Becoming The Muse

*Note: trigger warning for vegetarians with delicate sensibilities

If you were having coffee with me I would welcome you to my tangle of words and introduce you to our main guest for dinner later today.

What? Oh no it doesn’t have a name, naming something makes it your responsibility, and you cant eat something that you have named. Never play with your food, didn’t your mums teach you that? You know how when you visit people and they want to cook chicken for you but you cant stay for dinner, so instead you are given a live chicken, to go…😂 Check out my Chicken Diaries article for a look at how such a scenario plays out.

Long story short, there’s this chicken, which has been squawking and screeching all night long and soon it will be delicious. I hope you are not a vegetarian or at least not offended by those of us who partake in meaty goodness. Some people are super squeamish about the killing of chickens, yet will gladly wolf down a bucket of spicy chicken nuggets… well, somebody gotta do the deed. I had the (mis)fortune of attending a mission boarding school where we were instilled with a particular set of chicken killing skills.

 While I can’t say I look back to boarding school days with fondness, the skills do come in handy at times like this. I know some people who think chicken comes from the supermarket neatly packaged up and would rather not deal with any unpleasant knowledge. I am a descendant of hunters from a hunter-gatherer clan; sometimes I stab store-bought chicken when taking it out of the fridge just to keep my skills finely honed.

And before you start thinking that I am some sort of chicken psychopath, let me put it to you that I am pretty humane about it all. I always sharpen the knife before I begin to make the deed as swift as possible. Oh and I learnt an interesting hack, you can just cover it with a dish leaving only the head sticking out and then *boom* its easy to handle and you don’t have to keep in a chokehold or secure its wings as you go about the necessary business.  

If you were having coffee with me, I would ask you why they call a chicken with its feathers plucked a dressed chicken… In my head when they speak of dressing a chicken, I picture it as being covered in something modern and stylish maybe with some aluminium foil highlights.

Once upon a time, my favourite music band South African FreshlyGround got banned from performing in Zimbabwe after they released a track which our then president, the late R G Mugabe didn’t particularly care for. The song is called Chicken To Change. Change is one of the things which an opposition party offers as its draw card. Nandos South Africa years back ran a snarky advert where a puppet resembling an infamous political figure stated that change will come from Nandos.

Speaking of change, you are familiar with how in Zimbabwe we transact in a multicurrency system? Sometimes it comes with challenges for example how you cannot get change for less than $1USD; some services come up with interesting workaround solutions, like offering change tokens, or something to cover the difference. I got offered an egg as change when I bought takeaway from a popular fast food establishment.

Weirdest thing is that some establishments after you pay in USD will offer you change in Zim Dollars but if you try to cover the price difference using Zim Dollars they will tell you that they cant accept Zim Dollars… Sorry what? You want me to accept change in a currency which you are unwilling to accept in return? 🤷🏾‍♂️

Small surprise some products are now only available in United States Dollars, at this rate the future of the Zimbabwean dollar doesnt look too good. One cant blame people for preferring to have United States Dollars.

Oh remember I mentioned the other week how we will be getting gold coins… Having looked at the maths – The coins will be minted out in 1 troy ounce of 22 carat gold which means each coin will cost upwards of USD $1600… They are definitely not something us ordinary folk can look to acquiring or trading in.

If you were having coffee with me I would tell you that Free Education is coming next year, just like they said the other year.

I ran into clips of the Sri Lanka situation with people storming the presidential palace and taking a dip in the presidential pool captioned this could be us but you are chicken. 🐔

What’s going on in your neck of the woods?

~B