We take up hobbies to block female yakking

I was seated at some restaurant the other weekend afternoon, waiting for the kick off of that Arsenal versus West Brom game as I played with the ice cubes in my drink, knocking them about with a small spoon, when a conversation caught my ear.

Now, incase you did not know, every journalist is a born eavesdropper. There were three women who looked between 25 and 30 -- let’s call them Faith, Edith and Lora -- and they were affectionately complaining about their men’s ‘home’ hobbies. I started listening.

Faith was complaining that her man, let’s call him Ray, just wants to hang around in his vest, shorts and (dirty) socks, in front of the TV screen with a game console when he is in the house weekends. You know them games? You are either running around in a car doing twists and bends, while being chased by bad hombres or else you are a first-person shooter, massacring monsters with a gun that never runs out of ammunition.

“When I try to interrupt the game,” Faith who looked 25 said, “he says ‘wacha nifike next level’ but goes on.”

Afadhali Ray wako,” Edith, who looked in her late twenties interjected. “My man Duncan likes to get a series, then watch it all weekend, especially now that it is mid-month and he has no money to hang out.”

“But that sounds romantic!” Faith objected. “Si you cuddle up on the couch with him and watch the series!”

I frowned. The only series I follow – and that’s because the literary writer David Benioff is involved in it – is Game of Thrones. And John Snow cannot be getting stabbed by the traitors of the Night Guard, and you expect me to cuddle up and feel all romantic now. How?

A serious series is like taking a s*** - you do not want to share the intensity, not even with your partner. “But the series he likes watching are about sijui vampires and werewolves and twilight! And he’s a Kisii. Do you think yeye ni omorogi?” And all three burst out laughing, as I felt sorry for my weird kinsman. Vampires and werewolves? Really?

Anyway, Lora, the oldest of the trio, was now complaining about her serious man, Tommy. “We have Zuku and it is like he has an ABC of news channels that he constantly watches,” she said. “He’ll flip through Al Jazeera, BBC, CNN, Deutsche Welle, E-News, Fox News and if I complain, he looks at me like I’m foolish and says: “Lora, my love, why are you against current affairs?’’

I tried to picture the three gentlemen in my mind, to rationalise their screen choices. Maybe Tommy is one of these small-time lawyers who dashes between resident magistrate courts all week, but very proud that he understands the geo-real-politik games of Vladimir Putin on dumb Donald Drumpf.

And man Duncan could be working as the assistant to a dentist, and all that teeth pulling, blood and gore had led him to a fascination with vampires (werewolves are harder to explain).

As for Ray, with his obsession with car and shooting games, maybe his dream had been to join the KDF and kill Al Shaababs, or he dreamed of being a KCB rally driver (never mind he doesn’t own a vehicle) ... or maybe he just fantasises about walking in, one day, into the call centre where he works – and mowing everyone down with an Uzi sub-machine-gun. I don’t know. I examined my own ‘hobbies’ – books, booze and boots; and by ‘boots’ I mean football boots, and by football boots I mean watching the English Premier League. I have never wanted to be a footballer. I gave up.

Yet as the (poor) Arsenal game got underway and got finished, and those three young ladies went on yakking away on the next table – paraparaparapara – a possibility occurred to me. Maybe those guys were on the news and games and series in order to avoid being assaulted by female chatter. All weekend.

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