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My Dear Seth,

I trust you and your family are well and you are still running that fine paper. One has even heard talk of a nascent airline.

I have been back in the country for a couple of weeks now, inspecting our farms in the Cape. Naturally, I have combined this rather tedious bean-counting exercise with some wing shooting. I don’t spend nearly enough time here these days, old boy. These SARS chaps really are quite restrictive about the number of days we spend in the country.

I invited some chaps from town over for some shooting last weekend. Old Taps Ndlovu was there again, sweating in his flash new tweed, and Tubby Chetty cleaned up the skeet competition before cooking us a fiery mutton bunny. Even the Tiddlers turned up. I take it you are still insisting on abstinence from bloodletting, otherwise, naturally you would have received an invitation. A few of the usuals were fishing in Alaska, so Strangely-Browne brought along one of his new pals who has recently moved down from the North. I was terribly hungover after an evening in the Graaf Reinet Club, so I didn’t think much of it. Strangely mentioned that their sons were at school together so I had assumed everything would be tickety-boo.

I was mildly alarmed when the fellow turned up at the farmyard in a Lamborghini 4×4, wearing full camouflage, and clutching a pump action – as if he were in the SAS back in ’82, trying to take Mount Tumbledown back from the Argies. He brushed past me at the door without greeting me, obviously assuming my tatty farming attire suggested I was a farm manager. Then he conducted a live valuation of the art in the house using an app on his phone while shouting large numbers and vulgar concepts like ‘capital gains free assets’ out loud to no one in particular. Taps looked mortified – he has always been such a snob. I assumed this chap was a bit daft but hoped he would show better form in the field, or at lunch after a few sherries.

I intentionally placed him in all the wrong spots during the sport. He moaned loudly about his luck and shot low and poorly. He claimed three of Tubbby’s birds and shouted, repeatedly, in his dreadful, guttural accent for more strategic leadership.

Naturally, I had him seated at the other end of the table over lunch. I had called for both strawberry and vanilla flavours to drown out the bore, but not even my finest claret could douse him. He insisted on taking a selfie with each bottle once he had catalogued and priced it on an app. His table manners were appalling.

Then he launched into a forty-minute soliloquy. First, he criticised the rugby at his son’s school. Then he boasted how he had cheated his fellow shareholders out of his mining company, and then let us into his secret plan of how he was planning to personally hire Rassie Erasmus to coach a new first XV next term whom he has personally recruited from Pretoria, Fiji and Bloemfontein. It was only when I realised, incredulously, that this oaf was talking about our alma mater that I discovered how bad things have become.

The wives arrived before dinner on Saturday, but I shan’t relay any of the stories as they are far too depraved, even for your hard-edged journalistic sensibilities. Phoebe has hired a Russian tech wizz who is attempting a sophisticated social media blackout to ensure none of our friends discover the depths we have inadvertently mined.

Seth, my dear boy, I fear this is a runaway fire, a full-blown emergency, fueled in equal parts by fear, greed and rampant semigration. I have heard talk of water polo matches which sound like battles from Bosnia/Herzegovina, and shocking allegations of racism in hockey matches. Our schools must immediately begin subjecting both existing and prospective parents to complex psychological testing and high-level screening at INTERPOL before their genetically suspect progeny are allowed through the hallowed gates.

How can we stand aside and watch centuries of carefully nurtured tradition being eradicated by the corrosive acid of ill-mannered greed?

I couldn’t believe the school had let this brutish bywoner’s offspring into our community. The creep even wore our old boys’ tie to dinner (unearned), while the rest of us were in dinner jackets. I can’t bear the thought of our kind and civilised old place being sullied by these bottom feeders who have somehow cheated, stolen, and rogered their way up the ladder to the level where they can afford the school fees and bluff themselves in.

This is no time for subtlety. These brutes have thick skins and hard hearts. We need to ram in the assegai when their flanks are exposed, Shaka style, and then twist.

It is time to circle the trusts, Seth. We all know that wealth whispers, while money talks and that it isn’t done to be too openly involved, but there are times when firm action is required from the silent power. We must eradicate these calls for gauche professionalism immediately. A school with no class is about as useful to us as a cock flavoured lollipop.

Any prospective parent should read carefully what a couple of centuries of a fine institution stands for on the tin, learn from it, and let your children thrive in its collective wisdom – if they deserve to get in. But don’t you dare come to our town and then try to change the rules? If you want a sweatshop/rugby academy designed to spit out cookie-cutter products to get your brats up the next level in the chain, build your own school. Leave ours alone.

Walking in, but increasingly surveying the horizon.

Yours, Sir Toby Don-Wauchope esq.