Life-&-Living

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. ...

Thirty odd people, myself included, cluster around a table in a somewhat private corner of the Monkey House. Once a quarter, the guys and girls from work all pile in here to de-stress, and let our hair down. Rumour has it that after enough beers have gone around, fortuitous slips centred around what certain bosses actually think about certain staff have been known to occur. Usually, the evening starts with a few beers and nibbles - fish fingers, spring rolls, and all the other light food we’d collectively call small chops in my other world, the small matter of a few thousand miles away. ...

I woke up to five missed calls on my phone. I had felt, rather than heard its insistent buzz deep within lalaland but sheer tiredness had kept me from waking up. Instead, the phone’s chirpy ringtone somehow ended up blending itself in with the background to some weird dream I promptly forgot on waking. Of the five missed calls, three were from my mother, one from my father’s phone and one from a private number. This has more or less become her standard M.O. - when she feels I am intentionally refusing to answer her phone calls that is. That she’d called five times suggested it was important, so I groaned inwardly, punched in the numbers for my calling card and made the phone call to Nigeria. ...

In retrospect, it was the best weekend to have been away from work - but I didn’t know that three weeks ago when on a whim I decided I needed an extended break. It just so happened that Thursday morning, which was my last work day of the week, brought with it the slight irritation of an unwelcome work event that needed a response. That event ended up spawning a response that had burgeoned into a full-fledged emergency of sorts - complete with the mindless, headless running around centred on being visible and being seen to be doing stuff, however pointless - by midmorning on Friday, by which time I was sauntering casually down Links Road, up the beach Esplanade and then unto the Boulevard with the sun on my back, tempered by a cool breeze from the sea and the barely perceptible sound of the waves lapping the shoreline, the sound track to what was a very leisurely stroll. ...

.. is a lot of time to spend in introspection, curled up tight into a ball (or sprawled out like an amorphous mass in my case), unable to lift my head and throat as they were being bombarded by the triune forces of a sore, swollen throat, a fever and a banging headache to boot. And think did I – when I was not obsessively googling home remedies for what turned out to be some flu strain sent from hell. ...

If I dialed down my definition of success to its most basic, it would have three (or four) components: Excel in (Corrosion & Materials) Engineering; Be the best husband, father, son, brother and friend I can be; Live in, and contribute to life in, a great city and a great church. Simple enough, I guess. Unless you’re me with a well documented attention to detail – often bordering on over-thinking – with which every little, simple decision segues into a long, drawn out exercise in Planning, Reviewing and Risk v. Reward Assessment. ...

Post London, TOj and I have kept in touch - primarily extended conversations about everything; work, life, failed loves and the stereotypes of Nigerian dudes in London as being primarily baby mama creators rather than the marrying kind. Not sure where that leaves me, being the never married, single-since-April-2011 dude who has only being in two relationships all his life. We do have a knack for great conversations between us, it must be said, in addition to all the elements of the future Mrs S spreadsheet that she checks. ...

And so I survived my first Aberdeen Christmas in a long while. It was with more than a little trepidation that I faced the end of the year; the niggling thought at the back of my mind initiated by the sudden realisation that my policy of disengaging from the myriad friendzoneships I was mired in had left me with no real excuse to make what had become fairly regular trips across the pond. Newcastle and London, as always, were temptingly good options - Newcastle because of the old school mates still down there, and London for the promise of piping hot moi-moi and the chance of a first face to face in near on two years with my super wing-woman K. Given my memories of my one and only Aberdeen Christmas to date - bucket loads of snow, lugging suitcases on to and off trains as I made the move up North, and missing a rendezvous with the only guy I knew in town at the time - I suppose my fears were justified if not entirely expected. ...

It will have been five years this year since I made the decision to up sticks, pack in the life I had lived up till that time and head out in the great unknown that was grad school, and what it would ultimately lead to a hiatus from Nigeria. On paper I had a good life. A job that left me squarely ensconced in the safe, settledness of middle class Nigerian life, the prospect of a final salary pension with the option of cashing out at age 45 if I so wished, and the almost cast iron guarantee of an average 20% pay rise every two years thanks to an aggressive union. ...

Although a year and some ago I thought I had truly gotten over the pain of the EJ debacle, I still managed to spend Christmas stateside attending a wedding, hanging with mutual friends and kind of hoping I would run into her. Neither happened, and when push came to shove I couldn’t bring myself to take the short hop across town to the city where she now lived. Coming into 2012 then, the targe t was to resolve a number of the other friendzoneships I had somehow gotten sucked in over the years. ...