Wednesday 20 May 2026
Eastleigh, via a quick stop at the lady who makes the lovely colourful tote bags we have so missed on the last couple of visits. They were so popular and, hopefully, will be again. Beats carrying Lidl branding around with your bits and bobs.
The stuff from Mokono is bloody excellent and I get a couple of extra bits before plunging into the sub basement of that same building for another load of highly combustable panties. You really do not want to rub up against anyone else’s pile of purchases lest the whole place lights up. Buying panties wholesale here in this little offshoot of the Chinese Empire is a contact sport. Imagine, if you will, Primark having a Closing Down, Everything Must Go Sale and all the customers are on crack. If looks could kill, several Kenyan women would be getting kitted out for prison uniform right now.
But I get my goods and David and I go and have a cup of BLINDINGLY good coffee at the little hole in the wall on the street. In a country famed for its coffee it would make a grown Italian weep to see the, frankly, incomprehensibe and obscene amount of (whisper its devil name low) Nescafe which is offered up here in those miniscule sachets when you order a coffee.
Next we descend into another basement – less room between stalls but also less nylon – and get more lessos to send to Samburu, where a new group of ladies is selling up a storm.
Now we go and pick up a few deras. And the day explodes. OK. I explode.
A couple of things on my hate list – right at the top, tbh – are being patronised and being treated like an idiot (no, not quite the same thing, although close). Now, in Kenya, I have learned to put up with it up to a point, because this is how Kenyan men treat women. The only thing their men do better, on a world class level, than running, is mansplaining.
So. Bullet points.
Stall with lovely deras
I ask how much, taking a long pole and pointing at specific ones
Bloke says xxx with a reduction for wholesale. Excellent.
I choose a selection and take them to the Mama at the back
She gives me the non wholesale price
I am not happy. We call the bloke
HE now says that the cheaper ones (for the wholesale price) are a completely different lot of deras – a lot that he had never even shown me.
Of course the wholesale ones are cheaper fabric, not such nice design etc. BUT he held the nice ones out (once a lawyer …) to be available at the wholesale price and I bought on that basis.
I am quite – and vocally – unhappy.
Now David comes in and starts mansplaining to me about the difference in quality between the cheaper and more expensive deras.
I absolutely lose it. Totally. I am appalling. But this is one mansplain too far. I rant on about the guy not even showing me the cheaper ones and making out that all were xxx wholesale … then grind to an embarrassing halt when I realise that I do not know the Swahili for ‘the principle of the matter’ and have no time to Google it
Heaping Pelion on Ossa, David has a little laugh behind my back with the Mama saying “she is just tired.”. I overreact completely.
I do realise how petty thos all is but I may just have hit my wall. And lashed myself to it with the end of my tether.
The deras are lovely. But anyone asking for a discount will feel my wrath
