We survived Stroh 80. Our kids will be fine. 😂

Just when you thought Stellenbosch students were surviving exclusively on coffee, beer and their parents’ Woolies accounts, along comes Adam Jack.

The third-year Stellenbosch University student has set himself a perfectly normal and academically important challenge:

Eat one entire chicken. Every day. For 75 days.

He started on 3 August and, assuming neither he nor the chicken industry gives up first, will finish on 16 October.

And he's committed.

He’s eaten his daily bird on a boat on the Vaal, up in the Coetzenburg mountains, in the SU Library and even while playing golf. His personal chicken-eating record currently stands at 17 minutes.

Naturally, Nando’s eventually heard about this and thought: This man needs support.

They sent him a voucher, merchandise and 24 bottles of sauce.

There have also been some unexpected side effects.

Adam says he’s gained around 5kg, gotten stronger and recently bench-pressed a personal best of 130kg.

So apparently we've all been overcomplicating fitness.

Forget creatine.
Forget protein shakes.
Forget complicated training programmes.

Just eat the entire Checkers rotisserie section.

We look forward to 16 October, when Adam will presumably either celebrate...

...or never look a chicken in the eye again. Or… will he chicken out! 🐔

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You know the guys in the red bibs around Stellenbosch CBD?

The ones you awkwardly interact with after parking your car and suddenly discover you haven't carried cash since 2019?

Turns out, they're doing a lot more than pointing enthusiastically at an empty parking bay.

There are currently 37 official Red Bib attendants operating around the CBD, Eikestad Mall, Die Boord and Lower Dorp Street as part of a partnership between the Stellenbosch Municipality and the Winelands Safety Initiative. They're vetted by the police and receive training in surveillance, communication and public relations.

Importantly, they're also part of the Business Against Crime "Eyes and Ears" project, helping spot suspicious activity and report crime around town.

One attendant recently helped chase away someone attempting to steal a spare wheel from a shopper's vehicle. They've also been helping protect tourists from scammers who follow visitors around town and try to convince them to withdraw money from ATMs for imaginary "vouchers".

And here's something many of us probably don't realise:

They don't receive a salary from the municipality.

They rely on voluntary tips from the public. They aren't allowed to demand a tip, and the official attendants now even have Zapper and SnapScan available for those of us whose wallets contain three expired bank cards and absolutely no actual money.

Some work until 23:00 at night and then walk home to Kayamandi.

So perhaps next time you see one of the official Red Bibs looking after your car while you're enjoying dinner in town, don't just think of them as parking attendants.

They're another set of eyes on our streets.

And in a country where we spend an enormous amount of time complaining about crime, it's worth recognising the people quietly doing something about it.

Just make sure it's an official Red Bib: the genuine attendants have numbered branded bibs carrying the Visit Stellenbosch, WSI and Stellenbosch Municipality logos.

Every now and then I think back to my student days and wonder:

What were we thinking?

Take Stroh 80.

Somewhere along the line, a group of supposedly intelligent university students walked into a bottle store, saw a bottle containing 80% alcohol and thought:

"Yes. That looks refreshing."

EIGHTY PERCENT.

At that point you're not buying a drink. You're buying something that should be stored in the garage next to the turpentine.

Nobody tasted Stroh 80 and thought, "Mmmm... lovely hints of vanilla."

Your body tasted it and immediately started activating emergency procedures.

And yet we'd drink it.

Why?

Because we were students.

Then there was cane and crème soda.

Another magnificent South African invention.

Nothing says sophistication quite like taking cane spirit, pouring luminous green crème soda over it and drinking something that looked like it had leaked out of a nuclear reactor.

And we didn't sip these things either.

There was no ice bucket. No garnish. No mixologist gently expressing an orange peel over the glass.

It was a plastic cup.

Three blocks of ice if you were at a fancy residence.

And measurements based entirely on vibes.

"How much cane?"

"Ja, that's enough."

It was never enough.

The remarkable thing is that we'd drink this concoction until 2am, eat something deeply questionable on the way home, sleep for four hours and then somehow arrive at an 8am lecture.

Today, if I have two glasses of red wine on a Thursday night, Friday requires a hydration strategy, two Panados and some quiet time.

I don't know whether today's Stellenbosch students still drink Stroh 80 and cane and crème soda.

But if they don't...

maybe this generation is smarter than we thought.

I recently saw what looked like a student sitting at a table on the Rooiplein with a sign along the lines of:

“Pitch me your business idea. If it’s good, I’ll give you R100.”

Naturally, I stopped to watch.

And what worried me was how many of the ideas seemed to be some variation of:

"It's an app that..."

"It's an AI agent that..."

"It's basically a CRM for..."

Please.

South Africa does not desperately need another entrepreneur building an app that reminds us to drink water.

We have thirst.

It's been working remarkably well for thousands of years.

We probably don't need an AI agent that automatically orders organic dog food based on your Labrador's emotional state either.

What we desperately need are people who solve actual, boring problems.

Clean my gutters.

Wash my solar panels.

Clean my pool.

Fix my fence.

Paint my house.

Remove my garden waste.

Repair my paving.

Clean my windows.

Pressure-wash my driveway.

Come and collect the mountain of cardboard boxes in my garage that I've been meaning to take to the recycling depot since 2023.

These businesses aren't sexy.

Nobody at a Stellenbosch coffee shop is going to lean across the table and whisper:

"We're disrupting the gutter-cleaning space."

You probably won't raise R10 million from venture capitalists.

There won't be a launch party.

You won't describe yourself as a "Founder & CEO" on LinkedIn three days after registering the company.

But you might actually make money.

That's the bit we've somehow forgotten.

Imagine a student starting this Saturday with R1,000.

Buy a bucket, some basic equipment, print a few flyers and knock on 50 doors in Stellenbosch:

"Hi, I'm a student. I'm cleaning gutters today. Yours are full of leaves. I'll do them for R500."

You could potentially have your first paying customer before you've finished building the landing page.

And that is entrepreneurship.

Someone has a problem.

You solve it.

They pay you.

Then you do it again.

Technology can absolutely make that business better. Use WhatsApp for bookings. Build a simple website. Run Google Ads. Automate your invoicing. Eventually use AI to answer enquiries and optimise routes.

But technology should often be the tool, not the business.

There's an entire economy sitting right under our noses made up of dirty, inconvenient, repetitive jobs that people with money don't want to do themselves.

And South Africa has something else rather important:

A desperate need for jobs.

A successful pool-cleaning business can eventually employ ten people.

A landscaping company can employ twenty.

A painting business can employ fifty.

A maintenance company can employ hundreds.

And unlike your revolutionary AI-powered social platform for matching people who own houseplants...

someone might actually pay you on Saturday.

So if you're a Stellenbosch student thinking about starting a business, perhaps don't begin by asking:

"What app can I build?"

Walk around your neighbourhood instead.

Look at what is dirty.

Look at what is broken.

Look at what people complain about.

Look at what people hate doing themselves.

Then knock on the door and offer to fix it.

It might not make for a particularly impressive pitch deck.

But it might make for a bloody good business.

Parents of young children will understand this.

There comes a point in every week when you've simply got nothing left to give.

It's 17:43.

Nobody planned dinner.

One child is crying because their sock feels weird.

The other has rejected three perfectly reasonable food suggestions.

And that's when you reach for the emergency lever.

Egg and toast.

The parenting equivalent of:

BREAK GLASS IN CASE OF EMERGENCY.

And every time I make it, I have a brief moment of guilt.

"Are we bad parents?"

"Should they be eating broccoli?"

"Didn't I see something on Instagram about children needing 27 different coloured vegetables before sunset?"

Then I reconsider.

Eggs have protein. Vitamins. Healthy fats.

Toast has carbohydrates.

Put some butter on there.

Maybe cut up a strawberry if you're feeling particularly responsible.

That's basically a balanced meal.

And here's the most important part:

THEY ACTUALLY EAT IT.

You can spend 55 minutes lovingly preparing a nutritious chicken casserole with organic vegetables, herbs and a sauce made from scratch...

"Yuck."

Egg on toast?

Gone.

Clean plate.

Possibly requests for seconds.

So I've decided we need to stop disrespecting egg and toast.

It's not a lazy dinner.

It's a high-performance parental contingency meal.

Cheap. Nutritious. Ready in six minutes. Almost zero dishes. Children delighted.

Michelin inspectors may disagree.

But Michelin inspectors have clearly never tried feeding a four-year-old at 6pm on a Tuesday.

Someone sent me a long email after one of my previous newsletters accusing me of a few things I strongly disagreed with.

My first instinct was naturally to reply.

Explain myself. Defend what I wrote. Point out where I thought they were wrong. Go backwards and forwards until one of us achieved the almost impossible task of changing a stranger's mind over email.

Instead, I replied:

“I'm sorry you feel that way.”

And carried on with my day.

A younger version of me probably wouldn't have been able to do that. I would have spent an hour crafting the perfect response, another hour thinking about their reply, and then allowed one email to occupy valuable space in my head for the rest of the day.

I'm slowly learning that not every accusation requires a defence, not every disagreement requires a debate, and not every invitation to argue needs to be accepted.

Sometimes you can simply acknowledge that someone sees the world differently to you and move on.

You don't always need the last word.

And there is a surprising amount of peace in that.

🌥️ Friday — 22°C / 15°C
Cloudy to start, but brightening as the day goes on. A fairly mild Friday.

🌤️ Saturday — 20°C / 13°C
Cooler with sunny breaks. A decent day, but definitely not summer just yet.

🌬️ Sunday — 20°C / 12°C
Breezy with cloud clearing through the day. Fresh, but improving.

☀️ Monday — 24°C / 10°C
Beautiful. A chilly start followed by long sunny spells and a lovely afternoon.

☀️ Tuesday — 27°C / 12°C
Now we're talking. Warm, bright and properly spring-like.

As always, thanks for reading. If you spot something in town worth knowing, reply and tell us. Half the best Stellenbosch stories begin that way.

See you around town,
Stellenbosch Brief

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