I am fine!

I now understand why many people, when asked how they are, automatically respond with “Fine” even though they may be five minutes away from a nervous breakdown. The unsolicited ‘help’ and ‘advice’ from ‘well-meaning’ friends and family can drive one bonkers!

If you say that you have been feeling unwell, you will be advised to make honey, garlic, ginger and lemon your best friends. The quantities that you are required to consume, however, will require you to become a beekeeper and farmer specialising in the growing of lemon, garlic and ginger.

If you reveal that your financial situation is precarious, or that you lost your job, the advice will come flying at you thick and fast. The religious will advise you to start extended prayer and fasting sessions while you flirt with pneumonia on some chilly mountain. 

Those who are into self-help will thrust the latest manual on how to grow rich into your hands while encouraging you to ‘stay positive’ and ‘think big’. Others who fancy themselves financial gurus will launch into an interrogation on your spending habits. 

The interrogation will end with much sighing and slow shaking of the head, the summary being that since you were not wise enough to put aside one year’s worth of savings, you deserve every problem you are now facing. 

Very few will ask you to send them your CV and then talk to the people in their networks to see if they can find you a position somewhere. 

If you have had little luck finding a romantic partner and this slips out, get ready to have all manner of unsuitable people almost physically thrown at you as potential partners. The ugly, the crazy and the scary— expect them all. Reminders that ‘you cannot be too choosy, my dear’ and ‘you are not growing any younger’ will abound. 

Not that these will help when you are dressed to the nines, sitting across someone reeking of non-deodorised sweat, who last read a full-length book in high school and whose topics of conversation are limited to betting, the scandalous cost of living in Kampala and celebrity gossip. 
So, brethren, how are you? As for me, “I’m fine!”