Not my game

After work the farm labourers like to head for the football pitch. They go barefoot, or in their Bata takkies, and they play rough. The first ball I gave them was an imported silver Fifa-approved item of great expense and they impaled it on a nearby fever tree within days. After that I bought cheap balls in Nairobi. These still get punctured regularly on thorns. The giant of a goalkeeper is a man named Magoolgool — named, like many of his tribe, after a treasured bull — who specialises in thumping the ball with such force that it rockets into the stratosphere and bursts with a distant pop.

I don’t play. It just causes embarrassment. Soccer is not my game. On the occasions I’ve persevered, I just end up getting squashed, which does have some entertainment value for the workers. No, at 39 I’m now a junior elder. I should be sitting on the touchline with my friend Tom, knocking back the Tuskers with our drinking steers in attendance. A drinking steer, by the way, is what the cattle-mad Samburu men use to generate a party spirit. It’s a beast with particularly fine lyre-shaped horns that you tether at your side to swell your heart with gladness while you get thoroughly pissed. I am still shopping for my steer, but in the meantime I use a lovely hogget with a back that’s flat enough to rest a beer on.

A couple of Sundays ago, our guys were invited over to the neighbouring ranch to play an away match. Their team had been training for years and was impressively kitted out in proper jerseys and boots, which we haven’t yet had a chance to organise. We’re the underdogs, the new boys.