BAR TALK with Bra Gee

I am sure that you are expecting one of two things in our talk over many glasses at the usual place this week. Either a rehash of the stories that made the news in 2013, or a wish list of what we would like to achieve in 2014, if we can leave the bar long enough to even attempt to bring about these miraculous improvements in our lot.

But you will get neither. Instead, we have decided that this looks like a good time for the regulars to help each other come up with a list of the things that we will not do. Instead of pretending that we will carry out some lofty resolutions, we are keeping it simple. We will just avoid doing some things.

2014: We resolve not to
1. We will not let the spouses attend church. No prize for guessing the reason for that first and most important of all our negative intentions.

If the spouse wants to go to church we will accompany them and wait outside ready to rush in and rescue them from lecherous males pretending to be servants of God.

The only time we will waiver this decree is if the spouse decides to attend a church led by a female pastor and we have satisfied ourselves that the female pastor is not a closet lesbian.

We will especially not allow the spouse to attend all-night prayer sessions or visit the pastor at home or in the office, even if the pastor is a sexless brick.

2. We will no longer keep the cash for the Eternity Drinker’s Slush fund at home or at the bank.

Thieves seem to have developed a special sniffing ability and they can pick the scent of large amounts of money in the home. We have heard the story of a family in Belvedere that got uninvited visitors late one night and had to pay US$15 000 to get rid of the interlopers.

Now we would pay a large amount of money to get rid of the houseful of uninvited relatives who besiege us every Christmas but that is ridiculous. So we will not keep the money at home. Neither will we take it to the bank. We certainly do not want to finance the fancy degrees or diplomas of thieving bank managers.

They express their gratitude for our business by loading all our cash onto the back of their cars and disappearing into the night.

Instead we will take all our money to the bar man and tell him to keep the drinks coming until the fund runs dry.

3. We will not compete in any elections unless we know that we will win. There are many ways to fall flat on your face and one of them is to enter a race then forget about practicing for it.

You end up complaining that you were competing with people who were too old or too young, too fat or too thin, too ugly or too beautiful, too everything.

So when we hear that the President of Drinkers post has been declared vacant, we will immediately fly to Russia to learn how they do it.

We will go via Botswana where they seem to be equally good and end up in Germany where the beer festivals were born.

And we will be drinking from morning till midnight every day to show that we empathise with the constituency. We will preach to the non-drinkers that with us in power they need not fear unruly drunks. Then we will be ready.

4. We will not let the camera catch our best side. We will sue anyone who takes good pictures of us. We do not want to be considered good-looking by any stretch of imagination.

There is fame and fortune in being ugly and we too would like a chance at having our hideous appearances celebrated.

There is something sissy in having a pretty face. And besides, you are always branded a bimbo. But when you are ugly, people believe that you are serious and brainy. So bring on the cameras and catch our worst grimaces.

5. We will not give away presents that we do not have. We appreciate that blessed is the hand that giveth and all that, but surely it needs to own before it can give.

There is something smarmy in telling the world that you will give a person lunch then wait until one o’clock to declare that you have no cornmeal. Sounds like a con trick, like you were hoping that once the world knew that you wanted to feed that one person, they would give you a tonne of maize and a whole beast.

So we will not embarrass ourselves like that.

6. We will not prophesy.

We will not predict that the world is coming to an end, that One Person will die, that we will wake up one morning to find all the streets paved with gold overlaid with hundred dollar bills.

It sounds good when you say it but predictions — be they political or spiritual, have the nasty habit of refusing to come true leaving PR officers to desperately cut the events according to the prophecy. So if this is the year in which roasted meat falls on our plates from places unseen and cold bottles land in our palms.

7. We will not get comfortable in borrowed robes.

We have heard of some former Eminent Personages who were chewing taxpayer dollars in huge air-conditioned cars.

Then when they got thrown out of the party, they suddenly realised that the fuel guzzlers are not an easy mistress to maintain.
So they downgraded to cheap ex-Japs.

But those too proved too costly and now they are back to the original Zim-Jap, the Mitsubishi.

So dear fellow drinkers, we hope you have a good idea of how not to live in 2014.

Bottoms up!