so A few weeks (months?) ago, there was an Incident. It bothered me. A lot. I shot the shit with people about it at the time and later, but it occurred to me again yesterday, for some reason. And apparently it's still bothering me. So it was Hell Night. You all know Hell Night, right? 20 stations at karate - running up stairs, pushups, pull-ups, sit-ups, benchpress, dips, lunges, punching bag plus a few more to get to 20 - 2 or 3 or 4 minutes (depending on the month) at each station with a 15 second gap to move to the next station. So it was Hell Night, and we all arrived, eager for the M part of S&M (because that's about all it can really be equated to, really) and we were all setting up the 20 stations - lugging small flights of stairs out of the storeroom and the dumbbells and barbells and all that stuff, and the Chief - that's Deric, our big boss at karate, Shihan 6th Dan (although he denounced it some years ago) - motions me aside, with a half-smile playing across his face like it does when he's having a go at someone in good fun. "I ran into Neville Horton today" he tells me. Me and Neville don't get on... The chronicle is detailed at length below, cunningly disguised as being brief; for those who couldn't be arsed to read the back-story, suffice to say Neville screwed me and 17 of my classmates royally and cost us our education to a lesser or greater degree. The only way he could have screwed us more royally than he did was if we had been presented to him trousers down, hands around ankles and he had a big box of Viagra and the largest tub of Vaseline in the world. If you don't wish to read this bit, look for the second set of little stars *** a few paragraphs down. ***A Brief history of Neville*** So when I was but a sophomore at High School, many years ago, we got a new Theory teacher. This was back in the day when the school was onlty 5 years old, we were having our first ever graduating class (because we have a mandatory 5 year High School period; not split into Forms like they do in the UK, or Junior High and High like they do in the US) and the school was into Year 2 of the Technika program. The Technika program was designed to be the intelligent alternative to the Technical High School, which trains its students in the languages, maths, science and various trades - electricianing, plumbing, steelworking, carpentry etc. Technika was designed to take the trades to a new level - it was, essentially, pre-University level in civil, electrical and mechanical engineering as opposed to the basic trades; with pre-architecture/engineering technical drawing as well. The school's Technika programme was not going well - in fact, my guinea-pig class was the first ever Technika class the year previously; and the 2nd ever Technika class, basically the guys graduating a year after us, was the last ever Technika class. This is largely thanks to Neville. So anyway, when I was in Standard 7 (now called Grade 9 again in .za) way back in 1990 as a sophomore, Neville appeared on the scene to take over running the theory side of the Technika programme. The drawing side was proceeding well, run by the late, great, slightly crazy Mr Visser, who was a legend. And so Neville taught us for 3 years, every day we had to seee him and learn and hear his stupid shiitty anecdotes in his flat accent and deal with his annoying put-downs and ridiculous mannerisms. The tables were, amusingly, turned one day when he was berating my good mate Bruce, who was struggling with the mathematical concepts behind resonant frequency in capacitors and inductors and Neville goes on and on at him and then lays into poor Bruce's "bum of a maths teacher. Yes, Bruce, you have a bum maths teacher!" So Sergio, musical wizard and general all-round hell-of-a-guy points out "er, sir, he's in your maths class..." For he was, and it got a rousing cheer. Neville went quickly from "Sir" or "Mr Horton" to plain ol' Horton when he wasn't in class and then to a variety of less-pleasant schoolboy alternatives (which prevail today). Nevertheless, we were all nipping some two years later when the textbooks *still* hadn't arrived - because the discipline was new, they were still drawing up books for the syllabus, we were told, so you see what I mean when I say we were guinea pigs - and we knew that in a year's time we'd be wrtiting final exams and attempting to get into university and all and this whole Technika thing just wasn't quite what it was cracked up to be in the brochure and at the start of our Matric year (senior year, yeah? Upper 6th, in the UK), Neville is off the scene. Gone to work for an insurance firm oafter 20 years of teaching. Enter the Shihan, Deric - and this is how I met him and got started with karate - who is an electronic engineer who runs his own electrical firm and who teaches at the local universities and colleges and trains up all the guys from Escom, which is the .za power company. So on the very first day of our lasy school year, final exams a mere 9 months away, Deric arrives and begins to teach. "We'll start with [insert something here], to re-cap from last year." We told him we didn't do that last year. "Okay, we'll star with {insert something else here], as a re-cap, which you'll need for grounding before we can get into this year's work." We tell hhim, truthfully, that we didn't do that, either. Eventually he hauls out the syllabus (which it turns out had actually been drawn up) and we looked over it and came to the conclusion that we were a mere 18 months behind schedule. So essentially, we had to do 27 months worth of work for the final exams, in addition to the other 5 subjects we took at school which were all on-course in terms of their syllabi, in 9 months. Neville had jumped ship and left us all to drown, little fucker that he is. Needless to say, we worked our asrses off that year. No school holidays - we put in full days work in technika to get up to speed instead - and it was a bitch of a year. To our - and Deric's - credit, everyone passed with flying colours. But only 3 of us got good enough marks to become an engineer. Which was fine, because at that stage, nobody wanted to become an engineer anymore. I ended up in the life sciences, Sergio as a computer programmer and Monkey (big Icelandic Paul) became an actuary. The others became accountants or electricians or went into the old family business or marketing or whatever. Still, every time Neville sees one of us, he makes like he's our best mate. ***The End*** So when Deric tells me, that fateful Thursday, that he ran into Neville Horton, I was merely polite when I said "Oh. How is he?" Deric draws me further aside, and shoos off some of my Monday night juniors who have picked up that there is some hush-hush discussion going on and are all ears and loitering with intent to eavesdrop nearby. "He had some very... interesting things to say," he says, "and if you don't mind, I'd like to ask you about one of them." I was intrigued. I told him I don't mind. Bearing in mind that every time I see Neville, I look the other way so I don't have to greet him or try to kill him or anything. Because he is a utter prick, you understand. "He says," Deric continues - and this is the clincher - "that you got some girl pregnant and he wants to know what happened about that." [Insert me, utterly gobsmacked, here] "Is it true?" Deric continues, the same half-smile still loitering. Now, I'm not sure why he wants to know. Understand, this is not merely the two of us shooting the shit with passing conversation. I have been summonsed and hauled aside. I'm not sure why he didn't ask me after the class. It may have something to do with our policy at the Shuhari Foundation - we will not admit any lowlifes, scumbags, druggies, general shit-stirrers, troublemakers, gangsters (or wangsters) etc etc. Anyone who proves to fit into any of these categories is summarily asked to leave. If they have half a brain cell, or have seen Deric in action for longer than three seconds, they would do so without him needing to ask again. It hasn't happened in the 10 years I have been there that someone has been ejected; but I'm guessing that had this thing occurred, and had I got some girl into trouble and booted her out to suffer alone in the rain - which, I'm guessing from his tone, was the untold part of the further conversation with Neville the fuckhead - I reckon I would have been shown the door. Behaviour unbecoming etc etc. For those of you wondering, no, I have not got a lovechild, nor have I ever had one, nor was there ever one on the way. And of this I am sure - there is (unfortunately) a very limited number of people who have shaken my proverbial moneymaker and I am still in contact with all of those people and I think I might have noticed had one of them, you know, had a baby. And people get pregnant and have babies all the time, married, single, whatever - I do not judge. Nevertheless, I was surprised at the time - you know, like when something just blindsides you completely and you find yourself saying "...what?" Still, I rallied, angry, to say it was not true and to ask where Neville had heard this bullshit from. Deric said Neville told him he'd heard it from someone who knows me, but he declined to give Deric a name. Who are you, person? I will find you, hold you down, rip your pubic hairs out one by one, knit them into a scarf and strangle you with it (yeah, it's vivid. Not mine though - stolen from Irish comedian Dave Allen - but adequate). I calmed down enough to mention to Deric that I would find Neville and have Words with him about The Way of Things. I think Deric told Neville that - they seem to run into each other fairly often - and Neville has been very scarce since then. Which is probably a good thing for him, sinister little rodent. In other news, got to red-line a brand spanking new Volvo S-40 Turbo last night - surprising, I know, to be singing the speedy praises of "the safest car in the world" following recent experiences with Italian sports cars but damn, what a beautiful piece of machinery! Well done, the Swedes. More on that later - my fingers are tired from all this typing. -D-