A dry March in my retirement hut

I like the village life, I’m seduced by it each time I come here. FILE PHOTO | SHUTTERSTOCK

I’m not a Catholic. I’m SDA. I thought I’d make that clear at the very beginning before I say that I’m off the booze for a month, which is an oxymoron when you think about it because as SDA – like my dear dad- we are usually off booze for our lifetime.

You could say I’m a different kind of SDA. The type my dad doesn’t understand but tolerates because you often cannot control how your son turns out.

But it could be worse, some people have sons who turned vegetarian. Or vegan. Or who are accountants!

Anyway, I’m writing this from the village and there is a full moon rising above trees. It’s pale and has bruises on it but it’s a gorgeous moon.

It casts long shadows of trees that look like dismembered limbs of alien creatures. It’s quiet here, so quiet you can hear raindrops in the lake. I’m camping.

Well, to mean it’s not my father’s village, it’s a different village where I’m building a small retirement hut because I’m getting increasingly tired of calling accountants to ask about my payment.

That’s all I seem to be doing with my life lately in the city, walking on eggshells around accountants, calling them, “bro” or “dearest” which doesn’t work on these people. Nothing does.

I truly think accountants deserve lots of boils on their backsides.

Anyway, I like the village life, I’m seduced by it each time I come here. How grown men just bath naked by the lake. The smell of woodsmoke in the air. How everybody calls you “my son” even if you don’t know them.

How impossibly innocent little children walk along highways from school while holding hands. How goats just nap in the middle of the main roads. And most importantly, there are no accountants here.

Being off alcohol for a month is turning out to be much fun as well. I particularly enjoy not having hangovers. Waking up fresh on Friday and Sunday mornings, with such stunning clarity of the world and of self.

I love not buying a double for Sh900 and pretending that I will only have two and then go home but I end up having more only to wake up with a hangover and think, ‘Oh let me call Linda dearest and see the status of my payment.’

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