In December, I lost a friend, Charlie Mnisi. Charlie was a former President of the Law Society of the Northern Provinces and very involved in the legal profession. He was always my partner at the Law Society golf days, except last year November, when I could not make the event, and a month later he fell down some stairs and died two days later.

I will always remember Charlie as a smiling, happy man who always had his copy of the Mail & Guardian close to him on a Friday at Council meetings and who never took things too seriously. At the halfway house at Country Club Johannesburg or CCJ as some call it, while the marshall chased the rest of us off to the tee, as they usually do, saying our breakfast break was over, Charlie simply continued to finish his breakfast and then ambled down to the tee when he was finished a few minutes later, a smile on his face and not a concern in the world, after the rest of us had already played off.
He was not going to be rushed and he was very relaxed and none of the pressure of the marshall or anybody else affected him and that was his nature. Another tragic loss and another family robbed of a father and a husband, and just a reminder to all of us that you really don’t know how long, at any given time, you have left on this earth.