I was born back in the day, so I’m ‘old school’. For the greater part of my school life, we drove to school on roads which were not tarred. Growing up and going to school, I saw the first 6.6 kV powerline being built along a newly constructed road that became the ‘Nicol highway’. I saw, too, the very same powerline being dismantled 40 years later. I have scrapbooks and photo albums kept by my grandparents. I have 8-mm footage of myself holding my aunt’s hand. She, in the film, is cradling my sister, aged four. My sister is now turning 60 years old.

On the mantle shelf in my lounge, there are two clay figurines. My father bought them at a village in Africa in 1960. One is of a young black woman sitting on her haunches. The other is of a similarly clad ‘tata’ with his hands encircling a clay mug. My house is 73 years old. It is sturdy and strong. The walls are made of clay brick, the floors of Oregon pine. It has a well-used fireplace and is on a quarter acre plot. In Europe, in a medium-sized town, the dwelling and the land would sell for about R6.5-million.

I have a collection of drawing stencils. A drawing stencil is a sheet of thin Perspex or plastic into which have been cut openings so that you can draw using a 0.5 mm drawing pen to trace perfect circles, or boxes, or shapes on a sheet of plastic drawing film to make an engineering diagram.

But let me stop there.

My points, based on the above points, are the following: (a) Sandton (not in existence when I was young) is now supplied by high-voltage gas-filled cables capable of supplying some 200 MVA, which is a lot of power indeed. (b) The original 6.6 kV powerline provided 40 years of useful service and the financial contribution to City Power was fabulous. It was expected to break even after ten years of supplying energy at R 0.01 per kilowatt-hour. At the end of its life, it was supplying energy at 20 times this value and, when it was finally taken down, the value of open land available, at no cost, was immense and was used for expanding the Nicol highway. (c) If you only have soft copies of photographs, documents and scrapbooks, one day, they will not be here. If you want to conserve these for future generations, the cloud is not the place. You have to have something solid that somebody cares about and carries with them and intends to pass on to their children. (d) The 86-year-old clay figurines are well made and beautiful. Whoever made them is undoubtedly no longer around. But they have been kept for the very reason that they are not blow-moulded plastic. They are clay from the country. They have been fired in a fire, not an oven. (e) Time and time again, people seem to think that building a house is a process that can be rushed and that the floor can just be vinyl and the walls concrete brick. I promise you, a house made out of mud would last longer. But these rushed houses don’t last, don’t repay investment and are overpriced. (f) Nobody draws with drawing stencils any more. They just click on a mouse and click on a circle or a rectangle. They don’t concentrate as much. There is no penalty for smudging the ink. Consequently, they draw badly, beautifully maybe, but inaccurately; and they take far too long as they have no imagination to determine the minimum amount of drawing to get the maximum amount of information.

My advice, if you want it, is as follows: (a) Make sure any records you have, photos and so forth, are hard copies, if you want to keep them. (b) The more solid you build a powerline, the more money you will make. (c) Local people can generally make things that last long from simple materials. (d) The higher the cost of the house, the longer it will last. And, finally, (e) I have no idea how to make today’s draughtspeople draw better!