Posts

In my head all I want is…. To truly forget To know that I did my best to make it work To not have to ponder the what-ifs and maybe’s To truly move on And start afresh Sigh…

Will this father be prosecuted for defending his family against burglars? Reclaiming the Gentleman - The SBM approach. Even nature tears down first, before attempting to rebuild. The plus side to the Australian fires. A dastardly act, and using social media to hunt the bastards down: Sugarbelly’s blog post, an e-Petition and numerous Twitter mentions. How About We on the types of women to avoid. Eugene Cho muses on Troy Davis, the death penalty and what is an appropriate Christian response. An essay on travelling. Navigating the “You’re a great guy, but…..” talk. Looking for the perfect dating age gap? Six is it. The case for doodling.

I have only officially dated two women - although there have been a slew of girls-that-almost-were. EJ and I lasted nine months; the other woman was the one I’ll call F and we lasted just over two years. I met F at a Christian young peoples’ conference. It was Easter 2006, and on a whim I decided to attend the annual conference hosted by the group I used to attend on Campus. My little brother at the time was fairly well known in those circles, so hanging out with him got me some attention. That was where I saw her. And when their bus needed re-fuelling on the way back, my big fat more-than-I-could-use pay check from XOM came in handy. ...

…Of the last year. I suspect that today was my Newcastle moment; the day when my decision to head out to pastures new was taken. The UK is looking increasingly hostile ( I may be reading the comments section of the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph too much), but it certainly hasn’t helped that some drunk wanna-be pirate complete with an eye patch called me a f*ucking black bastard in broad day light in Aberdeen. Even conversations at work occasionally centre around immigrants - mainly Poles, but surely its a short hop from Poles to Nigerians. ...

What a bloke wants: Great conversation An appreciation of the arts A balanced Judeo-Christian worldview… The same sense of long term direction.. And not having to travel half way around the world to get them…. Surely, not too much to ask for? Or is it? Sigh…

In no particular order MG: High school mate, Mother figure, best friend through the teenage years, my very own right-girl-wrong-context conundrum, now married with children. H: High school mate, never really friends until we met up again in University, now married Elo: High school mate turned high profile Lawyer. I talked her through a particularly difficult heart break in ‘06 after which she plucked up a lot of courage and asked me out. Unfortunately (or fortunately) I didn’t bite, and she ended up running away to New York and the bloke who broke her heart in the first place. ‘Susuuu: Under grad protege who I taught calculus for a year. This was way too complicated to ever work, Now married TheB: Friend of a friend turned e-friend, turned friend in real life, sadly too many things happened to ‘us’ in 2009, from which we never recovered, still single. AJ: The kid from Hi5 when it was still the rage, and I had the luxury of free internet at my first Nigerian job. In retrospect she was always going to be way too young, we did end up, and have stayed very fast friends. Still single, but engaged to one of the lads.

Rebirth says men are never 100% single, and offers further clarification in a comment: In my opinion, being single means free from any baggage, no causal dating or stringing along, emotionally available and willing to commit if its the right person…but i find most guys have more than 2 women they are talking to at a time And I have been thinking. If I met someone (new) today, would I be emotionally available to commit, if it was the right person? Most probably not. Every time a picture of EJ flashes or her name comes up in a conversation, I realize I still haven’t forgotten, still haven’t let go. Am I ’talking’ to any other woman? No. There are the long term friends elC, TheB and ER who ostensibly might be options - but we’ve been stuck so much in the friends zone, I doubt anything can progress from that. ...

I suspect it might be the vestigial memories of night bus journeys from Lagos to Abuja back in the day, but my favourite journeys over the last couple of years have been on trains - spotting a rainbow just outside Edinburgh on the way to a job interview in 2009, returning to the North East of England for a weekend of introspection in 2010 and being surprised by the breath taking beauty of a sun bathed Forth Road Bridge, in November no less! Something about watching the grey granite of built up areas segue into lush greenery, and blue clouds, usually leaves me a little awed. ...

Being born on the campus of a Federal University in the ’80s, I grew up in what was a cultural multi-verse. On my street alone, one was as likely to run into a Pakistani anthropologist as a Cameroonian linguist, or a Scottish librarian for that matter. Over the course of growing up, these seemingly distinct cultures all bled into each other, till there was almost a multi-cultural sweet spot at the centre of it all. ...

Conventional wisdom suggests that quality trumps quantity. I imagine it is an MO that ‘makes sense’: identify a few high value targets, focus the scare resource of time and energy on them and (hopefully) maximize the potential reward. Louisa May Alcott probably spoke for everyone when she had Amy say in ‘Little Women’: You don’t need scores of suitors. You need only one… if he’s the right one The only snag in that little argument is that this is based on the implicit assumption that one knows in quite precise terms what/who the One is; and that this definition is pretty much static. In real life, I suspect that the who/ what is continuously evolving, such that truly knowing what that entails is an iterative process. One then, must of necessity, date in quantity to gain a better understanding of the ‘market’. ...