How not to worry about bastards, panties and squirrels

A retiree who lives down the road says he has just had a wonderful holiday without leaving town. He switched off all his electronic devices for a week, except for the TV to watch cricket.

It may not be practical for everyone. So addictive has the electronic media become, a survey in Britain shows that more than half the mobile phone users there check for overnight activity on the phone and its apps as soon as they wake up, well before saying good morning to partners or children.

The good gentleman down the road was briefly freed from a few bawdy jokes from his golfing friends, an annoying chain letter or two and ‘breaking news.’

One Zimbabwe Cabinet minister is saying a rival minister is the illegitimate son of the late Ndabaningi Sithole, a founder of Mr Mugabe’s ZANU PF party accused eventually of turning into a traitor, and other allegations that a minister’s exploits in the war for independence included stealing the panties of women fighters from the washing line in the guerrilla camps.

Did the good gentleman really need to know how the infighting in Mr Mugabe’s party has sunk so low?

He also missed the start of the latest typhoid outbreak and health authorities advising citizens to wash their hands thoroughly using soap or ash from a fire in clean or boiled water and “avoid shaking hands at public gatherings, particularly funerals.”

Ash is an age-old cleaning material, blamed in the crippling economic times nowadays for worsening blockages in already ruptured drains and sewers.

The steady deterioration in the potholed roads and most other local conditions is starkly apparent to those who have been out of the country, if only for a brief spell. In the 1980s, the British rock band Hawkwind sang of watching grass grow. Living right on top of it, we don’t see it growing – worsening or accumulating in this case – at every moment of the day.

The gentleman down the road missed some of the barnstorming blethering of squirrelhead Donald Trump, then the fine actor Samuel L. Jackson vowing that if Trump wins he will get his (unprintable expletive) “black ass” to South Africa, where Mr Zuma has big troubles of his own now.

Our retiree says he slept extremely well during his holiday at home and concluded there is little point in losing sleep about things he has no power to change.