It’s Friday and I am blog-surfing during what ought to be some kind of lunch break- no don’t ask- too complicated. In a minute, I will stand up and walk through the doors to the café where I will ask for a brown baguette with coronation chicken and salad and a bag of crisps. Or perhaps not. Seeing as I often ask for that anyway, the staff often burst into laughter once I turn up. Is there anything wrong with eating what you like over and over again? I remember my first term at university when I ate rice and stew twice a day, occasionally leavened with some beans and was as happy and healthy as anyone, at least I thought so.
It is cold, freezing, the kind of cold that hurts your nostrils and burns its way right into your lungs searing your throat as it passes by. On the train, there are coughs and splutters aplenty, and I find myself eyeing the perpetrators, silently warning them “If you dare give me that your cold, eh!” As if looks could cauterize the bacteria or viruses or whatever it is that causes these colds and coughs…
My lips split, laughing at a joke outside the office today and so I am slathering them in lip salve. Come to think of it, the weather isn’t unlike harmattan, in its harshness, with the dust clogging your airways with a similar harshness and lips requiring a good slathering of salve to avoid splittage…
Recent reading has covered Blake Morrison’s South of the River, an utterly enjoyable romp through South London in the Blair years following a varied cast of characters as well as The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which I had long heard about but never got round to reading. A recent work-related foray to Edinburgh found me with time to kill before getting the shuttle back to the airport and so I walked down the dark brooding somewhat Gothic streets of Edinburgh city centre to the small bookshop hiding in a corner. Browsing the shelves and name-checking Adichie and Habila, I stumble across a pile of pristine Muriel Spark novels, a bargain at 99p each and seeing how slim The Prime is, I make my way to the shelf where the bearded bespectacled proprietor takes my pound coin, offering a penny’s change and a brown paper bag which I decline….
Christmas carols blare out from shops and on television as we are exhorted to shop for Britain. In Nigeria I imagine the frenzy to buy things for Christmas in full swing, the streets around the Marina/CMS area thronging with pedlars of cheap toys. Across the seas we are gripped by the same frenzy to buy….
Perhaps that’s why I wake up to 15 missed calls from a Nigerian phone number this morning. At first I panic, thinking it portends bad news but, no it is a cousin making a last ditch attempt at extracting a Western Union transfer to ease the impending cash sucking crunch of Christmas…
Each morning it sometimes feels as if I am walking through thick gooey liquid, a feeling enhanced by the dark gloomy days…this morning walking to the train station in the small town where a work Christmas do has brought me, I spot a lollipop lady, a creature I have often read about but never seen, standing by the primary school to ferry children across the busy road, her huge lollipop in hand. But unlike the ladies of my imagination (and the Ladybird books), this is no matronly twinkly comfortably padded mother figure. Here is a blonde Amazon, some six feet tall, her legs encased in bronzed leather high heeled boots, her pony-tail flicked away as she guides the children across…
So Ibori, the thieving Niger Delta ex-governor has finally been arrested by the EFCC. Perhaps there is something to the Yaradua rule of law after all. The Nigerian Guardian reopens after an enforced closure caused by a strike and the question is raised why journalists adept at exposing the exploitation and corruption of government are so silent when it comes to their employers…
Friday, December 14, 2007
Wednesday, December 05, 2007
"Stolen" time, cheese eating and a positive silence?
I know the clocks went back in October but did “they” do something to steal our time as well- where do the seconds and minutes and hours go? I keep promising myself that today I will spend time to update my blog and then never get round to it. I haven’t had a chance to read blogs in ages and as for Facebook…what’s that? Or maybe finally while I wasn’t looking, responsible adulthood has crept up on me….
More train stories:
On the train from Liverpool Street to Stansted airport I was sitting beside these two couples, young and blonde and good-looking- poster children for the British dream- they obviously all worked in the City as evidenced by their rapid chatter interspersed with scrolling through their Blackberries and then making urgent, rapid-fire calls to the office, talking about this deal and that deal and closing…. I watch them fascinated and hear one of them explain to the person at the other end that he is going to cheese-eating, wine-drinking surrender monkey country for the weekend….later I see them in the queue for the check in for the Ryanair flight to Bergerac….
Who on earth chose the lurid yellow and bright blue uniform of the Ryanair staff? Yes I know it’s a budget airline and they need to keep costs down but cheap materials also come in muted colours, don’t they. I’m tempted to whip on the sunglasses at the glare of the uniforms so reminiscent of the school uniforms in a poor village school in Nigeria…
I approach the security gate, backpack secured and book in hand and am not really paying attention when it gets to my turn. I unsling the backpack and put it through the X ray machine and then emerge at the other end. I have forgotten my toothpaste in the backpack which means it is pulled out of the queue for special checks in these days of no-liquids, no-gel flying. I am still not payng full attention as the young Asian woman explains that she is going to swipe the backpack for explosives. She is quite young- barely twenty and I imagine that it is first time nerves that make her swipe my bag again and again. By the third time, I am paying more attention and she is looking more flustered. Suddenly I see her stop and run to an older, more senior- looking woman, who then calls the attention of HER boss, a middle aged man who comes to me and informs me that my bag has tested positive for traces of explosives. I reel as I expect him to say it’s just a joke but when I look up, he’s deadly serious.
He runs off a series of questions- how long have I owned the backpack, where have I taken it and so on and so on….he then whips out a form and asks to take my details, having decided that the positive test may have come from one of the places that I have taken my bag to in the last week. Apparently some chemicals used in everyday life can give positive results. Giving my name, address and contact details, I fear that they will stop me from flying but he waves me through. Nevertheless I worry- will my name now enter some database? What if some nutter does blow up the plane, will I then be blamed post-humously? As if it would matter then.
Landing in Bergerac at the tiny airport, I make the immigration officer’s day when he finally gets to use his stamp. Used to waving EU citizens through, he waves me through as well, before realizing that my passport is green not red. He holds up the queue as he flicks through my passport for the right visa and then with aplomb marches to his desk, where he unleashes his heavy stamp on to my passport with a gusto that suggests that he does not get to do this very often…
Somehow, it seems as if not very much news is coming out of Nigeria, or perhaps it’s my mood, but it seems as if things are settling into a more quiet, more sedate pace…which is probably a good sign.
There’s a new edition of Farafina magazine out and following closely on Helon Habila’s successful book tour, Chika Unigwe, visitor on this blog from time to time, begins a Nigerian book tour to promote the publication of her first novel ,The Phoenix
More train stories:
On the train from Liverpool Street to Stansted airport I was sitting beside these two couples, young and blonde and good-looking- poster children for the British dream- they obviously all worked in the City as evidenced by their rapid chatter interspersed with scrolling through their Blackberries and then making urgent, rapid-fire calls to the office, talking about this deal and that deal and closing…. I watch them fascinated and hear one of them explain to the person at the other end that he is going to cheese-eating, wine-drinking surrender monkey country for the weekend….later I see them in the queue for the check in for the Ryanair flight to Bergerac….
Who on earth chose the lurid yellow and bright blue uniform of the Ryanair staff? Yes I know it’s a budget airline and they need to keep costs down but cheap materials also come in muted colours, don’t they. I’m tempted to whip on the sunglasses at the glare of the uniforms so reminiscent of the school uniforms in a poor village school in Nigeria…
I approach the security gate, backpack secured and book in hand and am not really paying attention when it gets to my turn. I unsling the backpack and put it through the X ray machine and then emerge at the other end. I have forgotten my toothpaste in the backpack which means it is pulled out of the queue for special checks in these days of no-liquids, no-gel flying. I am still not payng full attention as the young Asian woman explains that she is going to swipe the backpack for explosives. She is quite young- barely twenty and I imagine that it is first time nerves that make her swipe my bag again and again. By the third time, I am paying more attention and she is looking more flustered. Suddenly I see her stop and run to an older, more senior- looking woman, who then calls the attention of HER boss, a middle aged man who comes to me and informs me that my bag has tested positive for traces of explosives. I reel as I expect him to say it’s just a joke but when I look up, he’s deadly serious.
He runs off a series of questions- how long have I owned the backpack, where have I taken it and so on and so on….he then whips out a form and asks to take my details, having decided that the positive test may have come from one of the places that I have taken my bag to in the last week. Apparently some chemicals used in everyday life can give positive results. Giving my name, address and contact details, I fear that they will stop me from flying but he waves me through. Nevertheless I worry- will my name now enter some database? What if some nutter does blow up the plane, will I then be blamed post-humously? As if it would matter then.
Landing in Bergerac at the tiny airport, I make the immigration officer’s day when he finally gets to use his stamp. Used to waving EU citizens through, he waves me through as well, before realizing that my passport is green not red. He holds up the queue as he flicks through my passport for the right visa and then with aplomb marches to his desk, where he unleashes his heavy stamp on to my passport with a gusto that suggests that he does not get to do this very often…
Somehow, it seems as if not very much news is coming out of Nigeria, or perhaps it’s my mood, but it seems as if things are settling into a more quiet, more sedate pace…which is probably a good sign.
There’s a new edition of Farafina magazine out and following closely on Helon Habila’s successful book tour, Chika Unigwe, visitor on this blog from time to time, begins a Nigerian book tour to promote the publication of her first novel ,The Phoenix
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