Starting over…and UBHH

In September last year, I stopped writing a weekly humour and satire column for The Sunday Monitor. By The Way had run 4 years at the time. It felt like I was on the wrong side of the submission deadline every week and the regular owe dance wasn’t doing it for me anymore.

The owe dance is this thing that happens when you hope you don’t run into someone you owe something. You somehow inevitably do because the world conspires for you to. Could be that the boda boda rider, stopping to refuel, parks right next to them. Or of all the places they could have gone to hang out at, they seem to have followed you to the same corner of your favourite spot. Or they chose to sit in the same taxi – as if they don’t know about Uber. Or, the worst bit, they chose to call you. For some reason, that’s the only time the phone doesn’t tell them that the number doesn’t exist on the network.

When the owe dance starts, you are confused. You hope they don’t bring up what you owe because then you can testify of God’s goodness because He answered your prayer that they forget it. On the other hand, you hope that they bring it up so that you can finally share that story you’ve been rehearsing.

I was done with the weekly owe dance and I thought I’d still do this regularly without the deadlines and structure that The Sunday Monitor editor imposed provided. If once a year is regular, I’m still on track.

I went for the Uganda Bloggers Happy Hour (UBHH) last Thursday. It’s this thing where bloggers go and be happy for exactly one hour.  There’s a scale used to determine your fate:

Category	Happy for	Fate
1	Less than 1 hour	Will be the topic of ridicule on every blog for the next month
2	Exactly 1 hour	Attain rockstar blogger status. Admiration all round. High fives. People attribute jokes to you like, “Would you believe what YOUR NAME said once? They said… (Joke that leaves everyone in stiches)” Quotes are also attributed to you. “You know what YOUR NAME always says, Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate…”
3	Between 1 and 2 hours	Okay person. A few laughs to some of your jokes.
4	Over 2 hours	Strange fellow. Strange. Slowly draw away from them and don’t leave your handbags or anything valuable near them. Don’t allow them to contribute to conversation.

From the score card, you can already tell that Solomon King fell in category 4. Nevender, the referee, and Josh, his assistant, didn’t publish the results but I can guess that Safyre fell in the same category, based on the fact that Florentina stealthily edged further and further away from him during the course of the evening to the point that he had to leave early.

Dilman, more used to making a killing in the sun, took a while to adjust to the evening. You could tell from how long he’d process something Edna would say before making an unintelligible response. PKahill, seated right next to him, would nod quite vigorously after each statement either because she understood him or she just didn’t want to upset our awesome writer. Moses and Sheila were pretty quiet throughout the evening and we are still trying to ascertain whether they were not from a shady security agency. Given some of the candid remarks made by a one Peter Kagayi, this is a scary thought. It isn’t helped by the fact that the blogs they said they write for don’t exist and that Kagayi’s has not been reachable since the meet. It is remotely possible that it’s because he’s preparing for his show on the 19^th June at 7:00PM at the National Theatre.

Basiks came so late, he didn’t have time to understand the discussion before contributing. Eloquent. But off topic. Everyone let him fall in porridge. Even you Nevender? We expected more from you.