“The uglier he gets, the happier she gets”

HUMOUR: As I was busy and painstakingly trying to have what one would call a lunch, a one Mungai (from the slopes of Mt. Kirinyaga), simply walked to the table on which two friends and I were seated and asked if he could join us; one of my colleagues agreed on condition that he (Mungai) would settle his own bill. As we were busy trying to push the contents of our plates down our throats, the man from the Slopes of the mountain, simply ordered for soup (portage) with some miniature balls like bread. This guy is simply incredible, while most of us were busy “eating” our lunch; he preferred to “drink” his! It is very funny, the guy was complaining that, when he eats, the food takes several hours or even a day before digestion can act. He told us that, he had just returned from Nairobi, his “Chain Keeper”, has been pumping food into him and he was complaining that he was getting fatter and uglier! He further said, “The uglier the husband gets, the happier the wife gets, reason being, less competition (women will avoid the ugly man)!” I wonder if the reverse is not true! (Chain keepers, do not hold this on me, these are not my own views). One of my colleagues took him to task as to why he was “drinking”, instead of “eating” his lunch; this YM (Youngman not related to H.E. Yoweri M7) did not stop there, he even wondered loudly if Mungai was a fisherman at one moment in his life, instead of “eating” big chunks of meat, he was simply “fishing” very tiny meat pieces from the depth of the soup crucible by using a spoon. This really looked funny, someone eating meat with a spoon? The Mungai man being in his mid sixties or late fifties wasn’t amused, he hit back at YM, “I too used demolish food mountains just like you are doing, it is just age that has caught up with me that, I have almost lost all my appetite,” he jeered. Going by the way YM had loaded his plate with food, if it had been a vehicle on the road, for sure, Traffic Police would have arrested him in his tracks before he even went half a kilometre. All this mountain of food was surely busy disappearing into the stomach of a young man as if he was emptying it into a volcano! I bet, if one had dared look at the mobile phones on tables adjoining to ours, they could have surely been experiencing network failure due to being obscured by a “food mountain”. In those olden days, we used to go out grazing; we would eat raw sweet potatoes and cassava freshly looted from the shambas of the owners; there was no problem with our worms, maybe they had got accustomed to sharing any food stuff that got into our tummies without complaining. Now days, it is getting increasingly difficult to take in solid food stuff, save for the “bull shits” (brochettes) that we are mandated to consume in daily dozes as if they are a cure for terminal ailments. Otherwise, how do you expect some of us to neutralise the several litres of stuff produced by BRALIRWA? Mfashumwana@fastmail.fm