Your wall is naked. So are the students. 🖼️

Nine Huis Marais students will be doing community service after a naked run on campus. According to the residence, they’d lost a game of quad cricket, with the losing team required to strip off and run around two buildings. They’ve since apologised and accepted the consequences.

Now, I’m not suggesting naked students should become part of the official campus tour. But had community service been the standard punishment for streaking ten years ago, Stellenbosch would be running like a Swiss train station.

Every pavement spotless. Every pothole filled. The Eerste River clean enough to bottle. A third-year engineering student polishing each individual acorn on Victoria Street.

The municipality could have operated entirely on forfeits.

“Who’s collecting the rubbish this week?”

“Metanoia lost at beer pong. We’re covered until December.”

Of course, nobody should be harassed or forced into participating. But there is something wonderfully student-like about arriving at university to pursue a degree and ending up issuing a formal apology because you lost at cricket without adequately considering your trousers.

At least the next team will read the terms and conditions.

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Some people taste wine and pick up citrus, floral notes and a delicate minerality. The rest of us pick up that we’d quite like another glass.

Fortunately, our local winemakers know exactly what they’re doing. Stellenbosch and Franschhoek have talent in the finals of the 2026 Diners Club Winemaker and Young Winemaker of the Year awards.

Tokara’s Stuart Botha, with his Director’s Reserve White 2023, and Stellenbosch Vineyards’ Bernard Claassen, with his Credo CVV 2025, are competing for the main title in this year’s white blends category. Among the young winemaker finalists are Carlo de Vries of Stellenbosch Family Wines, with his Carlo Pinotage 2023, and Xander Spreeth of L’Ormarins, with his Ou Bosstok Cinsault 2025.

The winners will be announced on 21 November at Arabella Hotel & Spa, with R75,000 for the winning winemaker and R45,000 for the young winemaker, plus international wine travel. A proper reward for the people doing the hard work behind our favourite bottles.

Congratulations to the finalists. The rest of us will continue supporting the industry in our own small, occasionally expensive way.

📱 You went online for five minutes. Where did your evening go?

I’ve mentioned this before. I’ll keep mentioning it. Because we seem to have accepted spending enormous chunks of our lives staring at other people’s lives, then wondering why our own feel a little unsatisfying.

The Social Reckoning, Aaron Sorkin’s film inspired by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen and journalist Jeff Horwitz, brings the uncomfortable questions about social media back into focus. It’s a dramatisation, but the concerns behind it deserve attention long after the credits roll.

Consider these figures from the US Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory: more than three hours of daily social media use was associated with roughly double the risk of mental health problems, including symptoms of anxiety and depression, among young people. And 46% of teenagers aged 13–17 said social media made them feel worse about their bodies. These aren’t statistics taken from the film, and an association doesn’t prove causation. They are still serious reasons to question what we’ve normalised.

Imagine a school activity where nearly half the participants said they left feeling worse about their bodies. Parents would demand a meeting. Put it on a phone, and somehow it becomes an unavoidable part of growing up.

And adults, please don’t read this while nodding disapprovingly at teenagers. We’re sitting at the same buffet.

One person is comparing their kitchen with a stranger’s renovation. Another is getting furious with someone they’ve never met. Someone else has watched forty videos about improving their life while postponing the walk that might actually improve their afternoon.

We say we don’t have time. Then our screen-time report arrives with evidence for the prosecution.

I’m tempted to call it legal cocaine. That’s a metaphor, not a medical equivalence. But the feeling of “just one more”, followed by another half-hour disappearing, should make us uncomfortable.

Of course social media can help us find customers, maintain friendships and discover useful things. That usefulness makes it easier to excuse the hours that deliver none of those benefits.

There’s a difference between opening an app for a purpose and opening it whenever life offers three seconds of silence.

So try something concrete. Turn off unnecessary notifications. Keep the phone away from meals. Give yourself a time to check social media, rather than giving social media permission to interrupt every available moment.

And before we lecture children about being present, let them see us put our own phones down.

The feed will still be there tomorrow. You don’t get today with your family back.

We all have that one wall. Completely blank. You moved in, said “we’ll find something nice for there” and then somehow three years happened.

By now, the little nail sticking out has become the artwork.

The trouble is, choosing art feels like it should reveal something profound about you. Are you a moody landscape person? An abstract person? A vintage Italian travel poster person who has never been to Italy but does eat quite a lot of pasta?

You’re allowed to just pick something you like. It doesn’t need a backstory involving a small gallery in Lisbon. “I thought it looked lekker” is a perfectly respectable artistic position.

If your wall needs help, have a browse through Nifty Posters.

That nail has carried the room for long enough.

We’ve used AI to write birthday messages, create pictures of ourselves as action figures and settle arguments that neither person was prepared to lose.

But one of its most useful jobs might also be its least exciting: doing the paperwork.

Take a local service business. A customer sends a WhatsApp asking for a quote. A few messages follow, discussing the job, the price and when it can happen.

Then someone has to take all that information and type it into a quote. Later, they do much the same thing for the invoice.

The information already exists. A human is simply carrying it between applications like a waiter delivering numbers.

With the right setup, an AI bot can use those messages to prepare the quote or invoice for someone to check. Suddenly, a conversation can become a finished piece of admin without someone manually retyping every detail.

It’s less spectacular than a robot doing a backflip. But try asking the backflipping robot to help with your paperwork at 9pm.

For a small business, this is where AI gets interesting.

The owner is often also the salesperson, receptionist, scheduler and person who knows where the extension lead is. Saving them a few minutes on something they do twenty times a week can make a meaningful difference.

There is a catch: the process needs clear rules. If the pricing is vague or the customer’s request is unclear, automation can produce a very professional-looking mistake. You still need someone checking that “clean one office chair” hasn’t become “clean one office”.

The sensible starting point is one repetitive task. Get it working reliably, then move on to the next.

You don’t need to turn your plumbing company into a Silicon Valley startup. Start with the boring job that keeps you at your desk after everyone else has gone home.

The real luxury AI could offer a small business owner is surprisingly ordinary: an evening off.

We spend so much time trying to get fitter, learn more and become better at what we do. But learning to be at peace inside our own heads deserves just as much effort.

To pause before reacting. To focus on what we can influence. To care about the world without letting its chaos take over our minds.

Whether you believe in God or are still figuring that out, there is something powerful about surrendering the worries you cannot solve. For me, that means handing them to God and trusting that I don’t need to understand everything today to find my way through it.

Faith doesn’t mean everything will happen as we wish. It means we can face what happens without needing every answer in advance.

Some lessons hurt too much to call blessings while we’re living through them. Give yourself time. There may be wisdom, strength or a change of direction in them that you cannot yet see.

Keep becoming better. And let “better” include being kinder to yourself and quieter in your own mind.

A slightly soggy start, followed by a weekend that understands the assignment. Keep the umbrella handy until Thursday, then dust off the braai.

🌦️ Tuesday, 20 October: Increasing cloud with a passing afternoon shower. 13–20°C

🌧️ Wednesday, 21 October: Periods of rain, with a breezy morning. 15–19°C

☁️ Thursday, 22 October: Cloudy with a possible shower in places. 12–20°C

🌤️ Friday, 23 October: Sunny spells and a lovely step up in temperature. 14–24°C

⛅ Saturday, 24 October: A mix of sunshine and clouds. Very respectable braai weather. 16–25°C

🌤️ Sunday, 25 October: Partly sunny and pleasant. Perfect for a slow lunch that accidentally becomes dinner. 15–24°C.

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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