The cold creeps in, Cherie& Gordon, dreaming of meatpie

It's beginning to feel quite cold in the mornings and the evenings and I suppose that soon I will have to dig out my warm clothing, swop my light soled summer shoes for my thicker soled winter ones and begin to contemplate the cost of heating.....

The barbecue the other night was a qualified success- getting there was a nightmare as there were so many roadworks going on and the Northern Line was closed so I couldn't get on the tube. I was amazed at how intolerant of traffic I had become- I, veteran of three hour long sweltering, packed solid, no movement traffic jams almost throwing a tantrum because of an hour's delay.....Anyway the food and company more than made up for it- even if there was no meat proper- the burgers, sausages and salmon were just right- and unlike the case at many barbecues I've been to, the host actually managed to produce well-cooked, juicy food without burning any of it.....

Yesterday I decided to be adventurous and had a Jamaican meat pattie for lunch. What I had really wanted was a Nigerian meat pie and the patty did not quite measure up. Cornish pasties which also look like meat pies and which I've tried as a subsitute have ended up being stuffed with more vegetables than meat which as every Nigerian knows is the first no-no for a real meatpie.....the sort that Kingsway used to sell with thin, crusty, flaky pastry and thick savoury meat before they morphed into Mr Biggs and started selling the mass produced starchy nonsense that they sell now.....Perhaps I'll just have to make my own....

The news here is filled with stories of the Labour Party conference- it appears that the verdict on Gordon Brown's speech yesterday was good but not great. But it was overshadowed by the allegation that Mrs Blair had been seen saying "Well that's a lie" when Mr Brown spoke of his warm and productive working relationship with her husband- Tony. Apparently there has never been any love lost between Cherie and Gordon- and she hasn't really refrained from showing it.... I suppose not being a politician she can afford to be more frank than her husband.... Amazing how little things change...look what I was blogging about a year ago
http://uknaija.blogspot.com/2005/09/leaders-squabbling-with-their-vices.html

The political jostling in Nigeria continues to unfold- with allegations of Senators being bribed to impeach the Vice President- and refutals and various "leaders of thought" and senior citizens calling on the President and his vice to sheathe their swords as their exalted offices are "being damaged" by the ongoing feud. As far as I'm concerned, both parties should continue with their revelations- I believe the whole process strengthens rather than weakens the Nigerian democratic process......

I'm reading and enjoying Howard Jacobson's Kalooki Nights which was also longlisted for the Booker this year.Jacobson, himself of Jewish heritage explores Jewishness in a half humorous, half serious way that is engaging. You can almost sense in the writing the author's own struggle with what it means to be a Jew as he paints various perspectives including that of the Orthodox Jews, Liberal Jews and atheist Jews.....it's a great book and one which I approached with some skepticism but am enjoying....

Nigeria- cui bono,where's Prezza, image politics and recent reading

I seem to be going through another period where finding time to blog is difficult. It's been a busy time work wise, but I hope it eases off soon. The problem with being away for such a long time is that by the time you come back, so much has happened it's difficult to know where to start.... Anyway here I am....

Neither of the two gladiators- Obasanjo and Atiku- has been impeached yet and it appears that they may not be anytime soon. It was interesting to see them both, dressed in identical blue robes at the funeral of the generals who died in the plan crash last week. How they can continue to exchange social pleasantries while each plots the other's downfall continues to intrigue me. But then Blair and Brown have long elevated that to a fine art. The evil genius himself, IBB lurks in the background and I wonder what role he has to play in all of this...as the lawyers say cui bono? Who profits from the Atiku-Obasanjo face off

Meanwhile in the UK, John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister seems to have completely disappeared from public view after his double fiasco earlier in the year- his affair with one of his secretaries and then being pictured playing a game of croquet during working hours while he was supposed to be deputising for Blair- not evn during the recent heightening of the Blair Brown face off did we get a glimpse of good old Prezza....

An opinion poll in yesterdays papers show Cameron beating Brown on most questions put to the people. The only question where Brown scored higher was on who would be more able to make difficult decisions. Brown was thought to be more arrogant, less of a team player and had a less likeable personality. I'm seriously beginning to think that if the Labour party wants to hold on to power, they'll need to get someone young and fresh to compete with Cameron- in this media age of politics, poor dour Gordon doesn't just cut it...Will the Labour party dare do the unthinkable?

On the subject of image politics, I read TIME magazine's cover story on Segolene Royal, the frontrunner for the Socialist Presidential nomination in France. She's another example of someone using image and media-friendly perceptions to get ahead in the opinion polls. Reading some of the criticisms about the lack of policy content to her campaigning, I was reminded of Cameron whose content free policies haven't stopped him from tearing ahead in the polls.... Besides perhaps it's time France with its much vaunted egalite got a woman in the top job as the UK and Germany have...

On the reading front I've just finished Peter Carey's Theft which was longlisted for the Booker Prize. I enjoyed it on several levels especially the insights into the art world. I've just started Kalooki Nights which was also longlisted for the Booker. I'll see how I get on but it looks promising. Meanwhile Doreen Baingana's Tropical Fish which I thoroughly enjoyed a while back is now out in paperback in the US. I'm surprised it never got published in the UK, especially as it contains not one but two Caine Prize shortlisted stories.....don't be put off by the short story tag though- they all kind of hang together tracing different aspects of the lives of three Ugandan sisters. Here's an article she had published in the Guardian a while back http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1540698,00.html

Meanwhile the sun's out and I'm off to a barbecue- friends making the best of the last bit of sun before the chill descends...

Catching up, the Queen, and the mystery of Booker prizes

You turn your back and so many things happen at once. The last week has been so hectic work wise that I've had no time to blog. Or perhaps that's just a lazy man's excuse. From the Pope's speech and the furore it caused to the continuing mudslinging between Obasnjo and Atiku in Nigeria to the armed forces plane crash to the march for Darfur yesterday- it looks like the world has been far busier than I have.....

I just wish the National Assembly would get their act together and impeach both Obasanjo and Atiku, leaving the Senate president to preside over what would then hopefully be a level playing field as there would be too little time for the Senate President to rig himself into the presidency...dare I wish?

Went to watch The Queen, Stephen Frears' new film starring Helen Mirren who plays Her Majesty so well it's uncanny. The film is set in 1997 around the events when Diana died and watching Martin Sheen play the young ambitious newly elected Blair you begin to remember why his election was greeted with such excitement. It's a great film and has some great cinematography ofthe stunning landscapes around Balmoral, the Scottish royal retreat where the Queen is holed up with the royal family at the time they receive the news of the Princess' death. There's one shot where the deep red of Her Majesty's lipstick is echoed in the deep red border of her Hermes scarf and the deep red of the blood running from a stag that has been shot on a neighbouring estate which of course is supposed to echoe the sense of Diana the huntress turned the hunted.....At the cinema where I watched it, the audience roared at a scene where Tony Blair asks his secretary to put Gordon Brown on hold...

Just finished Caine Prize winner Segun Afolabi's excellent collection of short stories- A Life Elsewhere which was poetic and evocative of a displacement echoed in the lives of many immigrants. I'll look forward to his Goodbye Lucille which is due out next year....

I'm reading Theft by Peter Carey which made the Booker longlist but failed to make the shortlist. I'm still reeling at Sarah Waters' The Night Watch being the favourite for the prize. I read it ages ago and while it was quite entertaining, I hardly thought it Booker material.....still I suppose the judges must have seen something in it that I missed...

On a final note it appears I might be "meeting" the real Queen before the year runs out on some work related stuff. As iconoclastic as I claim to be, I guess there's enough of the old colonial mentality in me to thrill at the thought....

Humid days, a radical solution, Little Miss Sunshine and Dhaliwal's Tourism

Monday September 11 - humid and hot with the earthy scent of a sky pregnant with rain. Yet the rain does not fall and it feels like I am breathing steam when I walk out to lunch. The weather is almost tropical and reminds me of home- is it global warming or just one of those days- who knows?

The war of the vices -the Obasanjo-Atiku and Blair-Brown sagas continue to unfold. While in the UK there appears to be a temporary truce as the truth slowly sinks into the skulls of Brownites and Blairites alike that they haven't been elected to spend the time squabbling like nursery school brats; in Nigeria VP Atiku ratchets up the heat by heading for the courts. I read the report of the "investigative panel" the president set up and I wonder where in the Nigerian Constitution this panel fits in.......at least in the UK everyone sort of knows the framework within which the fight is conducted...oh well! I'm increasingly being drawn to the neither/nor option in both cases- dump Blair AND Brown in the UK and dump Atiku AND Obasanjo in Nigeria.....

Went to watch Little Miss Sunshine over the weekend- it's the kind of dark comic tale of a dysfunctional family where you never quite know if it's okay to laugh. For me the best scene is one where a smarmy serenades the contestants in a beauty pageant with America the Beautiful as they strike suggestive poses and their dolled up faces grin. Problem is they are all under ten years old and if you think kiddy beauty pageants are ok- you really should watch this film......

Have just finished Tourism, by Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal. It's no surprise he gave Gautam Malkani's Londonstani such a harsh review- they're kind of in the same market....Tourism is an okay read-with liberal instances of equal opportunity provocation- everyone in modern London from the working class to the middle class to the rich are slagged off, as are every ethnic group from the author's own Sikhs to blacks to whites (or honkies, as the author persisted in calling them) I've never actually heard that phrase used except in books and comics from the 7os USA but then perhaps I've lived a rather sheltered life. Apart from the provocation, there's lots of fairly graphic sex but frankly it feels like a hodge podge of scenes and ideas and thoughts cobbled together.... Nevertheless there are some great scenes of contemporary London and certain echoes ofAlan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty- in the way in which outsiders enter the circles of the rich in London and are corrupted....

Parallel political drama at home and abroad

Roughly a year ago, I blogged about theparallel feuds between the leaders and their "vices" in the UK and in Nigeria http://uknaija.blogspot.com/2005/09/leaders-squabbling-with-their-vices.html

Imagine my surprise therefore to find a year on, the simmering feuds bursting to the surface suddenly, unexpectedly- In the UK, Brownites forced Tony Blair to announce today that he would not be attending the Labour conference next year as Prime Minister. This announcement did not seem to go far enough for the Brownites who wanted a firm departure date and promised to keep baying for blood. What the reaction of the Blairites would be, who can tell? There were rumours of a heated confrontation between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown yesterday, alleged to be the worst ever between the two men.

Meanwhile back in Nigeria, the long simmering cauldron of bitterness between Obasanjo and his vice president Atiku bubbled over as the President sent a request to the Senate requesting the impeachment of his vice president, on the alleged grounds of corruption. As the Atiku camp struggled to fight back, potentially with a proposed impeachment of the President, I wondered if a scenario I've long hoped for would come to pass- a situation where Nigerian leaders dished the dirt on each other- it'll be interesting to see how this plays out...

Who would have thought that this would all come spinning into the open now- have the holidays had anything to do with it? Perhaps plans were honed and polished during the recess and are now being put into play....

Blair, Brown, disloyalty and Okija, female foreign ministers, recent reading and Isioma Daniel

The whole fuss around Tony Blair and his leaving date seems to have reached a new peak or trough(depending on whose side you are on) overnight. Only yesterday morning Blairites were insisting that it would be premature and damaging to set a leaving date and then by this morning, they were all over the place loudly saying that the Tone would be gone by next summer. Whether this had anything to do with the leakage of a planned triumphal victory tour of the country by the Blessed Blair early next summer was unclear but it was obvious that there had been an orchestrated message sent to the Blair loyalists to let rip. What was crystal clear to all observers was the hilt of the dagger sticking out of Gordon Brown's back....in all the interviews, the Blairites made it clear that there was no anointed successor and that the field for the succesion was open to all comers. While I have had my reservations about whether or not Gordon Brown can pull off the feat of leading Labour to a fourth election victory, I can't help but feel that he has been massively betrayed by Tony Blair who appears to have reneged on whatever formal or informal agreements they had had when Brown stepped down for Blair in 1994....Perhaps Brown should have considered dragging Tony to the infamous Okija shrine and made him swear there like some Nigerian politicians do to their acolytes, and then he wouldn't be where he is now....

For some reason I was thinking recently about Ngozi Okonjo Iweala and then my thoughts turned to female foreign ministers as she's since been replaced by another woman- Professor Joy Ogwu- and it then occurred to me that Nigeria, Israel, the UK and the US all currently have female foreign ministers- Tzipi Livni, Margaret Beckett and the delectable (!?!) Condi. Googling to see if any other countries did led me to this very interesting website http://www.guide2womenleaders.com/foreign_ministers_current.htm which has details of female leaders globally (complete with pictures)...

Just finished Atonement- Ian McEwan's novel published in 2001 which I had been meaning to read after I enjoyed Saturday. I was initially skeptical and unsure where the story was going but the ending definitely packed a punch- really great, thoughtful book. At the moment I'm reading what would probably be the equivalent of blogs from 1940s England- diaries kept by various ordinary people as part of the Mass Observation project http://www.massobs.org.uk/introduction.html now published in book form in Our Hidden Lives. It's very interesting to see what ordinary people made of the end of World War II, the Nuremberg trials and other historical events

I see Obasanjo has carried out another of his minor reshuffles exchanging the Ministers for Communications and the Minister of Works- what this really means six or so months to the end of his tenure, who can really say?

Meanwhile 7 months to the Nigerian presidential elections, there's a deafening silence as far as candidates putting forward their manifestos- perhaps they are still waiting for an anointing at Okija or whichever shrine has taken over as the anointing venue of choice for aspirant Nigerian leaders....

Finally, if like me you have ever wondered- "Whatever happened to Isioma Daniel? (the NigerianThisday reporter whose article on the Miss World beauty pageants in 2002 allegedly set off an orgy of violence) There's an update here- http://www.cbc.ca/sunday/isioma.html

Fighting colds, Blair's regret and critics on Adichie

Not a great weekend not least because I appear to be battling a filthy cold- i wonder if I picked it up on the plane. I hate colds because of their ambiguity-You know the feeling- you're not really unwell enough to completely drop out of life and yet you just feel like crap and like crawling into bed and staying there forever....

Tony Blair must be regretting the day he let slip the statement that he would not serve a full term following his reelection last year. Ever so often the UK media descends into a frenzy trying to speculate and get him to name the date. Brownites, acolytes of the taciturn Chancellor (the presumed anointed successor) leap into the fray and talk about how Blair's continued presence is a liability to the Labour party. The Tories watch, cautiously egging them on from the sidelines and rumours swirl of a final treachery in which a third party, a dark horse is anointed in Gordon Brown's place at the last minute. This morning, one of the leading contenders for dark horse- Alan Johnson the Education secretary was on the radio to talk about the new school meal standards Labour were introducing- away with deep fried food and semi-processed "meat" and in with fruit and veg- but all the interviewers wanted to talk about was whether he had any plans of running- like a true politician, he refused to be drawn, one way or another, simply repeating "I've made my position clear and I have nothing to add" in a rather unhelpful manner.

Stuck in bed over the weekend, I devoured the Guardian and was pleasantly surprised to see two Nigeria-related items in the Review section- one was Diana Evans' account of her reading tour of Nigeria facilitated by her publishers- Jeremy and Bibi of Cassava Republic and Naijablog fame http://books.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1863011,00.html and the second was a distillation of two reviewers views on Chimamanda Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,1862903,00.html Both reviewers were generally positive, but the Times reviewer was upset at the effeteness of the only major white character in the book, Richard whom I quite liked. The Telegraph reviewer however was upset that the book was not longlisted for this year's Booker Prize, a sentiment echoed by the Independent in an earlier interview http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/books/features/article1219876.ece

Over the weekend, with my cold and blocked sinuses I yearned for some hot pepper soup, but a friend brought me the next best thing- beef chilli ramen from Wagamama- as I slurped the noodles, crunched the onions and chewed the beef, I could feel myself getting better. ....