A-Prodigal-Abroad

__ It seems as though scarcely a blink has passed, yet somehow it is the end of March, a quarter of the year having sped past. Winter, a not particularly difficult one as I recall, has been and gone. Incessant rain interspersed with sunshine, longer days and the first sight of flowers blossoming all point to spring on the horizon, and how have I needed that! There is also the small matter of a milestone of sorts - four months in the new gig. A semblance of routine has taken root: Monday night flights to the continent, three days of hard work, and a late return to London on Thursday nights, followed by some work from home on Fridays. ...

Turning forty four sometime last year (where did the time go) seems to have been a trigger for thoughts about legacy rising to the fore in my mind, the end result of which was packing up my bags and swapping the sand dunes for Surrey. The decision being made, it still took the better part of six months to execute; lining up something this side of the dunes, rolling up the detritus of 1200 days of life and navigating notice periods amongst other things. Tnere was a lot of hand wringing, offer/counter offer and a little bit of emotional blackmail (of the good sort) but in the end what had to be done had to be done and I was on a flight heading bacck to good old Blighty. ...

Never one to miss the opportunity proffered by a long weekend, I drag myself and my back pack in the wee hours of the morning of the 27th to the airport to catch two flights - first to Dubai and then to London. The third trip of the sort this year, it is my ongoing attempt to manage this year of distributed domestication, one in which S and L having returned to London for good I am left shuttling back and forth every few months. Unlike the last time, I do not run into anyone I know, for which I am thankful for the company of Ike Anya’s Small by Small. Beautifully short and deeply evocative of my own memories of growing up, I find myself going down mental rabbit holes, fleshing out the (typically) well written prose with my own experiences. Not being of a medical persuasion myself - engineering saved me from all that - the extensive overlap with friends and family does leave me with enough knowledge to appreciate his specific travails. with the memories of growing up on a university campus it drew in. ...

Cake with I, somewhere on a humid Lagos afternoon ** Being a prodigal abroad, in a relatively small, close knit expat community has its perks, not least if you are Nigerian. Truth be told, more often than not, there is a risk of private spaces being invaded, but when they come through, they come through spectacularly. The most recent example of this was Easter Sunday, on which after dragging myself home from work my late evening reverie was interrupted by persistent knocking. At the door was M, the matronly mother figure from three streets over, with a bowl of piping hot egusi soup, some swallow and a tub of fried rice in tow. Whatever misgivings simmered beneath the surface at the intrusion vanished very quickly, wafting away as though borne by the steam still rising from the bowls of food. ...

** As though in the blink of an eye, winter out here has somehow slipped away, the halcyon days of pleasant twenty-five degree mid-day weather and leisurely late evening walks replaced by mid day temperatures in the low thirties. Whilst not truly hot enough to be unpleasant yet, the days leave one with a sense of borrowed time, a fleeting, finite block of time to be enjoyed before harsh reality hits. To make the most of it, and prepare myself for the long slog ahead, I pack the lightest bag I have and catch a flight back to London. Heathrow seems the same way it has always been - functional, frenetic, and increasingly arranged around minimising human contact. Trying to get cash from the ATMs for my taxi raises the spectre of having to pay a withdrawal fee for my UK debit card. A rude shock, and a first for me, if my memory serves me right. A mix-up with the telephone number they have on file for me means we spend the better part of twenty minutes trying to find each other, the blasts of cold, wet air a reminder of the stark difference between here and there. Several phone calls to the taxi company later, he gets my correct number and we find ourselves for the twenty minute ride home via the M25. ...

Time as a trickster of sorts is a theme I find myself coming back to again and again, the key motif being how in the moment life and time can seem like drudgery, but when viewed from the vantage point of hindsight it can seem compressed, like a video watched at 2x speed. My thoughts as I packed up my bags and began to prepare for the short hop back were very much in that vein, not helped I suspect by the long hard year I had had. Between L, her boundless energy and various work related niggles, I was running on empty for the final few weeks before I left. Awaiting me on the other side - in addition to reintegrating myself back - were a big house move, and the mother of all Nigerian parties on the other side of town. If there was any anticipation, it was hope that I would finally get to sink my teeth into a juicy burger, indulge in all the bacon and sausages I could manage, and hop along to the odd Parkrun. As it turns out, all of my fears - and none of the things I was looking forward to - materialized.As is its wont, Reality and expectation never quite matched up. ...

Photo by Matthieu Joannon on Unsplash ** The heat hangs heavy on the head, the way a wet blanket only partially wrung dry after being pounded by feet in a washbasin hangs listlessly in a barely-there breeze. The short afternoon walks to the canteen, to grab some combination of a salad, chicken and rice is beginning to feel like a chore, not helped by the sand which has become a permanent fixture it seems. Some days G and I wonder if the haze is from fog or dust but the loud whirl of my air purifier settles it for me; dust it is - that most irritating kind that finds its way through every tiny crinkle in our armour, covering everything with a fine layer of brown. Not far away in their ubiquity are the flies which flit around everything, their persistent buzz the soundtrack to life in these baking summer months. With Ramadan behind us, it is the season of long vacations and every other day it seems someone else in the wider team disappears for a few weeks. My turn to disappear is in about a month, and for the first time in a long time, I am looking forward to kicking back, waking up at my leisure then sticking L in her stroller and grabbing brunch with real bacon. Adding a few more Parkruns to my total - with maybe one push for a new PB - would be a welcome bonus. ...

Photo by Il Vagabiondo on Unsplash ** One day it was wet, slightly windy and the temperature was below 30 degrees C, the next it wasn’t, which is how seemingly out of the blue the semblance of winter bowed out, being replaced by summer in all its fierceness. To be brutally honest, calling ‘it’ winter would be a stretch by all accounts, but for the context of the prospect of 40+ weather over the next few months. Of more personal importance though is that it is the end of Ramadan, and the lengthened hours with little food that was my lot in the period (a quirk of the shift patterns revised for the period was that my work day started an extra hour early, and the food spots at work were all closed). As with last year, I decided it would be a fantastic time to attempt to shift some of the weight, tacking on three morning runs and reduced carbs to the month. The three kilograms which have somehow slid off into the ether suggests there was some value to all that exertion. Whether it was worth it all remains to be seen though. ...

Photo by Max van den Oetelaar on Unsplash ** It feels somewhat trite, given what is afoot in the world, to be riled up about life in my gilded prison corner of the world. The Ukraine and Russia conflict looms large of course, but for all the outpouring of support - and some might say posturing - it feels more like a cause célèbre, than anything else. As others have pointed out thousands more have lost their lives in Yemen,. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars were hardly less gruesome for ordinary civilians. Closer home, it seems like Nigeria teeters more on the edge of imploding, with power, security and the general hardship levels all running away in the wrong direction. Of course, concurrent occurrences of bad things does not make any of them less ‘bad’. One can only hope that the energies expended in mobilizing and blanketing the air waves with the plight of Ukrainians is also extended to other (blacker and browner) bodies. ...

Photo by Kenza Benaouda on Unsplash ** Of the things that still irk me, more than a year into my Arabian Odyssey, the sheer inefficiencies which seem baked into the system stand out for particular ire. Case in point: this past week to spend ten minutes picking up a letter from my employer and then delivering it at a government office fifteen kilometres away, I had to drive 250+kilometres. To my mind, it is something that can and should dare I say, be managed via an online portal but I found to my pain that this was not the case. It is no wonder then that in the short space of over a month I have driven just shy of three thousand kilometres, mainly between my outpost in the middle of nowhere, work (twice), the big city next door (multiple times) and the occasional trip to the provincial capital for some government thing or the other twice too. ...