Men’s Day: breakfast in bed and later fun at grubby shebeen
SUTURED TO one of the world’s least developed nations, I maintain a deranged pride in our number of public holidays. The more, the better. Our algae-slicked coast and talking bladders on the new TV channel will be enhanced by official Sweet Wine Tours on Youth Day, Family Day, Human Rights Day, Heritage Day, Women’s Day and so on. Word will get around.
Instead of the weekly food fights in North Korea, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia and Zimbabwe (where it costs Z$100 trillion for a tub of Marmite) tourists plot to abscond for the entire weekend. They smuggle themselves in disguised as crocodile handbags.
The cabinet has set up a commission to probe the need for new holidays. To serve you must first be sacked from all organs of governance to prove you really have nothing to do except steal public funds and siphon them to a boy scout at Mugg & Bean before moving on to Gatvol van der Pomp’s Kombuis en Kamers in Woodstock.
I see only one obvious lacuna in the holidays. It’s Men’s Day.
On Women’s Day, females in a state of bigamy can do what they really want. On temporary remand from the iron cages of their constitutionally mandated barracks, they are free to guzzle sushi at the Waterfront, sip Brutal Fruit before 10am and gossip loudly before toddling off to admire the Brad Pittsian biceps of the smirking octopus in the aquarium behind the sushi bar.
Men deserve just as much and I propose a different agenda for Men’s Day:
Breakfast to be served in bed. This will have the dual effect of waking you up as the tray of slithering eggs, reinforced bacon, pulpy vegetable sausages, poisonous mushrooms and Ouma’s knitted doomsday missiles drone into your nostrils in synchrony with the Noon Gun. Time to rise before the dog has licked your chops clean!
As you leave for the pub, your partner of 48 years screams: “Don’t forget the pink meat. The children are coming to supper!” Vowing to get scaly green shavings instead, you dance on your painted toes to the grubby shebeen where you and your former football train drivers mellow out every Men’s Day (plus a few extra).
Bets are taken on the outcome of a televised football match between a team of rehabilitated child soldiers and crystal meth addicts noted for their speed and dexterity. Apart from the 12-hour government speeches, this is the sole entertainment and is designed to build up stamina for the few remaining jobs in pumping up Cuban jet tyres and checking for punctures.
Thanks to Julius Malema and his Economic Freedom Fighters – who bounce each other’s paunches, plunging down Boyes Drive – Men’s Day has been transformed into a spectacular mélange of drinking and driving, hunting down immigrants who have not paid for the proper papers and the transformation of Cape Town Stadium into a massive dogbowl for such Olympic sports as snorkelling, oxygenated blood transfusions and rustling up giant Madagascan hissing cockroaches, which (if not consumed in a twilight braai after the women have been herded back to their dens), make cuddly pets.
The crescendo of Men’s Day is when every male between Cape Point and Sir Lowry’s Pass pulls on womanly dresses, frocks and panties concealed in reusable Pick ’n Pay packets that morning. Then it’s a vivacious potpourri of incandescent colours dedicated to the 186th re-election of Robert Mugabe even though his neurons have desiccated to pumpkin pips.
As Trevor Manuel puts it: “Better policies for better lives.” We have only just begun.