Personal

MMA International On a clear, cloudless day, Amsterdam from above looks like a patch work quilt, its greenery criss-crossed by a network of canals, an endlessly repeating pattern; broken only by the shore line, and a little further out the silhouettes of oil rigs, an enduring monument to the Dutch pride of place in the scavenging of North Sea Oil. On the morning of my return to cold, wet and windy Aberdeen, I find myself half asleep, mentally pulling myself up by my very own bootstraps to remain awake as my City Hopper makes the hour forty five minute hop from Amsterdam to Aberdeen. Ever since an ever so slight snore embarrassed me a few years ago, I have tried to minimise future risks by limiting how often I fall asleep in public places. There were mitigating circumstances then - EJ might be best placed to tell if I indeed snore as a matter of course - I had stayed up all night studying just before a class test and I was very very knackered. ...

My return to Benin was less about closure than reacquainting myself with the past all over again. As feared, there was an immediate fall out from the wedding – the next morning, Mother was at the door of the room I was sharing with the kid bro wanting to chat, and there could be no uncertainty about what her primary objective was. It was thus expedient to engineer a move away to the relatively low pressure of Aunt G’s back in Benin. I had an official reason for upping sticks and bailing - chasing up transcripts for the Welding Engineering PhD I may or may not require after all. The other unofficial reason was to catch up with Cousin E and her baby, Dara, the fifth and final member of the clan born since the last time I was out here. ...

You know that the bride’s wedding gown will be ultra conservative as will be those for the bridal train. There will be no low cut, cleavage accentuating, eye candy-ish, strapless nonsense, and the hems will be at least an inch below the knee. You know that there will be at least ten different preachers – each with the belief that he is a colossus in his own right - and where both bride and groom are PKs, they might be nearer fifty than not. You know that the program will be tweaked to provide an opportunity for every one of them to do something – give a word of admonition, pray, or lead the reading of the vows, or take a thanksgiving offering. You know that every speech and every prayer will be interminably long, as though there were an unofficial contest with a prize for the longest, most colourful speech. You know that it will be baking hot, and dry, because the powers that be have ‘decreed’ that there will be no rain. ...

Hawker, Lagos Plan A was to catch a flight from Lagos into Benin and then a bus for the final leg of the trip to the small university town of Ekpoma, where the wedding was to hold, but the events of the last few weeks ensured that the one thing my mother insisted on was that the journey out of Lagos would be by road. I thus had to brace myself to navigate the tortuous 3oo km+ trip from Lagos into Benin with minimum fuss. ...

As I stand, satchel slung across my shoulder waiting for the call to board the KLM flight from Schipol to Lagos, I think back wistfully to a similar scene just over three years ago, when I stood within the Departures Lounge at the Murtala Mohammed Airport making the transit in the opposite direction. Then, as with now, it was a wedding - that of Sister #1 - that had lured me across the miles, outside the safety of what had been a year of near total insulation, back to Nigeria. In truth, the time and the distance have been mere blips on the timeline of life, but so total has the lostness been that it almost feels like I need to be reacquainted with everything all over again. ...

A few weeks ago when I sat down to identify the five or six things that would make 2012 the perfect year, one of the things that eventually came to the fore was carrying over zero holidays in to next year. That by itself shouldn’t have been significant, but between hoarding my holidays for what I thought would be quarterly jaunts westward and my eventual withdrawal into my time honoured silo, I ended up needing a flurry of trips late in the year to claw back what was a huge holiday backlog. Even that was not enough, I ended up losing four days having carried over the maximum seven days into the new year. ...

Since the end of Q1 edition, quite a few changes have occurred. It turned out that in addition to the worldview issues Q and I had, she was also a carrier of the haemoglobin S trait (like I am). Given the family history I have got with losing the sister Gracie all those many years ago to sickle cell disease, that effectively put an end to any further involvement. Interestingly, all the other potentials from the last update have more or less slipped off the front burner. AJ effectively broke contact, and I quite frankly made no effort to keep in touch, Ify’s proximity (and the fact that she lives close by) probably means that there are no real opportunities to progress in that direction anymore; and as for TheB, I suspect I am well and truly over her. Liz got back in touch after quite a few months, and we had a frank conversation, however I think we may have crossed the rubicon here. ...

I have spent the last few days offsite attending the SPE’s Oilfield Corrosion Conference in Aberdeen. When the email invite first came through, I knew I had to be part of it. The one main gripe I have about my job is the lack of real technical content in it on an ongoing basis. I tend to get sucked into the fire fighting, reactive mode that prevents me from applying my specialist Corrosion & Materials engineering knowledge. ...

Eight years ago, I was a wee lad, barely 23, fresh off my year of serving the nation in the foothills of Sango; with the mellifluous, if unintelligible, sounds of the music that consistently wafted upwards from the traders that surrounded my very modest lodgings at Maraba still ringing in my ears. I was none the wiser of the ways of the world at the time – like the good son of my Mother that I still was, in addition to being the pitifully shy, introspective bloke, I still greeted older males and females as ‘Sir’ and’Ma’ - a predisposition which perhaps made me fall prey to the shenanigans of a couple of police men on my first day at work. ...

The morning after the evening when I finally decided I had had enough - of playing second fiddle to all the lasses who were or were not in my life, of being the simple nice guy whose remit was providing the shoulder to cry on and all, and seeking unilateral closure via radical surgery, I got a text message from MmeK. Apparently, she’d not been feeling very well, which was the driver for the extended period of silence. That turned out to merely be the first salvo in what would be a barrage, seemingly orchestrated by whoever runs the world, to test my staying-away-from-women resolve. ...