OUT TO LUNCH

Last week I attended a school concert as an adult for the first time in my life. Not having any children of my own (as far as I am aware) I have led a selfish life blissfully free of a parental obligation to attend sports events, parent’s meetings and school concerts and plays.

When I was at boarding school in England back in the days when The Beatles were doing rather well I was a keen member of the school’s dramatic society. Membership of the dramatic society came with perks, particularly in what was known as the Spring term which was when the annual school play was performed.

Spring term covered the months of January to March or April (depending on when the Easter weekend fell) and those are not months known for their balmy weather in the UK.

So by auditioning and getting a part in the school play you could quite legitimately avoid having to turn out for compulsory rugby or hockey practice on an icy Spring day because you had to rehearse for the school play. This was a particularly attractive perk to some of the chubby ‘sportaphobic’ pupils who would audition for the one line part of messenger or became a spear carrier in Act 2.

In my penultimate year in the lower sixth form a keen new English master recently down from Cambridge University decided to direct Shakespeare’s ‘Richard II’ as the school play. Even in the capable hands of the Royal Shakespeare Company this presents something of a challenge. ___STEADY_PAYWALL___

The play is hardly a barrel of laughs and where one might have got away with a comedy such as ‘Twelfth Night’ or ‘Much Ado about Nothing’ as a reasonably viable school play the choice of ‘Richard II’ (or Dick 2 as it became known at rehearsals) promised to be an ungrateful punishment for fee paying parents.

I bagged the part of Henry Bolingbroke, the villain of the piece who goes on to dethrone his cousin Richard II and become Henry IV Part 1. The part of King Richard was played by a boy with asthma who wheezed his way through the play and the part of John of Gaunt was played by a very solidly built lad who spoke in a monotone (which rather spoilt his ‘this sceptred isle’ speech) and would clearly rather have been playing rugby on a frost covered pitch.

Even with cuts to the text the play must have dragged on for well over two hours which can’t have been much fun for parents sitting on hard wooden chairs in the school hall. My parents were very kind and told me that they were very impressed that I could remember so many lines but they were a bit evasive when I asked them if they had enjoyed the play.

Fortunately my attendance at the school concert last week was nowhere near as torturous. We have become friends with an Afrikaans family who are close neighbours and have become honorary aunt and uncle to their two young children; the son a keen cricketer and the daughter a budding violinist. So it was off to Laerskool De Hoop last week to watch the emergent Vanessa-Mae strut her stuff.

I must confess that I didn’t have high hopes but was quite prepared to show support for my neighbour’s daughter. However, the evening exceeded all my expectations. The concert lasted for an hour and half and was made up of nineteen well-rehearsed pieces featuring string instruments, pianos, marimbas, guitars, drums, a choir, a synthesiser and a saxophone.

There was not one bum note all evening and at the end of each performance the pupils (sorry…. I don’t do ‘learners’) acknowledged the audience applause and took a well-deserved bow. It was a magnificent evening’s entertainment but what struck me most at this superbly run Afrikaans speaking school of 1 200 pupils were the good manners, the pupil discipline and the obvious dedication of the music teachers.

What a welcome contrast to what appears to be taking place in so many of our massively expensive private schools and, most recently, at Fish Hoek High School. I got the impression that if any of the race hustlers and diversity training phoneys approached Laerskool De Hoop then they would be politely shown the door.

What has emerged from the Fish Hoek High School balls-up is the fact that you don’t need any relevant professional qualifications at all to demand a very fat fee in return for your Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity mumbo jumbo.

What you do need to do apparently is to be allowed to lock pupils in a room for two hours and ban teachers and any adults from attending. Then what you do to earn your blood money is to terrorise young children and tell them they should be ashamed to have a white skin and that now is pay back time.

The racial arsonist running the Fish Hoek fiasco is called Asanda Ngoasheng and her particular interest is in ‘decolonising’ the school curriculum. As such she would have banned most of the music performed at De Hoop last week with the possible exception of ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’. She also stated way back in 2016 that she supports acts of violence to achieve her aims.

What is generally known as ‘Critical Race Theory’ (CRT) has been a relatively recent introduction to South African schools and has been enthusiastically embraced by many left leaning educationalists. White kids are told that they suffer from all sorts of non-medical conditions such as white guilt, white privilege and white fragility.

Why don’t more parents speak out against this utter bullshit that is being foisted on their little pale darlings at their R300 000pa private schools you may well wonder.

Speaking to a good mate of mine with his son and heir at such an institution I asked him that very question. His response was that if it ever got out that he had questioned the loony left CRT bullcrap he would be outed by the school as a racist and a bigot and could well lose his job. This is the crazy influence the CRT bullies now have over formerly rational people.

Not that I blame him for his reticence. He still has quite a few more years of education to pay for and obviously needs his job. As an already outed ‘racist’ and ‘bigot’ I’m in the enviable position of being able to exercise my right to freedom of speech without fear or favour; something that is fast diminishing for those less fortunate.

The best case scenario in my opinion would be for parents to withdraw their offspring from all educational establishments which spout this diversity nonsense but that would be unfair on the many great teachers still hanging in there and trying to weather the storm.

Perhaps the better alternative would be to remove once and for all these infiltrators in the education system who seem dedicated to destroying all the educational, moral and religious traditions which have served us well for decades.

***

Next week President Frogboiler is due to arrive in London and check into the VIP suite at Buckingham Palace as a guest of King Charles III. Apparently, the invitation was extended by his mother, the late Elizabeth II and he is keen to honour the arrangements made by her. However, the invitation to come across for a state visit was probably made long before the Phalagate affair escalated and if one is to believe the mainstream media there is a chance that President Frogboiler will just be Mr Frogboiler by the end of this week.

That all rather depends on the strange machinations of the ANC and their quirkily named ‘integrity commission’ which has already found that Pres Frogboiler has brought the ANC into disrepute according to a report on News24. This ought to lead to the ‘step aside’ rule but much now depends on the calls from the big cheeses in the ANC.

Most of Frogboiler’s presidential predecessors have already put the boot in and last weekend presidential hopeful Nkosozana Dlamini Zuma also managed to get a good kick in by demanding that Frogboiler step aside. This is pretty ungrateful behaviour from a woman who was appointed by Frogboiler to make people’s lives as miserable as possible during the COVID scamdemic.