Occasional-Essays

Standing here on the cusp of a milestone birthday of sorts, the sense is one of relief - that what has been a deeply emotive, if difficult year, has ended without too much lingering damage. Much of course is relative, depending on that difficult to define quality emotional capacity, or resilience. To my untrained mind, it would appear that like muscles and exercise, the more experience one has had dealing with trauma and difficult, emotionally charged situations, the easier it should get. I suspect the jury is still out on that. Tempering the sense of relief is a sense of clarity, the detached sort that hits in the moments between when a car begins to skid off a bridge and when it hits the icy water beneath. Time, in those moments, seems to stand still, each event on the time line of dying taking on crystal clear quality, like an HD frame, frozen. This birthday has that feeling of being a portal to inevitable change. The facts are what they are, I am now nearer forty than thirty, and that realisation in one fell swoop takes away any remaining pretensions to enduring youth I still have. What this does in addition is bring to the fore the questions of being, identity and direction I have managed to sweep under the carpet over the past few years. ...

[ Source] When March finally dragged itself to an end, I remember thinking that I hadn’t felt as stressed as I did at the time since 2008, 2008 being a nadir of sorts; one that ended up with me quitting my job and heading back to grad school, my version of navigating a delayed quarter life crisis. So out of sorts and form did I feel that I took myself away to the Starbucks in Union Square, one Sunday after church, ordered the most decadent hot chocolate with cream on offer and proceeded to have a conversation with myself. What quickly became apparent from that exercise was that there were a number of pressure points which were driving my malaise. ...

[ Source] When I was seventeen, I was sure that I would be married by the time I turned twenty-seven. I knew the date, Saturday the 7th of July 2007, who she would be and the song we would say our vows to. That year was my first away from home at University in a different city, one in which I cut my teeth creating a budget, spending money as I chose and defending my results to my father at the end of each month - all very responsible and grown up - or at least so I thought. There was no real science – or thought for that matter - to the timing, merely a wild stab in the dark. Ten years seemed far enough into the future to feel like forever, and my big Uncle F who seemed to embody adulthood perfectly turned twenty seven that year, or maybe thirty. Reality, I would later find out, was far more intention and hard slog than hit, hope and wishful thinking. ...

[ Source] When my father would tan my hide - which was often in the years between turning twelve and escaping to University when I turned seventeen - he would send one of the many cousins who lived with us to fetch his preferred instrument, a lean, mean pankere, roll up his sleeves and matter-of-factly deliver a canning of epic proportions. The speed with which the instrument materialised time and time again - in spite of my best efforts - had me convinced that my cousins took a certain perverse, gleeful joy in seeing my bum tanned. Any number of infractions could have been the trigger for one of those in those days - taking apart his treasured gramophone for the heck of it (and not being able to put it back together again a la Humpty Dumpty), sneaking off to ‘dessert’, the patch of red earth where endless games of football took place - and young men where introduced to cigarettes and girls if you believed my mother, and once resorting to my fists to settle an altercation with E, the sharp mouthed imp who seemed to delight in getting under my skin. Early on, the tears flowed in copious amounts, until I mastered the act of tensing my buttocks just enough to mitigate the pain, the odd faint moan escaping my gritted teeth the only concession I allowed myself. Custom and practice dictated that, upon completion, I would have to say thanks and then sit through a debriefing session where my failings would be analysed, and alternate behavioural practices highlighted. In retrospect, the canning - intense as it was - was never truly the worst outcome. Infinitely worse was being left to stew in silent contemplation, particularly where my failings had occurred outside the confines of the house on 39th; my sense of guilt being complicated by the uncertainty around how much, if any, my father knew of my misdemeanours. ...

[ Source] Amidst the hurly burly that was the last quarter of 2014 at work - not helped by the unease set off by sliding oil prices, and questions around the future viability of North Sea oil and gas given lifting costs and taxes - the crazy gang team at work made time out to head across town for a day to reflect on how we’d performed through the year and agree objectives for the 2015. For what it’s worth it was good craic, much better than I expected given the strong personalities within the team, and the sense of simmering conflict, even though it was a tad too reliant on woozy, zen-ish things like sitting in a circle and taking time out to reflect in silence. ...

Scottish-independence-referendum-flags A few months ago, people across the length and breadth of the nation of Scotland went to the polls to answer the question, “Should Scotland be an independent country?” At stake was the very future of the United Kingdom, and Scotland’s place in it. On one hand, the governing Scottish National Party staked its reputation on a ‘Yes’ vote, alongside the Scottish Greens and the Scottish Socialists under the aegis of Yes Scotland, whilst Scottish Labour, the Scottish Conservative Party, and the Scottish Liberal Democrats took a pro-Union Stance under the Better Together banner. ...

[ Source] Whilst rustling through my documents at the weekend - I forget what prompted the decision to take on the Sisyphean task of rummaging through drawers filled with several years’ worth of papers of varying vintage - it struck me that it was now nearly five years to the day since I dragged myself, bags in tow, off the East Coast train from Newcastle to Aberdeen to begin a new life of sorts. Ditching my Nigerian job for grad school 18 months before meant that nostalgia - and twenty-something years’ worth of memories - counted for little; pragmatism was very much the defining consideration. In a sense, Newcastle, and then Aberdeen afterwards was about tearing everything up and starting afresh from scratch, pretty much the recovery from a self-imposed apocalypse. The driver for that decision was a sense of injustice at the Nigerian work environment; five years of being unaligned (being from the minority in a minority state didn’t help), a sense of having hit a glass ceiling and the desire to prove myself on a global sense all contributing. ...

Back in ‘94 when Delirious was still the house band for The Cutting Edge, a local youth event run by the Arun Community Church in Littlehampton, doing music full time didn’t look feasible, nor was the possibility of multiple Dove Awards and a Grammy nomination. In fact between leading worship at the cutting edge events and keeping up with a hectic schedule of gigs across the UK, the group that would become arguably the UK’s greatest Christian contemporary music exports had to hold down day jobs to keep things ticking. ...

In the immediate aftermath of the Woolwich murder, once that truly harrowing video had surfaced and the Nigerian connection was first mooted, I found myself cast in the unwilling role of the Nigerian ’expert’ at work. For most of the people in my corner of the world, I was the most handy Nigerian they could talk to. The odd attempt to parlay it into banter did come up, but for the most part, these were people looking to get some perspective on what was both vicious and senseless. ...