Newspapers: Literature written in a hurry and not meat wrappers

Journalism is literature in a hurry — Matthew Arnold (1822 - 1888)

Fast forward more than a century, and thousands of miles away from Middlesex, England (where Matthew Arnold was born), and you are in Bomet, and an agitated Uhuru Kenyatta is saying for the umpteenth: “ I have said it before, and I will say it again, gazeti ni za kufunga nyama.”

Let us put the politics aside and sink our teeth into the meat of this statement.

Clearly, one cannot chambua every newspaper, or even a whole newspaper, in this space.

One needs a sample, like the very dividable dozen pages of the Sunday Magazine you are currently reading.

Having written these words that you are reading in my present, which is now past 5.22 a.m., Thursday, 21st May — I had to run the clock back to the Standard on Sunday, May 17, 2015, to test this executive hypothesis.

 Words are symbols

Ann Mukei in her From The Heart column does not need affirmation with words, cards or pictures. After all, as we all know, words are just symbols to be stained by the blood red run gauntlet of raw meat.

A Yummy Mummy on page three of the magazine, Ms Queenter Mbori maybe, spoke of boys and bath-avoidance.

Well, boys will be boys, and baths are baths, and never shall the twain mix.

It is not like embori (goat meat) and Royko Mchuzi Mix, which when wrapped together in a newspaper, mix well.

There was the main feature on that day, featuring the London marathon champion, Eliud Kipchoge, who famously avoids publicity and fanfare, and prefers to read John Mason, and quote him with slogans like “the impossible is possible” and “imitation is limitation.”

Whereas I am often suspicious of folks who think in rhyming slogans, as if their minds are ticking on Hallmark card mechanism, Kipchoge had won me over by the end of the piece (of meat) with his observation that “the athlete with sh 50 million in his bank account may keep bragging, but the uneducated farmer who used the same amount to plant his wheat for one season walks around town unnoticed.”

Vulgar arriviste nitwits

This folk wisdom is the meat of the wheat in a Sonkofied world full of blinged out braggadocios and vulgar arriviste nitwits.

Besides, any man who religiously follows all the Williams sisters’ tennis matches is not to be taken lightly.

From the Sunday Ride, I learnt that there is something called the Road Annuity Programme (RAP) that seeks to put to rest the perennial problem of cowboy contractors.

These are the fellers who lay tarmac with depth the size of a meat wrapper.

But how will we know about RAP if Mr Kenyatta gives newspapers the knuckle-rap all the time, as meat wrappers?

Sheila Kimani, in Fashion, told the sartorial-conscious reader that suspenders are back.

I loved suspenders back in the early 1990s, but dropped them for being teased as Steve Urkel and the Digital Under Ground.

I thank Miss Kimani’s generation for writing on papyrus and “bringing back the nineties,” (never mind that’s when they were being born).

I will not comment on the Literary Discourse of that Sunday that spoke of “Awakening Kiswahili literature from the ‘bush’” for fear of affecting my friend Ken Walibora.

 But I must say I laughed hard over Baba Jimmy “catching feelings” because his Starlet — last fashionable in the first age of the suspenders — was banged from behind by a Prado.

Our female readers also got to know, thanks to scribe and old mate Benson Riungu, to avoid visiting Uturine village and Undecided Leisure Resort for therein lies in wait for stray husbands, a fat femme fatale called Karembo.

Having planned to go to Balaklava mid this year with I Max film man Alexei Serkov before Vladmir Putin and his men in balaclavas put paid to that plan by invading the Crimea, and starting a way there, it was nice to know (from Diaspora and Destination) that across the Black Sea, there is Turkey and the Bosphorus River.

A traveller can put it in the bucket list to one day, visit and shop at the Istikilal Cadesi, as Dubai is not the only destination on earth.

The world is full of beautiful, hidden, dubious places.

But Kampi ya Kazi luxury eco-lodge where our aptly named Thorn Mulli went as per his travel piece just sounds like a piece of paradise — with its Kilimanjaro flights, nature walks, Chyulu drives.

There is also an organic chicken ranch within its vicinity.

I wonder if Thorn took this magazine out of the main paper, without reading it, and wrapped three large pieces of chicken with its separate detachable. Do you see what he would have missed?