War on London streets, remember Saro-Wiwa and marriage in southeastern Nigeria

In these days when darkness falls almost immediately after midday, I find myself making my way through cold huddled crowds heading home. This early darkening still takes me by surprise but then I remind myself that it's payback for all those long summer nights when we sit sipping Pimm's and lazing in the sun till 9pm or later... I realize that everything is balanced

On the streets of London, there's a war going on between free two evening newspapers- the london paper and London Lite. Now for the four or so years I've been here- there's only been one evening newspaper- the Evening Standard which cost 40p until recently when it went up to 50 p. It's on sale at all the train and underground stations and many commuters grab one to avoid having to look their fellow commuters in the eye.....Then a few weeks ago, vendors appeared on the streets every evening handing out free copies of something called the london paper.....free paper versus 50p paper? Hmm not a tough choice there, so the Evening Standard guys hit back with their own free paper- London Lite which is like a dumbed down version of the Standard. So now commuters on their way home have to run the gauntlet of not one but two sets of vendors handing out free papers. Looking on the positive side, most of the vendors on my route home are black or Asian, so they're obviously providing jobs for the brothers and sisters. On the negative side however, the streets and the train carriages heave with discarded free newspapers....Surely these two newspaper giants should make some contribution to the extra cleaning costs which their commercial war is generating. And I haven't even started on the forests that are being massacred to feed this paper war....

Angela Davis and Ken Wiwa are appearing at City Hall on Friday in the final event in the Remember Saro-Wiwa programme for this year http://www.remembersarowiwa.com/ . I'd hoped to go but the main hall is full up and I really will not go to all that trouble just to sit through a video link- sorry.

Stumbled across another paper by the anthropologist Daniel Jordan Smith on marriage in contemporary South Eastern Nigeria...very interesting reading http://paa2006.princeton.edu/download.aspx?submissionId=60281

Meanwhile, the launch of the Heart of Africa project appears to have received very little if any coverage in the media here. I haven't seen any. Even the Nigerian newspapers concentrated on the bizarre attempt by protesters to hijack the event http://allafrica.com/stories/200611210309.html . Yet there are Nigerians in strategic positions in the media here, but I bet no-one asked them....and so it was the usual suspects...