WHY is it that white people can start off whole conversations with such mundane remarks as the day's weather and get on famously well thereafter while I, on the other hand, find it difficult to move anywhere beyond the weekend's soccer scores with the black brothers?

The other day, while our womenfolk were chatting away excitedly like schoolkids on their way to the zoo, I was stuck with two morose cretins who didn't give a hoot about Aaron Mokoena being given the freedom of the city of London or Baby Jake Matlala being forced to leave hospital early to be trussed up at home.

I retreated to my jalopy to wallow in the sweet sounds of Maceo Parker.

The gods of retribution had me in their sights for a repeat when they lumped me together again with total strangers after a good 10km run at the Soweto Marathon.

How was I to know my fun stopped with me pounding the streets of Soweto? I mean this other guy had a book, and a well-thumbed copy at that!

It's not like I volunteered my Guinness World Records 2011 library-size ton of nice-to-know-but-totally-useless snippets on them. I resisted the urge to share with them that the oldest mechanically printed book came in Mainz, Germany, around 1455.

If I wanted to, I'd have rammed it down their throats that JK Rowling was the first billion-dollar author in modern history.

To cut an arduously long story short, it turned out the man with the book had as much interest in books as fish have in umbrellas.

"To cut a long story short" is one of the hackneyed phrases that generously peppered his conversation - all 93 seconds of it.

I think people like him should be shot on sight. Why carry a book and not, say, a pack of condoms? He'd surely have had a lot to say about rubber seeing that he had such obvious aversion for collated pages.

We should throw the book at them so that punishment for him and his ilk should include being denied the right to use any phrase involving the book.

Come to think of it, he could easily have been a garrulous interlocutor only if he did not set out to torture strangers with his mournful company. Punish him and reduce his cliché-laden two-minute conversation to no talk at all by removing from his vocabulary anything to do with the book.

I used every trick in the book to get him to be civil. What did I get? More moping and inaudible monosyllables.

I was taught never to be judgmental and tried my utmost not to judge a book by its cover and dismiss him as an ass, but all my attempts at being an open book were met with a brick wall. He remained a closed book.

I have closed the book on this stock of people. From now on, I will play by the book, no more Mr Nice Guy of chit chat. They must stay at home and stare at their walls. Should they dare come out to play, they must be brought to book for their petulance.

They are all killjoys, a book of matches that spoilt my Sunday when it had started so well with a 58:33 sprint to the finish at Nasrec.