HUMOUR : Bird hunter lands a bird from Oncle Nic’s family

As you probably know, this week was French week in the land of 1K hills as Oncle Nic came visiting. People in this fair city of colorful birds were ecstatic about Oncle Nic’s visit for different reasons, depending on the generation of belonging. You see, when senior members of Oncle Nic’s family started to behave funny towards our family, we were forced to shut our gate on their noses. We were not happy to do so but we had to because we were forced to. But being the peace loving and reconciling family that we are, we quickly warmed up to gestures of peace from Oncle Nic’s family and opened our gates once again. Oncle Nic decided to honor our peaceful gesture by coming in person, after more than two decades had passed without any head of that family doing so. To be honest, we were also touched. Everyone in our family had personal reasons for their feelings towards the rekindling of warm feelings between the two families. I have been hearing of some bald headed members of our family who grew up in the other family speaking with sadness about how they missed speaking the language of Oncle Nic’s family. Having grown up speaking that language, these senior members of our family still get the kicks out of speaking that language, especially the part where one has to raise their shoulders and let out a mouthful of air and climax the entire body show with the word “mais, quand meme!” or “ ba! en tout cas!” As for the young family members, football was mainly the drive behind whatever they thought about the re-opening of the gates to the other family. You see, the young members of our family are quite crazy about the family of Oncle Nic’s famous football team, popularly known as les bleus. Actually I overheard one of them wondering why it wasn’t Thierry Henry, Frank Riberry or Nicolas Anelka(another ‘Nic’ in the family!) who had come visiting first. Well, no awards for guessing – my mind was strictly focused on bird hunting since the day our gates opened to the family again. Oncle Nic’s family is famous for matters of love and romance in the entire world and I wanted to put this to test. That is why I visited Simba Supermarket, not to buy agasabuni ka Duru (Duru soap) that kaibanda keeps singing about on radio every morning but to sample up the ‘elegant’ suits that have made the supermarket famous. I knew that to win a bird from that family one had to look good; after all, isn’t that family the origin of the most famous fashion designers in the world? For less than 100K I was able to become owner of two suits of different colours and they looked as good as Woolworths products. I knew I was in business. On the day Oncle Nic landed in the land of 1K hills, I was busy taking some French courses from one of my many birds who did not have a clue why I had suddenly become so serious with the language. Armed with the basic words that I was sure would be able to see me through a bird’s defences, I waited for night fall and headed to one of the big hotels where I had been told a big part of the delegation had been booked. I avoided the hotel where paparazzi were staying because I loathe this lot. They are nosy and wise-asses. Apparently things were going as planned and before long, I was sitting deep in the middle of French birds who were drinking and chattering away in the most difficult French I have ever heard anywhere. My stock of vocabulary was only made of “Je m’appelle Bird Hunter, et vous belle?” “Comment-estce-que etait la journee?” so you can imagine the rate at which my confidence was plummeting as a result of sitting right in the middle of a sea of French. But before I could watch the last drop of my confidence disappear, I decided to gather the little remaining and approached a blonde bird and introduced myself. She immediately realized that I was anything but a French speaker and ironically, this seemed to actually raise my value! “Je m’appelle Carine,” she said as she extended her supple fingers for a greeting. As my mouth was about to blurt out “merci”, I remembered in the nick of time that the right word was “anchante!” and the hesitation amused her a great deal and I was liking the ambiance. Soon she started bombarding me with French words but owing to her heavy French accent, I could not even hear a word however much I strained my ears. I decided to answer her back with any French word that came to my mind and she was very amused and she kept laughing and laughing to the envy of her colleagues. Later she suggested that we leave the crowd and find a place where we could sit by ourselves and have more fun. I excitedly obliged and followed her as she moved quickly trying to avoid questions from the other birds. When we were finally alone and peaceful, we were able to seal a lasting friendship between ourselves and of course our two families. brdhunter6@gmail.com