Random pre- Christmas blogging

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…