WE SAY
When your khaki shirt starts looking like a swarm of bees
Times change,
and as they do, so does what we regard as entertaining. I can clearly remember playing with marbles and spinning tops as a school boy. Or those Super Trump playing cards (nothing to do with the current US president), where you compared battleships, fighter jets, trains and submarines with each other. You dealt the cards, and if the warships in your hand were more deadly than the others, you won. Between these pastimes we also did the usual things – soccer, touchies and the occasional fight behind the bicycle shed. It’s a good thing there weren’t any cellphone cameras around back then. About fifteen years ago 4x4 academies exploded. Now, I’d like to mention that it’s a pity that few people go for formal 4x4 training nowadays, because it’s impossible to teach yourself all the nuances of off-roading. Or learn it on the fly with friends whenever they decide to go play somewhere. Those courses also made for great entertainment. Not the training (the course attendees took care of that) but because of the clothes that the instructors wore, and more specifically, their shirts. One day a former colleague remarked that while they never had ranks that they wore, you could still tell how important someone was (or wanted to be) by the number of logos embroidered on their shirt. Look, no one takes issue with someone who embroiders his name above his shirt pocket. It’s practical and prevents awkward social situations. There’s also nothing wrong with embroidering the name of your business above the other pocket.
But it’s when both pockets, both sleeves and the back of the shirt look like the billboards around Loftus or Newlands that you start to think twice. Imagine a swarm of bees spotted that shirt. And just imagine how the wild animals would avoid him. I’ve done a bunch of desert trips in my time, especially in the beautiful Namib. One tour operator in particular was very fond of the logos on his khaki shirt. Let’s call him Mr X. Basically, his shirt had everything conceivable on it. His name, his tour company, a tyre company, a butcher, a 4x4 accessory manufacturer, his local Wimpy, his local Spur, a guest house in Lüderitz. Klipdrift. Captain Morgan. And then of course a Jägermeister logo (they do say that two shots of Jägermeister on an empty stomach are worth an extra 30 kW and 50 Nm in the dunes) and a Tafel Lager emblem. And what appeared to be a logo for mineral water. And another two for Proheps and Essentiales. As well as Myprodol and Panado. And then possibly also one for a towing company for everything they broke racing around on the trip. He’d also thrown a couple of extra logos onto the rest of his shirt just for good measure, to ensure that there was no khaki left exposed. Luckily you could always see where he was standing, because his busy shirt stood out against the brown dunes like a signal fire on a pitch black night, so no one could accidentally drive over him. But this style of shirt turned out to be contagious, because soon people who went on his desert trips also started decorating their khaki shirts with logos. One guy decided to embroider every desert trip he’d done with Mr X (and there were many) on the back of his own shirt, along with its name and date. It looked more or less like this: Saddle Hill to Moeggekuier 2001
LüderitzTest Spencerhim untilon Bay the we’recar dunes! buster kaput 2002 2002 2001 Dune Drive 2002 Lüderitz until we’re done 2003 Sand driving and gooi, pappie! 2003 Kuiseb or Die! 2004 Lüderitz to Walvis Pub Crawl 2004 Put foot Pietie! 2005 Walvis to Angola 2005 Hold my beer… 2006 Lüderitz ’til the ice is finished! 2006 Test him on the dunes! 2006 Brandy knows no brakes! 2007
I heard a rumour that the shirt was only washed three times a year, but in 2008 he had to buy another shirt because he was only 1,9 meters tall, and his shirt was too short for all his trips. Long jokes usually aren’t funny, but in this case, I’ll make an exception.