OUT TO LUNCH

When I was sent off to boarding school in England in 1966 at the tender age of thirteen I spent the first few days feeling homesick and longing for my bed at home and for my Scalextric racetrack but the feeling soon passed. ___STEADY_PAYWALL___

I made close friends at school and I’ve just sent a bottle of Three Ships 12-year-old to an ex school friend of 56 years who is about to celebrate his 70th birthday in Devon. I was his best man when he travelled out to South Africa and got married in the Herbert Baker church in White River and he was my best man a few years later. I planned his entire ‘exiled’ wedding and we all stayed at what was then Cybele Forest Lodge and popped a few corks of bubbly to celebrate. There were only five guests but we went off to the White River post office after the ceremony to post 40 postcards to announce the nuptials.

Unsurprisingly, many family members and friends were rather pissed off that this had been a clandestine marriage. But that wasn’t my problem. Happily, my wedding a few years later was better attended and I didn’t have any explaining to do.

Apart from my long standing friend of 56 years I made many other friends at school and a few I kept up with and many I didn’t. Some became successful businessmen, some died of drug overdoses and a few went on to become rock musicians, my younger brother being one of them.

In my year we had a massive ethnic mix. One of my closest buddies was a quietly spoken, studious African pupil whose father was later accused of keeping human body parts in his fridge. Happily, his son stayed with the Friday night school menu of lasagne and salad.

Then there were the Saudi Arabians whose father owned an import/export business in Jeddah. I used to sneak off to the squash courts with like-minded rebels for a Player’s No 6 after prep on a Friday night. Knowing I was an occasional smoker Adnan turned up one Spring term with a present for me. It was a gold cigarette lighter with a Swiss watch embedded in it. Probably the most valuable thing I had ever owned and a suitable justification, I felt, for upgrading from a Player’s No 6 to a Dunhill International - even though the extra smoking time made us more vulnerable to discovery by the housemaster.

In the sixth form, boys in their final A levels year were allowed to keep a car at school for exeat weekends. ‘Brickie’ Blythe, whose father was a property developer, had a brand new Rover 2000 which rather eclipsed the house master’s aging Humber Hawk. Adnan, I’m happy to say, didn’t hold back and got daddy to buy him a red 1750 Alfa Romeo GTV which we used to go hunting for girls (toxic males that we were back then) at the weekend.

Since Adnan didn’t drink and I wasn’t allowed to drive for insurance reasons this all worked out to my advantage. Although I live in constant fear that ‘Mandy’ from Worthing will someday surface and ruin my political future by accusing me of ‘inappropriate touching’.

In my year at school we had Indian students, Africans, Persians (as they were then known), Arabs, Jews, Gentiles and even Americans and Canadians. Racism and anti-Semitism was rife and it cut both ways. Insults were hurled in the changing room after rugby practice and just as cheerfully hurled back. Nobody asked the house master for a safe space and nobody, as far as I can remember, had a nervous breakdown. Back in the tuck-box room we were all, to a greater or lesser extent, buddies and no formal complaints were ever laid.

These days of course we would have to suffer the visitation of highly remunerated ‘diversity consultants’ who would point to the error of our ways and get us cancelled if found guilty. My buddy Adnan was called ‘poodle’ by one of my contemporaries because of his closely cropped curly hair.

Since he was soon to inherit his father’s highly profitable business it didn’t bother him at all. But now we know with the wisdom of virtue signaling hindsight he could have gone on to rule his country had it not been for the torment of his ‘racist’ oppressor and the obvious damage it did to his self confidence (despite going on to own a couple of hotels in London). His tormentor went on to a successful career in business.

My friends with children at expensive private schools in SA are frightened. The new thing apparently is ‘colourism’ which I had never heard of. This is the latest big sin and it’s the measure of relative darkness of the skin.

So a light coffee coloured complexion has no right to feel as persecuted and put down as a darker roast complexion and the ebony black complexion holds all the high scoring cards. Fortunately, our DIE consultants are on hand to pronounce on the burden of relative disadvantage.

As I mentioned previously I have no kids or grand-kids so I have no skin in the game when it comes to all this diversity/inclusivity/equity (DIE) training at schools. But I do have a lot of younger friends with school going children and they are becoming increasingly worried that their children are being turned against them by these unregulated ‘consultants’.

Few of them have any idea what is going on in their children’s schools and most wouldn’t believe that the R170 000 plus they pay per annum in school fees includes Marxist indoctrination. One 13-year-old daughter of a friend has been so indoctrinated that she is bitterly ashamed about her white skin and keeps blaming her white parents for her shame.

But let’s face it, the world has become mad and the Lord of Disorder now rules. I watched a Senate Committee hearing on YouTube last week where the questioner, Republican Dan Bishop, asked Aimee Arrambide, the executive director of a Texas abortion rights group, whether men can become pregnant and have abortions and the answer was…yes. Twenty years ago, you would have been committed to a mental asylum for an answer like that and with good reason.

The fact that we have allowed the ‘Diversity’ loonies to infiltrate our education system ( and weirdly, our fee paying schools first and foremost) probably suggests that the threat of job loss and social media ‘cancellation’ has trumped whatever remained of good sense amongst our educators. Let’s be frank about this. What other job opportunities are available for a 50+ high school teacher? Practically none. So bowing, groveling and kowtowing to the DIE bullies is the only way they are going to be able to afford to reach retirement intact, providing they mind their language in class and avoid micro-aggressions.