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Night of Booze.
Yours truly would like to claim that it was my idea but honesty demands that I credit it to the right quarter.
A regular, Far, (short for Farai) suggested it. He is a young fellow but fairly decent in spite of the wooly mop he insists on keeping on his head.
He is different from the rest of the young crop in the regular place who think they know it all and are very rich, forgetting that we the oldies have probably already drunk more money than they will ever make in this lifetime.
But Far is a civil young man who knows that even in a bar age demands respect in the form of a round for the old and wise once in a while.
That being the case, we can forgive the buck for the poor style sense which makes him aspire to look like a gollywog.
We were afraid that we would have to endure half the pleasure at double the price when we read that the price of beer had gone up.
Just as you did, we rapidly read through the relevant part of the paper in apprehension dreading that the price of our favourite staple had been doubled and we would have to do with much less as the employer is very reluctant to even add to the salary, never mind doubling it.
It was with great relief that we found out that the price was going up by a mere five cents if you are one of the great masses of the uncouth who think that the bottle store is a bar.
For us at the usual place (and many other proper drinking places), the only one who is groaning and muttering about reduced profit margins is the beady eyed publican who has had to absorb the increase.
We are sure that he was hoping for an increase of
20 cents or more to justify him hiking his price by a dollar.
But The Night of Booze helped put him in a good mood as volumes consumed must have more than compensated for the tiny margins that the greedy beady eyed proprietor of the usual place is always grumbling about.
Paul has consistently asked how the publican can then afford one wife, a string of expensive cheap-looking mistresses and two brats who attend schools where the fees for one term are adequate to keep Bra Gee afloat for two solid months of uninterrupted imbibing.
But that is an idiotic question which should not be voiced.
It is like asking how all the workers in the country who claim to be existing on incomes way below the poverty datum line (which is calculated without the inclusion of even a single bottle of the worst) can afford to drink day in and day out and allow our beverage producers to be the top performing companies in the country.
Anyway, back to the topic on The Night of Booze. Far came up with the idea because his spouse is one of those who were hoping to be touched by a spirit and she had forsaken the marital home (and bed) to spend the night glued to a television screen.
Far, who has absorbed the lessons on marital bliss freely dispensed at the usual place, says he has stopped querying her actions but he would have liked to ask how she hoped to receive spiritual blessings via a TV screen but wisely kept the thought to himself.
Before the night was over Taurai, the bar gossip, had reliably informed Paul and I that Far’s wife was indeed receiving blessings that night, only not of the type that Far believed.
She was reenacting the story of creation with a male church mate in a place where one can buy a home for a night.
“That Joe sent his wife to SA by plane so that he could be sure of having the night uninterrupted with Far’s wife,” Taurai told us.
He even knew the exact room number where the couple were reciting the Song of Songs.
There was no point in asking how he had come by that information as Taurai always knows someone who is related to the cousin of the wife of the friend of the people that are in the middle of any salacious happening.
Taurai has repeatedly been accused of malice and telling lies or rather embellishing the truth but if you pan the extra details, you will usually discover valuable nuggets of information.
When Paul asked Far to call his wife and hear what was happening at the particular church she was at he was told that the good lady had switched off her phone so as to be totally in a receptive mode to receive the promised showers of blessings.
Taurai claims that he only told Paul and me, but by now the only people who do not know about The Night of Bed are Far himself and the writers of that paper, you know the one I mean.
None of us has been brave enough to be the first one to cast the stone of accusing someone’s spouse of infidelity lest we are submerged by an avalanche about other cases that are really close to home.
So Far had his own night of bliss due to the ignorance which we wisely kept him in. The rest of the regulars have already marked a date on the calendar just in case, nine months down the line Far comes into the bar claiming to be a new father.
All told we had a wonderfully wet Friday night and in line with all the major TV stations we paid scant attention to Libyan deaths and cried with the Japanese for all the sake that the tsunami so cruelly swept away.
After all in that area they seem to kill each other at the same rate that they rape women in our neighbours’ country, reportedly once every three seconds.
And besides, none of Gaddafi’s bombs were likely to land on a brewery or a distillery therefore we felt that it was a domestic issue and we have already stated the policy of our bar on such matters.
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