Thankfully, life is not like a cartoon, where thought bubbles appear over your head.
I was travelling to Nairobi from Cape Town recently. My Kenya Airways flight was a virtual cornucopia for those like me who enjoy idly watching other people do their business.
Regular readers of this column may recall my story about a bar in the Nairobi CBD of the early 1990s called Pfaff. The bar was named for the shop below, which sold the German-manufactured sewing machines of the same name.
The bar itself was unpretentious and not that well-known, but after the shock to the pockets of price decontrol of beer, it became a place where some of my colleagues and I would go to have a cheap beer after our regular joint hiked prices.
We immediately noticed that unlike many bars in the CBD, where the clients were mostly middle-aged men and their youthful paramours, Pfaff seemed to stand that social norm on its head with a different dynamic.
At Pfaff, it was middle-aged women in their forties entertaining their young lotharios.
As I settled down in my aisle seat at the back of the aircraft, an ideal spot to keep an eye on my fellow passengers from, I noticed what appeared like an interesting threesome board.
The women looked like Pfaff veterans who were no longer middle-aged but were now in the glamour-gran phase of their lives, perhaps in their sixties. The exhausted looking man with them appeared to be in his late thirties or early forties.
Immediately my mind went to the gutter and stayed there. I decided these were possibly wealthy widows or successful divorcees, continuing their Pfaff Bar behaviours.
Sure the women were older and perhaps even richer, but the younger men are also not in the first spring of youth but still have the louche attitude of an aging lothario.
After one of the glamour grans let her hand carelessly caress my shoulder as she waited in the queue for the aircraft loo, I felt even surer of my made-up story about the threesome.
When I gave her a look, she was effusive in her apologies, but the sorry never reached the eyes, which were dancing and smiling with anticipation of delights to come.
At some point the young man must have gotten bored of being sandwiched by the two sugar mummies and moved to the aisle seat to let the two women chat and have a giggle.
If I was being charitable, I might have concluded that the fellow was a devoted son or nephew who accompanied his aunts on a trip. But where is the fun in that?
Next, I decided to enjoy the creativity of other minds and switched on the shows on in-flight entertainment.
While watching an episode of Murphy Brown, I was amused by the airline’s censorship policy on what are considered to be ‘rude’ words.
In this day and age of uncensored access to films and TV shows on your phone, I cannot for the life of me understand why KQ has employed someone to bleep out bits of words on movies and TV shows even though everyone knows what the word being bleeped out is.
They screened the Murphy Brown episode where Murphy takes on President Donald Trump during his first administration.
In the episode, Trump refers to Murphy Brown as ‘Old Murphy’, which irritates the character, who is also competing with her TV journalist son for ratings.
Anyway, long story short, Murphy, who is making a comeback, wins the family ratings war and closes the episode with a wry: ‘Old Murphy, my ass’. Which KQ’s Ezekiel Mutua wannabe edited so it is rendered as: "Old Murphy my bleep ss"
Seriously, who did they think they were fooling? And another thing. Who decides the word ‘ass’ is bleeped and the word ‘butt’ is not censored?
Also, when it came to the movie ‘Horrible Bosses’, did the censor fall asleep when it came to the subtitles, which carried all the swearing with no seeming attempt to ‘protect’ passenger morals?
