Saturday sports talk never runs dry, unlike dams
IWENT to the hardware shop to buy a new rain gauge on Sunday morning (I’m an optimist) and found my friend David, who works there, in a state of exhaustion. Long queues of customers lined up at each till point. “What’s going on?” I asked. “Jo-Jo tanks,” he panted, “and all the pipes and valves that go with them, and we are expecting another load within an hour and if they don’t arrive on time I’m going home. Already received two loads this weekend.”
As I drove home I passed the giant lorry piled high with rainwater tanks and hoped they reached the store before David went home.
The people at the rainwater tank factories must be making an absolute fortune right now. Everyone I know is either installing one, waiting for one or deciding whether to put a new rainwater-friendly roof on their house.
Conversation round the braai is almost exclusively about, “How I collect my teeth-cleaning water to flush the loo,” or “Did you know you can collect 120ml of water by putting a frying pan under your car to catch the drips from the airconditioner?”
During a brief lull in the conversation somebody muttered: “What on earth are we going to talk about when the dams do fill up?”
That’s an interesting point. What did we talk about before the dams ran dry?
I don’t know what women talked about because I am too polite to eavesdrop, but men mostly talked about sport. Sport is the universal Safe Subject.
Political talk is likely to start a fight and religion could end up with your being tied to a stake that has nothing to do with the braai.
If the conversation lags among a group of men, you can almost always get the chat going again by tossing in: “So what did you think of Saturday’s game?” No matter what season it is cricket, rugby or football – there’s sure to have been “Saturday’s game”.
Drop the conversational pebble into the stream and you can wander off by yourself and think about real stuff, like how you’re going to pay for a new drill, while the guys argue about whether Koos or Bliksem or whoever should have been selected for the team.
The thing about sport is that men can have very strong opinions and know exactly why the Cheetahs, or the Weasels or whoever, lost the game.
But it doesn’t really matter a damn. This season’s winners will lose next year and there will always be “total idiots” on the selection committee, so there will always be new theories about how we should have played. Unlike dams, sport talk never runs dry. I’m wondering whether I could put a Jo-Jo tank where the lawn used to be.
Last Laugh
Freddie and his old pals gathered in the pub for their usual Saturday evening session. After taking a long philosophical gulp of his beer Freddie remarked: “Have you guys noticed that as you grow older three things start to happen. First you start to lose your memory.” After a silence Pete said: “what are the other two?” “Other two what?”