I'm so looking forward to my cousin's funeral next weekend. It's going to be a blast. I cannot count the number of times I have uttered a boo-boo along these lines. I suffer from a brain malfunction where the words "wedding" and "funeral" are interchangeable.
I used to think it's because English is a distant second language to me. But I make the same mistake even in Zulu. I think this is because I consider both occasions to be forced socialisation where I have to take a full shower, apply roll-on, perform facial gardening on my sparse whiskers, put on a shirt with buttons, and wear polished shoes.
For a man whose default condition is walking around the house in a tattered UDF T-shirt from 1988, boxer shorts, football socks and flops, this is torture.
I hate formal occasions with the same passion Donald Trump has for Donald Trump. And boy, do my people love them! We will find any excuse to go out somewhere to play dress-up. It's usually some awards ceremony to honour some rotund fellow with three chins for his "immense contribution to the advancement of the poorest of the poor".There's always a "programme director" (or an MC, if you were born before 1990) whose job it is to speak beeg English and refer to the award recipient as a baobab tree and a clod of clay ... sorry, I mean son of the soil.
Whatever the occasion, at some point there'll be a Jesus moment where everyone needs to close their eyes, raise their arms and pray in unison and in tongues. Even if the occasion was a conference called Towards the Advancement of a Secular State for Social Cohesion, we'd still pray in tongues. And the bearded carpenter's son would have to sit there typing furiously on His Google Translate.
And then there's always that toast moment. I hope that the counter-revolutionary who taught my people the word "bubbly" is dead so that we can dig them up, shoot them and bury them again. Now there's bubbly this, bubbly that. It always culminates in that inevitable moment of retardation, the three sips.
That bus is never late. "The first sip is for love" - and then we all have to clink our glasses and yell "Love!"
"The second sip is for trust." Altogether now: "Trust!"
Tell you what. I have a better idea. Why don't we all take three sips for KILL ... ME ... NOW! And it doesn't help that these things always take place in tents - or, as we like to romanticise them, in marquees.
Give us head wraps, make us arrive on camels instead of in Bentleys and we could be in Kabul, what with our obsession with tents. And tents are not known for their insulation properties.I have a confession. The reason I'm whingeing is that hardly anyone ever invites me to these things. The few times I'm invited, I have to rough it among "our people at grassroots level" and the "poorest of the poor". This is a biggie among my people: "Do you have a VIP pass?"
Between you and me, I'd be pretty chuffed with an IP pass. I don't need the "V". But nooo. The place to be is at the VIP platform where you sit 20cm higher than the hoi polloi, munching on those mini drumsticks from fine china while the plebs pile mountains of samp and beetroot on their Styrofoam containers.
And if you think you can sneak into the VIP section unnoticed, forget it. We have a watertight wristband system that ensures that the lepers without a tender don't make it past the goons on steroids manning the velvet rope. The wristband system is colour-coded to boot. Yellow for the masses. Purple for the VIP section.
I was recently dragged to one of these events by a corporate client that I do some speaking work for. I ran into a former colleague from a radio station who took one look at my wristband and was mortified.
For the next 90 minutes she was walking up and down trying to fix this "outrage" with the organisers despite my strenuous assurances that I was OK among the folks she called "the riffraff". Finally, I was ushered kicking and screaming into the VVIP section, after a lubricant in the form of a R100 note was slipped into the palm of the Incredible Hulk at the entrance.
Tiny snag. I still had my yellow wristband. This meant that I couldn't go to the bathroom like regular VIPs. My bladder was talking to me in a language I call Expletive.
• Follow the author of this article, Ndumiso Ngcobo, on Twitter: @NdumisoNgcobo..