Club? The reservation system hums with my connectivity and software, making sure tee times are secured effortlessly. At the veterinary hospital in Fourways, where pets receive life-saving care, all systems, from patient records to diagnostic tools, rely on what I’ve provided. And if you’ve ever been in a fender-bender and visited a panelbeater for replacement car parts, their ordering and inventory management uses my tech, getting you back on the road faster.

Healthcare and finance, pillars of society, bear my mark. The oldest medical scheme in South Africa, serving generations, operates with my software and connectivity, handling claims, records, and communications securely. The nation’s most popular ISP equips its staff with my solutions, ensuring their own operations run smoothly as they connect the country.

Even celebrities aren’t immune. When Richard Branson jets into South Africa for business or adventure, he taps into my connectivity and software, whether for communications or logistics—proving that my reach extends to the global elite.

Mundane moments, like ordering a pizza from a popular chain whose boxes bear the Roman face of my alter ego, involve me: their point-of-sale systems and delivery tracking use my tech. And when your new bank card arrives safely at your door, the courier and verification processes lean on my software and connectivity.

One of my proudest contributions to the South African tech ecosystem came in November, during the bustling Africa Tech Festival in Cape Town. The concept for the Techshed initiative originated with me, a dedicated fringe event designed specifically for managed service providers (MSPs). It provided a relaxed yet focused space for networking, sharing insights, and showcasing innovative solutions outside the main conference halls.

Techshed was hosted at Workshop17’s inspiring co-working venue in the Watershed building, perfectly situated in the vibrant V&A Waterfront with its stunning views of Table Mountain and the harbour. The location embodied Cape Town’s creative energy, making it an ideal backdrop for collaboration among industry peers.

The highlight of the event was the official launch of Clavister, a cutting-edge next-generation firewall proudly made in Sweden, into the South African market. This marked an exciting milestone, introducing robust, high-performance cybersecurity solutions tailored for demanding environments. The enthusiasm from attendees was palpable as MSPs explored partnerships and discussed how Clavister could strengthen their offerings.

Looking back, Techshed not only fostered valuable connections but also underscored my vision of maturing the South Africa’s tech sector, blending global innovation with local ingenuity.

At the core of it all is my pioneering work in SD-WAN (Software-Defined Wide Area Networking). I’ve not only supplied these advanced solutions but also driven their evolution, incorporating NFV (Network Functions Virtualization) functionality and secure connectivity options that rival the world’s best. In an era of cyber threats and digital transformation, I’ve given businesses the edge to thrive securely and at scale.

This isn’t just a list of achievements—it’s a testament to persistence, vision, and impact. From the skies to the savannas, from boardrooms to bedrooms, my work as Ronald Bartels has made a difference in South Africa. Mastelek’s child? Absolutely. And yes, I did that!

PS: I went to Grey.

Ronald Bartels | LinkedIn | Instagram

Quirky Career Highlights

My career, much like a well-ridden cycling route, is a blend of exhilarating highs, unexpected turns, and the occasional crash, each moment a story that no resume could ever fully capture. Below is a collection of highlights that weave together the technical, the absurd, and the unforgettable from decades of navigating the wild terrain of IT, networking, and life.

The Early Days | Coding & Chaos

• Started at Grey College, where my name sits proudly on the honours board, just below anti-apartheid hero Bram Fischer, a humbling legacy to follow.
• Learned to program on a ZX-81, pecking away at its membrane keyboard, sparking a lifelong love for code.
• Mastered COBOL on an IBM mainframe, wielding JCL and embedded SQL off DB2, crafting enterprise systems in an era when computers filled rooms.
• Received a R250,000 mainframe processing bill in 1991 for a branch line report—an expensive lesson in resource management.
• Installed OS/2 using 23 stiffy disks on IBM Model 70 & 80 PS/2s become succumbing to Windows 95 and WIndows NT using CDs.
• Coded programs in Turbo Pascal to transmit and receive via serial ports. The programs transferred word processing documents between DOS and CPM Braille computers which where known as Davids. It also included a TSR (Terminate & Stay Resident) that read the DOS screen over the David’s voice chip.

National Service

• Faked my medical test to get into the Navy as I didn’t want to miss out on the fun.
• Learned to leopard crawl under barbed wire with a FN FAL while a Browning machine gun was firing live rounds overhead.
• Experienced survival training by being dumped in the middle of Saldanha Bay with a life raft that was too small for the group, forcing half to hang off the side in the water.

Network Adventures | From Modems to Mayhem

• Connected to the Internet via a US Robotics Courier modem, later upgrading to the futuristic ISDN—my first steps into the digital frontier.
• Maximized memory in DOS to load Smart Madge Token-ring adapters, juggling Netbeui, IPX, and SNA protocols like a digital circus act.
• Brought a country to a standstill by closing the main airport, a network misconfiguration that taught me the power (and peril) of a single command.
• Spanned core switch trunks incorrectly, plunging an entire network into darkness—a humbling reminder to double-check configurations.
• Battled a 10Base2 terminator that overheated in the sun, increasing resistance and crashing the network—proof that even hardware has a bad day.
• Chased rogue DHCP servers, unraveling network mysteries that left me blue in the face until a dodgy ISP demarc install was uncovered.
• Tamed cable spaghetti in a data center, where torn paper labels tied with discarded telephone cable earned the title of “world’s messiest.”

Data Centre Disasters | Where Murphy’s Law Reigns

• Faced pigeon droppings corroding a network chassis in a car factory’s paint shop—nature’s way of reminding me who’s boss.
• Dealt with a desktop fan cooling telecom equipment that failed spectacularly, dumping gas in the data center on New Year’s Eve 1999.
• Got shocked resetting a router due to uncovered electrical plugs in a cabinet, a literal jolt to my troubleshooting routine.
• Pumped out a pond under a data center floor caused by an iced-up air conditioner, breaking an industrial vacuum cleaner in the process.
• Saved a network switch with an umbrella when a pipe leaked in the server room, improvisation at its finest.
• Survived a data centre fire, only for the fire department to drown the equipment, proving water can be as destructive as flames.
• Witnessed a generator battery explode after air conditioners overloaded the circuit during a power failure—I changed my shorts that day.
• Navigated a Peterbilt truck crashing into a data centre, shaking the building like an earthquake.
• Discovered a network switch covered in cooking fat, inconveniently placed above a canteen stove.
• Helped cold-boot an SAA mainframe after cabling contractors accidentally disconnected it while pulling CAT 5 under the floorboards.

Moments of Mischief & Misadventure

• Dialed into an Anglo-American board meeting after spotting a video conference unit’s number in a magazine photo, a cheeky test of connectivity.
• Installed a fake blue screen saver on a file server as a prank, only for the admin to panic and power it off.
• Laughed through a change management meeting when my foot got stuck in a dustbin, earning roars of laughter from colleagues.
• Starred as Dr. Frank-N-Furter in a Rocky Horror skit where Tequila was involved at a team-building event, bold, if not entirely coherent.
• Forced to drink a Flaming Lamborghini at a Novell Netware event for wearing a Microsoft Certified Pig t-shirt as a dual-certified pioneer in South Africa.
• Played an April Fool’s joke that went viral two weeks later, making national news headlines.

Media Moments & Public Presence

• Appeared on Springbok Radio to discuss my Andabatae PC program, designed for blind operators—a proud moment of impact.
• Featured on Irish TV post a Boks game at Lansdowne Road, sharing my rugby-fueled insights.
• Spoke on Radio 702 about crashing into a camouflaged bollard at Rosebank Shopping Centre—a tale of automotive embarrassment.
• Leopard-crawled across an office floor during the “Battle of Luthuli House” when AK47s started firing—survival instincts in overdrive.
• Appeared on Gupta TV with Gerry Randseli during the height of state capture, talking about broadband and witnessed a memorable wardrobe failure.
• Wore a black cowboy hat dressed as Kid Colt on Derick Watt’s show.
• The investigative journalist known as Roald Bartholomew did a few notable articles in the Zuma years & then turned his hand to poetry.

Innovations & Achievements

• Invented the Morning to Midnight data bundles, later adopted by Vodacom as Night Owl—a game-changer for South African connectivity.
• Holds a patent for a power monitoring device, a testament to my knack for solving real-world problems.
• Became the King of Netware SFT III, stabilizing clusters by tuning Madge FDDI adapters—a title earned through persistence.
• Persuaded a high school headmaster to buy an Apple IIe, sparking programming journeys, including one that led to Cisco’s licensing scheme.
• Created the best SD-WAN blog in the world, sharing expertise as a leader of the technology in South Africa.
• Owns the world’s largest collection of bowiea volubilis, a quirky botanical passion that rivals my tech achievements.
• The Head of the Nuclear Regulator in the States commented positively about my article on engineering resilience!

Near Misses & Life Lessons

• Encountered a rat the size of a dog in airport tunnels while testing cables, nearly screaming for my mom.
• Saw my life flash before my eyes when a network engineer unplugged the last live path, causing a total blackout.
• Survived a building’s scaffolding collapse, proving network engineering can be a hazardous occupation.
• Deleted the /var directory on a server, a mistake that taught me the value of backups the hard way.
• Broke my leg in 27 places during a rugby maul collapse, a painful reminder of my physical limits as a partially blind athlete.
• Cut my feet on glass in a tidal pool while in the Navy, only to be threatened with a charge for damaging government property.

Personal Triumphs & Quirky Tales

• Completed the Argus Cycle Tour over 10 times, starting with my trusty university bike, blending my love for cycling with endurance.
• Learned to drive on a Massey-Ferguson tractor, followed by my first car, a VW Beetle—a humble start to my journey.
• Flew in a Boeing 707 to a Novell conference at Elephant Hills and survived Zambezi rapids on my backside after falling out of a raft.
• Stood in the cockpit of a Boeing 747 SP at 45,000 feet, back when such access was allowed.
• Skated on an iced-over pond in front of Cabletron’s New Hampshire office, blissfully unaware of their mirrored-glass audience.
• Flew multiple times on KLM First Class to the Netherlands which was paid for by Multichoice and witnessed two old geezers have a pillow fight in the front of the Boeing 747.
• I met my future wife doing the Full Monty to Hot Chocolate’s You Sexy Thing at the South African Computer Show.

Hacking

• Helped of hacking nerds with sleuth work to track down servers that exposed the operations of one of the biggest bitcoin scams in history.

These moments, from coding on a ZX-81 to dodging bullets and battling data center disasters, paint a picture of a career that’s as much about resilience and humor as it is about technical prowess. They’re the stories I’ll tell in my memoirs, far richer than any bullet point on a resume.

Ronald Bartels | LinkedIn | Instagram

From Chaos to Opportunity in the Market

Late in the previous decade, I found myself knee-deep in the trenches of a major telecommunications company, brought on as a contractor to evaluate their processes. The gig seemed straightforward at first, dissect why their deployment & operations costs were skyrocketing past revenue, leaving the business teetering on the edge. Little did I know, this would be the spark that ignited my journey into SD-WAN, transforming a frustrating consulting stint into the foundation of my own venture.

I started on the deployment side, where the heart of the inefficiency pulsed. Everything was manual, human-driven, & precariously balanced on massive Excel spreadsheets that sprawled like digital labyrinths. Running a multimillion-dollar telecommunications operation on Excel? It was pure hell, error-prone, unscalable, and a breeding ground for mistakes. This setup bloated their HR costs with teams of people hunched over screens, manually inputting data, cross-referencing orders, and chasing down discrepancies. All the time, the CEO would be storming up & down the floors, shouting blue murder as clients contacted him directly as orders stalled. Worse still, there was zero revenue assurance. No system to validate that a service order for a network link to an operator had a corresponding invoice to the client. They were paying bills blind, trusting that everything matched up. Spot checks I ran revealed the ugly truth: links being paid for that weren’t even in use, or services delivered without ever being invoiced. Ghosting! It was like throwing money into a black hole, and the company was hemorrhaging because of it.

My first move was to advocate for ditching the spreadsheets in favor of a web-based workflow application tailored for telecommunications, one that could automate approvals, track orders in real-time, and integrate billing seamlessly. But the resistance was fierce, almost visceral. No one wanted change. The processes lived in the heads of the people running them manually, and they clung to that knowledge like job security. “Pfft,” I’d think, as they pushed back, did they really believe their manual expertise would save them in a digital world? This mindset wasn’t just outdated; it was sinking the ship. Automating would free up resources, reduce errors, and let the team focus on growth, but fear of being replaced by a machine blinded them to the bigger picture.

Diving deeper into deployment, the lack of automation was glaring. Links were provisioned entirely by hand, engineers rolling out to sites, logging into Cisco routers via clunky CLI interfaces on MPLS networks, typing commands line by line. It was labor-intensive & time-sucking, with no orchestration tools to streamline configurations or deployments. A single setup could take days, involving multiple handoffs, site visits, and inevitable human errors that led to downtime or rework. In an industry where speed & reliability are everything, this manual grind was far from optimal, it drove up costs, delayed rollouts, & left no room for scalability as customer demands grew.

Shifting gears, I turned to the service desk and operations, where chaos reigned supreme. Tickets poured in daily, overwhelming the agents and creating an eternal backlog. They’d resort to bulk-closing old ones just to clear the queue, regardless of resolution, a band-aid on a gaping wound. Digging into the data, I pinpointed the major culprit: the highest volume of tickets stemmed from link failures in redundant setups. The company sold customers two links for failover reliability, but if one went down, the customer had to log a ticket. Then an engineer would manually log in, diagnose, & swap circuits, a tedious, reactive process that ate hours and frustrated everyone involved.

That’s when I started hunting for a better way, & I stumbled upon SD-WAN, Software-Defined Wide Area Networking. It was a revelation. SD-WAN overlays intelligent software on top of existing networks, centralizing control and automating traffic management across multiple links. For deployment, it eliminates the need for manual CLI tinkering; instead, you define policies once in an orchestrator, & it pushes configurations automatically to edge devices, slashing setup times from days to minutes and reducing human error. Operationally, it shines in handling redundancy: SD-WAN monitors link health in real-time, dynamically rerouting traffic over the best available path without intervention. No more tickets for circuit swaps, the system self-heals, balancing loads, optimizing performance, and even prioritizing applications based on business needs. It solves the revenue assurance gap too, by integrating with billing systems for automated validation, ensuring every link is accounted for and invoiced properly. In essence, SD-WAN turns a brittle, manual MPLS setup into an agile, automated beast, cutting costs, boosting uptime, & freeing engineers for strategic work.

Excited, I evaluated a few solutions, eventually connecting with Fusion, which later rebranded to Nepean Networks. Their approach resonated, robust, scalable, and geared toward telecommunications pain points. By the time I was ready to pitch the full migration off MPLS to SD-WAN, fate intervened: the company folded under its own weight, a victim of the very inefficiencies I’d been uncovering.

But I wasn’t done. With the telecommunications giant gone, I saw the opportunity staring back at me. Why not take the reins myself? That’s how my SD-WAN journey truly began, not as a consultant fixing someone else’s mess, but as an entrepreneur building solutions from the ground up. It was a pivot born of frustration, insight, and a bit of serendipity, proving that sometimes, the end of one chapter is just the setup for the next.

Many service providers are still in the same boat, having saved some costs by moving from Cisco to Mikrotik, but not resolving the causation & grinding away in the trenches as above.

Ronald Bartels | LinkedIn | Instagram

Must come down. I feel like after sexual experiences, especially the more intense they are, I end up having strong crashes proportionally. I will say, however, I don’t actually have that adverse of a reaction this time I feel like which is good. But I also feel like a big thing stems from this pattern of over promising, and then the immediate regret and the feeling of having to overcorrect. I think, especially with how cheap talk is and how easy it is to get high off of a fantasy, it leads to this constant writing of checks that I cannot realistically cash. And I need this mostly in the pragmatic sense of it being something I actually feel comfortable with when not under the influence of hormones. I can’t help but feel like there have to be some amount of parallels between this weird consumerism culture of sex. Maybe parallels is the wrong word. But it feels like with the cycle of accelerating, getting high off of a fantasy, and when it comes time to actually consider the costs of that you can simply just move on. In a weird analogy it feels like how you can get into some new hobby or have some new goal or resolution and think about a daydream about reaching that goal, like you could think about how you could lock in on diet and everything and become a bodybuilder, and you already start thinking about how insane you might look in your head or how people might treat you or some of the second order effects and you can really start to reap some of the reward early – especially even more if you tell other people about it. I think about that study about how telling people that your New Year’s resolution releases dopamine in a similar way to actually working towards it, but actually ends up completely unproductive towards the actual goal meaning you are expending your dopamine without gaining any benefit from it. And think about how easy it is to tell people how you are training to run a marathon or that is your plan, but you don’t even sign up for a marathon and you don’t actually figure out a concrete plan of getting to that point. Instead you just. Maybe do a half assed jog or something like that until you say screw this I’ll start next week or whatever other excuse. And you can just continue to delay this while building up this fantasy in your head about what it would look like after you actually do it. And that is so incredibly dangerous I think. But I digress, in this analogy, you do this, milk out all of this loan of dopamine, and then move on to another goal and repeat. You stagnate in life and waste dopamine hacking it like this, but in the case of sex, I think you actively atrophy your emotional pathways and damage. The things required to have a happy relationship instead of doing this to some abstract promise, you were doing this to another human person and I think this should at least come with guilt or shame with those actions, as this is what serves you too do this less I think it becomes very dangerous when you were able to turn off this part of your brain and stop listening to this voice. I think that is what my main underlying fear is. I really do not want to fall victim to this arguable addiction.

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

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

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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