We choose pals, but crazy relatives come naturally

One of the things I have never learnt even when I worked in busy and even crowded newsrooms, is how to moderate my voice while on the phone.

I often suffered the indignity of irritated colleagues constantly asking me to keep my voice down because there was a meeting in progress or just because I was being a nuisance.

I would be reminded that just because I was in an office in Nairobi talking to someone many kilometres away, in Meru, did not mean I had to shout.

This inability is partly explained by the fact that I grew up and was socialised mainly on the slopes of Mt Kenya where you often had to shout over ridges and across valleys to be heard by siblings and friends.

You may succeed in removing a boy from the slopes, but can never remove the slopes from the boy.

It could also be because, as I have heard, I fell on my head as a child. This might also explain my other odd behaviour patterns people often remark upon.

I am given to speaking to myself, often accompanying the mumbling with wild gestures. In bars especially when I am alone, I take to lengthy monologues, addressing to invisible audiences.

This, you might say, is clearly the behaviour pattern of an oddball who needs to consult a shrink.

But these aberrations are perhaps better explained by genetics. I belong to a clan with some members whose behaviour can be described as odd, to put it mildly.

Take the case of my distant cousin, a former military man whose age today places him in the position of junior clan elder.

Nobody knows exactly why he left the Armed Forces prematurely, but it is whispered that it had something to do with the smoking of substances that John Mututho, he of Nacada, would not approve of. Not to mention other forms of anti-social behaviour.

When he retired, he largely avoided people and spent most of his time locked up in his hut working on an “invention.”

It soon turned out that he had borrowed a leaf from the book of Gachamba, the Nyeri mechanic who has spent much of his life working on an aeroplane.

When my cousin was finally good and ready to fly, he called the village in his compound and unveiled a wooden contraption that resembled the three-wheeled “cars” that, as boys, we used to roll down hillsides believing that we were participating in the East African Safari Rally.

The thing, he explained, was an aircraft that could take off from trees and land safely.

To the joy of the assembly — made up mostly of boys — he would demonstrate by taking it up a fair-sized tree and flying off to distant lands.

Perching the contraption on a branch like some large wooden bird, my distant relative was ready to go, and making the noises a hophead must believe that an aeroplane makes, he kicked off from the tree. But instead of soaring off, the “aircraft” and its human cargo headed to the ground like a stone and the man landed on the seat of his pants with a powerful thud. The tree incident had the effect of permanently curing his interest in inventions.

I have this other cousin who once entertained dreams of becoming a businessman. He built a kiosk and stocked it with a packet of cigarettes; there was a bundle or two of snuff hanging from a string and a few other odds and ends.

Ownership of a “shop” gave him the standing to seek credit from the larger businesses in the area to stock up, and over time, he built up an impressive debt portfolio.

To avoid the creditors who started visiting his kiosk demanding payment, he would disappear during the day and appear only at the kiosk, which was also his living quarters, at night.

Well, these tricks only worked for some time, and when people eventually cottoned on, he was forced to leave the area and has not been seen since..