So there I was: two streets down from my beautiful house in Galway Road, living in the basement flat on Lurgan Road. My mother was still in her newly built cottage with my office on the second floor, but I couldn’t exactly go there with everything happening.
Niels and Briony decided she should be moved to White River. And just like that — very quickly — she was packed up and relocated to a retirement village down there. Another emotional blow I didn’t have the bandwidth to process properly.
Every day I drove to the Treacle offices in Bryanston to “work.”
And by work, I mean sitting in front of a computer trying to direct strangers on bulletin boards toward the Fishy Pete’s website while trying not to think about my disintegrating personal life.
This was pre–social media. No Facebook. No Instagram. No TikTok. Just forums and comment sections where you’d post something like, “Hey guys, check out this amazing Fly of the Month Club!” — paste a link and hope for the best.
Rudolf kept a massive graph on his office wall showing the daily subscription target: something like 7 to 12 sign-ups at $99 each. Roughly a thousand dollars a day. Hit that, we lived. Miss it, we died.
And we were missing it. Often.
Meanwhile, my mental health was collapsing, I had no salary, my loan account at Fishy Pete’s was running on fumes, the divorce was costing a fortune, and every day felt like my life was shrinking around me.
And right on cue — who should pop back into my life?
Neil Hellman.
Yes, that Neil Hellman — the one I never liked, the one I had to show my engineering degree to because he didn’t believe I actually had one. He was now MD of CH Chemicals, his father’s company. They held the South African agency for American soda ash and were the franchise holders for Dow Chemicals, among others. It was a cash cow.
Neil offered me a job: R20,000 a month.
Not a dream salary, but at least it was income.
Rudolf was furious — they wanted me online 24/7 flogging Fishy Pete’s like my life depended on it. But I needed money. I had no choice. So I took the job.
My role turned out to be project manager for Neil’s collection of completely mad “Walter Mitty” patents. He was absolutely unhinged, and I’ll get into that circus in later chapters.
But in early 2002 — April, May — my life was essentially this:
living in the Lurgan Road flat, commuting to the CH Chemicals plant in Edenvale, and falling apart emotionally, financially, and mentally.
Somewhere in that fog, someone — I think it was Mark Drysdale from Dullstroom — suggested I try Reiki.
So I did. A weekend course in Joburg.
And as strange as it sounds, I felt something. Some kind of weird energy sensation I still can’t properly explain. It unsettled me, but not in a bad way.
That same evening, Briony invited me to dinner at her friend Noelle Bolton’s place. And that’s where I met Rowena Robarts.
Rowena was the daughter of Basil Hersov — yes, the same Basil Hersov who had employed my mother as a secretary back in 1947. The Hersovs are Johannesburg royalty. Old money. Old power. The original establishment.
Rowena was tall, blonde, elegant, beautiful, and about ten years older than me. I was 35; she was in her late forties. Completely out of my league on paper. But I asked for her number anyway. Maybe the Reiki had opened something in me — who knows.
The next day I called her and invited her to a home-cooked dinner in my basement flat. Ever the gentleman, I picked her up from her mansion in Saxonwold — where she lived with her four daughters when they weren’t with their father. I cooked pesto pasta. We talked. We laughed. After a couple more dates, we ended up in bed.
This was huge for me. She was only the second woman I had ever slept with. Technically I was now also an adulterer, since the divorce wasn’t final.
Over the next few months, we saw each other often. I even took her down to White River. Carey was ecstatic:
“You walked out of a mess and now you’re dating the Queen of Johannesburg!”
The Hersov prestige was absolute catnip to her.
But it became clear our worlds didn’t overlap.
She lived the heiress lifestyle — game farms, weekends away, rigid family expectations. I was falling apart financially, emotionally, psychologically. I was living on a credit card and a prayer.
And then came the moment that really ended it for me.
One weekend it wasn’t my turn with the kids, and her daughters were with their father, so Rowena and I were at her house in Saxonwold. We were in bed in the upstairs room when suddenly her parents — Basil and his wife, Antoinette — arrived unannounced.
Rowena — nearly fifty years old — leapt out of bed like a teenager being caught and hissed, “They can’t know you’re here! You have to leave through the back!”
“My car is in the driveway,” I said.
“Well… then just get dressed quickly!”
We threw our clothes on and walked downstairs pretending we’d been having tea. And I remember thinking:
What the actual fuck?
But that’s the price you pay when your life is funded by a family trust. You toe the line.
The divorce was finalised in early September 2002, and I got a text from Terry saying:
“Now you can marry your rich girlfriend.”
I won’t lie — it gave me a tiny flicker of satisfaction that she was irritated.
Rowena and I broke up soon after. Mutual, calm, friendly. She’s a really fanastic person. Just not my world.
Meanwhile, the collapse at Fishy Pete’s was accelerating.
I was splitting myself between CH Chemicals and Fishy Pete’s by telephone, but the truth was the business was dying. Two or three sales a day wasn’t enough. The Rapala orders from Finland had dried up. Our Australian agent, Mike Felton, hammered us on price until there was no margin left. The retail outlets in Lydenburg and Dullstroom weren’t enough to save it. The final blow was that just as the main advertising bills were about to land the value of the Rand collapsed. Sure that help out exports but when had over a million rands worth of bills that suddenly became two million.
And emotionally?
I was barely functioning.
One day I got an email from Rudolf cc’ing the board — essentially saying Fishy Pete’s would be wound down unless I committed full-time. By then the board had resigned, leaving me legally holding the can for a company that was clearly insolvent. I can’t remember the legal term, but I was the last man standing.
You might ask:
“Why did you get involved with Rowena when the business was burning?”
Because I was trying to survive emotionally. And the truth is, I didn’t know how to be alone. I was completely overwhelmed.
We had put the house on the market. I’d promised Terry, as part of the divorve, she could buy a nice townhouse once it sold. Mikey had to move from St John’s to De La Salle — a much cheaper Catholic school in Linden — and we got him into counselling with a brilliant psychologist, Rod Charlton. That helped him enormously.
Then, in the middle of all that chaos, something happened that could easily have been the end for me — but wasn’t.
One Friday evening, I had Angie and Ollie in the back seat of my VW Jetta. We were taking Briony to Noelle Bolton’s house inside Sandringham, one of the wealthiest gated estates in Johannesburg.
We drove in, went a few streets, and pulled into Noelle’s driveway. Briony opened the passenger door.
And that’s when a pickup screeched in behind us.
A man in a balaclava jumped out, shoved a gun straight into Briony’s face, and screamed:
“Give me your jewellery! Give me your bag! I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you!”
Angie and Ollie were in the back seat, watching everything.
Something snapped in me.
Rage — pure, uncontrollable rage — flooded my entire body.
I jumped out and screamed across the roof of the car:
“If you want to kill someone, kill me, you fucking cunt!”
He swung the pistol at me, pointed it directly into my face, and pulled the trigger.
The bullet went over my head.
He got as big a fright as I did — maybe he’d never fired a pistol before — and he jumped back into the pickup and they screeched off.
Neighbours came running. Noelle and her boyfriend rushed out. Police arrived. Statements were taken. Nothing ever came of it.
To this day, I can still see his eyes behind the balaclava.
And here’s the truth most people never get to discover about themselves:
In that moment, I had zero fear. Only anger.
If he hadn’t fired, I would have gone over the roof and taken the weapon out of his hands.
But I also know this: if he’d wanted me dead, he wouldn’t have missed. It was too close for that. I believe he pulled the shot on purpose — maybe to save face with his accomplice. Who knows.
Still — my poor kids saw everything, and it could have ended catastrophically.
Fishy Pete’s was officially finished. Treacle made the decision to liquidate — and there was absolutely nothing I could do. Nothing I could say. Nothing I could salvage.
I met with the liquidator — I can’t even recall his name — and we drove down to Lydenburg. It was one of the saddest moments of an already brutal period. Standing there, having to tell all the fly-tyers, including Steve Barrow and the others, that the dream was over — that their jobs, their craft, their hopes tied to Fishy Pete’s — it was all being wound down.
The liquidator was an Afrikaans guy in his forties, steely-eyed and efficient. After the meeting we went for something to eat — a plate of food I had no appetite for. And over that meal, in his thick accent, he looked at me and said:
“So — which third are you going to be?”
I asked what he meant. He shrugged and said:
“From experience — when a business this size goes under:
one-third kill themselves,
one-third drown in drink,
and the final third somehow claw their way back to a life.”
I don’t know how accurate those stats were, but in that moment I felt myself sliding hard toward the first two.
Fishy Pete’s was liquidated. And I left thinking — even now, 23 years later — that it was my fault. That if I’d had the strength, the focus, the heart to throw myself wholly into the business — ignore my personal life and focus purely on making it work, like Rudolf wanted — maybe it would have survived.
Maybe it would not only have survived but thrived.
If I ever win the lottery (which is impossible, since I don’t play), I’d track down every person who lost something because of that collapse and try to make it right. Because even though external forces largely caused it — the global economy, bad timing, bad luck — part of me still believes I owed them more than what they got.