Hello everyone Happy Monday! I was just looking at the Skoolers Community Map 📍🗺️for South Africa 🇿🇦. The map shows how many people in South Africa have their own Skool community group! Over 650 people! Which is AWESOME 🥳 What would it take to invite all these people to the Skool IRL SA group? Personally I have started reaching out via DM but we can only do a few at a time so we are not deemed spam. How much fun can we have inviting more people to this group whether they are in Skool or not?! 😁😁

Joostenberg Vlakte, Canary Street, Durbanville, and the Art of Getting Things Wrong Productively There is a specific category of travel mistake that is not quite a disaster and not quite an adventure but occupies a useful space somewhere between the two. It produces no lasting harm, generates a mildly entertaining story, and occasionally — if the road you take instead turns out to have a Rock Kestrel on it — delivers something you wouldn't have found otherwise. Wednesday was that kind of day. The Wrong Day, The Right Attitude The plan had been straightforward. Drive out to meet Cindy at her home in Joostenberg Vlakte, a farming settlement in the Tygerberg district northeast of Cape Town where the land opens up and the sky gets bigger and the Cape's suburban density gives way to something altogether more agricultural and unhurried. The Klipheuwel road — one of those back routes that rewards the driver who isn't in a hurry with a completely different version of the Cape than the one the tourist brochures feature. We drove it with the particular pleasure of people behind the wheel of a car they are beginning to trust, in a country they are beginning, once again, to inhabit properly rather than visit. Joostenberg Vlakte arrived. We found Canary Street. We found Cindy's home, which was immediately and obviously the kind of place that a genuine wildlife and nature enthusiast lives in — the garden, even glimpsed briefly from the gate, had the specific quality of a space that has been thought about and tended with purpose rather than merely maintained. At which point Cindy appeared, warm and welcoming, and it became apparent — in the gentle, slightly excruciating way these things always become apparent — that we were a day early. The meeting was Thursday. There was a brief moment at the gate. The kind of moment that requires a certain lightness of spirit to navigate without it becoming more awkward than it needs to be. Cindy handled it with grace. We handled it with the diplomatic combination of apology and self-deprecating humour that is the only reasonable response to turning up twenty-four hours ahead of schedule at someone's home. A brief, friendly chat through the gate. Handshakes and smiles. A promise to return tomorrow — the correct tomorrow this time.