The final week of the year is the strangest week of all weeks. Christmas comes and passes like a whisper. In the seven days that follow, you are not sure which day of the week it is, or what to do with yourself. You wake up in mid-morning because you over-ate and drank one too many at your niece's baptism last night. You eat breakfast in bed and by 11 am, your cousin rocks up with a cold six-pack.
So, you grab yourself a cold one to cure your hangover (this is a lie from hell) and before you know it, it is 11pm and you have over-drank again. But this is "okay" because you are not obligated to go to work tomorrow.
Life becomes a seesaw of drunkenness and hangover. This is why the week after Christmas is such a blur in many people's heads, until New Year's Eve when they wake up to watch the fireworks before doing it one last time.
The last week of the year is a time when one looks out for old friends just for the sake of it. These are people you already have in some of your favourite WhatsApp groups. People you studied with at university or colleagues from your first workplace.
People from that WhatsApp group called 'Friends that Never Meet' because while you are virtually very close, you have not met anyone in this group since you partied hard and blacked out in Ange Nior before it became Guv'nor some 15 years ago. You just chat occasionally on WhatsApp and this gives you the false feeling of being close while blocking you from ever seeking them out physically.
And so, on some random day during that weird final week, a member from your favourite WhatsApp group may suggest that you meet at her new house (she is always a lady) in Ntinda. Everyone warms up to the idea because it is a good chance to meet friends you have not met in so long. Little do you realise that you are about to be part of the ultimate house party.
Because in the final week of the year, a house party that would otherwise start at 8pm ends up starting at 11 am because everyone is in holiday. And while other house parties may not go beyond 10pm, this one goes on indefinitely. One of my favourite WhatsApp groups is called The Book Club. Which is a strange name because, while it is indeed a book club, it is not the only book club in Kampala and calling it The Book Club makes it larger than life, you know, like The Sun. Anyway, this is a group of writers and people who love to read, but sometimes two years can pass without any meeting.
Text conversations happen daily, no doubt, but physical meetings are rare. Plus, there are members who have not physically appeared in five years. So, when one of us suggested that we meet at her house on December 30, it was a definite ‘yes’ because it promised a chance to meet elusive characters, because, you know, it is the final week of the year.
One of the members of this group is a character named Phillip Matogo. Matogo is a journalist and columnist with the Daily Monitor. His love for books is only rivalled by his love for history, which are the two subjects he writes most about. But the man is Forrest Gump in a black skin and then some.
He happens to have been at the right time at the right place for the last 40 years of this country's history. Like the time he hosted Muhoozi Kainerugaba and his mother in their home in Addis Ababa on their way from Europe, after Museveni's NRA took power in 1986. The father of young Matogo had been Uganda's ambassador to Ethiopia at the time. What many may not know about the man is that he is a bona fide comedian whose conversations are punctuated by endless punchlines. And once he makes you the butt of his jokes, you will not survive the night. He will not let go until he has skinned you completely. And while the group will shed tears laughing at you, you will laugh harder at yourself, because he is that good at cracking jokes.
What makes the jokes welcome to everyone is the fact that he makes even harder jokes at his own expense. He talks of the time he arrived at St Charles Lwanga SS, Kasasa in the 1990s after he was thrown out of King’s College Buddo and the towering bullies asked him as soon as he had arrived, what he could do and he said he could rap because he was utterly scared and did not know what else to say. In actual sense, he was not any good. Or when a fellow man was being too friendly and dishing out hugs to him willy-nilly until someone asked Matogo why he was gay, because that other person was a known homosexual. Most of his stories are laced in hyperbole. So it is never clear where the truth ends and lies begin but then again, that is what makes the conversations hilarious and memorable.
With conversations between like-minded people, alcohol plays a minor role in making people come out of their shells. You cannot talk and laugh for five hours and still hold back self-deprecating stories. In any case, people are too buzzed to hold them against you or to judge you. And that is what makes a house party a memorable one. But it has to be long and laid back for it to be the ultimate house party.
Only in the final week of the year can you afford to attend a house party from 4pm to 4am. And the potential for the best house party is very clearly mapped out in your phone; your favourite WhatsApp group. So, start planning one now. You have 12 months to attend the ultimate house party.
