Life

Image Source: Rajab Guga on Unsplash ** According to the Book of Proverbs King Solomon, who knew a thing or two about hope and despair once said - whether in despair or merely noting in a manner of fact way - that Hope deferred makes the heart sick, and for the last three months and some I feel like I have known just that; lurching — sometimes several times a day — between the delirious joy of looking forward to an adventure and the deep depths of despair. COVID-19 was the culprit, as were the not entirely unconnected issues of an oil supply glut and oil price wars leading to sub-zero oil futures pricing. That there was a clear cause-effect relationship did little to tame the perennial desire to find wider meanings in things that is our forte as Nigerians, cue warfare prayers from my near and dear ones, a la Mountain of Fire and all. ...

A Poets & Writers prompt from a few months ago asked us to explore ourselves by using the ten questions guests on the TV show, Inside the Actor’s studio, are asked. A few months late here goes my response: What is your favourite word? This would have to be ‘Quotidian’, a word I’ll admit to first hearing from Chris Abani’s 2008 TED Talk. Between the man, his work and the heft of the word, it is my favourite word, one I once made the theme of an entire blog. ) What is your least favourite word? Like, when it is used as an immensely irritating filler word. What turns you on? Boobs and brains. I’m partial to a well-spoken, well-read damsel with a great rack, cload in something just slingy enough to highlight the cleavage a wee bit. :) I’ve clearly thought too much about this…. Like this, which I’ll have to admit is disturbingly specific.. :) What turns you off? A nag.. What sound or noise do you love? I love the sound of rain on a tin roof, maybe a throwback to growing up in Nigeria and the freshness that a thunderstorm brings, washing dust and dirt away. A tin roof speaks of solidity and shelter I think, and the sound of hearing the rain rage outside whilst I’m safe within is one I love. What sound or noise do you hate? Dripping water. I suppose it is a counterpoint to rain, not least because dripping water drips in that annoying way, never quite making up its mind whether to be unleashed in a torrent or to just stop. Neither hot nor cold in a manner of speaking to use a Revelations metaphor. What is your favourite curse word? Fecking, like fucking but maybe less in your face? What profession other than your own would you like to attempt? Medicine, psychiatry or family medicine. How close I came I’d never know but both my sisters ended up towing that path and have quite succeeded at it I’d say. What profession would you not like to do? Policing, politics, and the pulpit… If heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the pearly gates? Could you have made your existence a little bit clearer and helped us understand our origins? What was all that cloak-and-dagger stuff about?

This has been sitting in my drafts for several months, so I thought I’d try to finish it off and post it here as a means to making use of the time I have on my hands. ** If there is a silver lining to being a terrible sleeper it is that I usually manage to wake up in time for things, typically before my alarm rings. The blips on that record are increasingly regular - and spectacular - like this past weekend when I slept through multiple alarms. When I finally woke up (having failed to do so to the alarm on my phone and on my watch), it was ten minutes before my taxi was due, cue half-brained rushing about to splash some water on my face, brush my teeth and grab my travel bags. By the time that was done, there were already two missed calls from the taxi driver and the company on my phone. There was, I thought, a hint of irritation on the driver’s face when I finally emerged. All of that disappeared once we were on the way, and speeding, to the airport. The usual chit-chat revealed he had passed through the corner of West Africa I was headed for many years ago, and that he was Latvian, not that anyone could have guessed from his near-perfect Aberdonian accent. Scrambling for change at the airport, he waived the additional £1.20, helped me with getting my bags out of the car trunk and then promptly disappeared for the next gig. Bag drop and security took ten minutes at that time of the morning, by which time I was barely lucid and grateful for the cup of black coffee I poured myself once I was into the lounge. I was the first of my work party to arrive, which gave me some time to settle in and breathe a little, before the incessant chit-chat and mindless prattle began. It was a good thing I managed to catch my breath because the chit-chat, when it began, focused on the prospect of my leaving for greener pastures - being a traitor to the cause was the good-natured accusation thrown about. In those days before the oil price tanked, there were stirrings of growth and opportunities and I was only the latest in a long line of folk who had either left or were in the process of leaving. To cut costs, we had somehow engineered a tight connection at Charles de Gaulle, our turn around time being a grand total of ninety minutes plane to plane which left us hands full, running almost full pelt through the airport. We made it with some time to spare in the end and were delayed by a further hour for reasons unknown to us, all of which left me internally cursing the necessity of the awfully early start. We found out in the end that the delay was due to a deportation order being served on someone, cue police and immigration and all the malarkey that comes with those. ...

Photo by Jose Antonio Gallego Vázquez on Unsplash ** When I reflected on life at the turn of the year, and wondered what the year would be for me, Delve Deeper came to mind. Behind that was the understanding, inspired in part by the Parable of the Wise and Foolish Builders, that everything worth its salt is tested, and only those which had roots sunk deep would survive. I was also on the cusp of quitting my job up north with the prospect of the move of a lifetime looming. Whatever your particular take on COVID-19 is — elaborate hoax, a pretext for instituting a new world order or a symptom of a broken world — what is incontrovertible is that in its wake has come a seismic change to the world and what we know of it. For all the preening, posturing and the facade of strength the world economies have presented, 2020 has shown it all up like an edifice built on shifting sands to use a biblical metaphor. The Emperor’s new clothes, for all we can see, are anything but a covering. ...

\\\* Seemingly like in the blink of an eye – like play like play in the pidgin English of my youth – we are somehow at the end of May! Summer is finally here, bringing in its wake the realisation that if I had stayed up North, the first of my Nine Fridays of Summer would have just gone past. As it is though, I find myself in an intermission of sorts, loitering in the space between a past life and the future in which an adventure in the sun hovers just out of reach, 70 days late. There are of course worse things than swapping grey granite for verdant green or being cooped up with family, like dying or very nearly dying like so many people, including a few closer to home for me, have over the past few months of this pandemic. ...

Of the many conversations I have had over the past few years, one sticks out in my mind, not for its length or its importance but for how odd it felt at the time. As I recall it, a travelling salesman and I had just finished a meeting and were heading to the kitchenette at work to drop our coffee mugs off when he asked: “How did you end up here?”. ...

beach\_morning book DataScienceConf food\_CDI food\_CDI2 lounge\_CDG --- In the end September sped past,

Spread out in various states of recline around a long table in the inner room of the Indian restaurant we have gathered in, I imagine we cast a scene not too dissimilar to [the last supper.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Supper_(Leonardo_da_Vinci) Not only are we thirteen (ignoring for a moment that S is barely 9 months old), it is a last supper of sorts, pulled together to celebrate the two J’s, in these their final days up here before they up sticks and move to study not too far off from ground zero in America’s bible belt. That we’ve plopped for Indian cuisine is perhaps a slight oddity given all thirteen of us have African roots. I suspect it is more indicative of the paucity of suitable eating options than adventure, which is why phones come out when it is time to order; google comes to the rescue. All that drags out the ordering process, which has a knock on effect on when we get our food. ...

I am seating in a meeting, listening to the folk around the table drone on about some subject now lost to memory when it hits me – in the way I imagine an out of body experience might – just how much of what is often dressed as expert opinion is little more than strongly expressed opinion. Far from thumbing my nose down at others, it is a farce I very much consider myself as a contributor to. That sense of winging it, making things up as I go along, is one which has come to define the first half of the year for me; from the vagaries of the aforementioned work situation to the minutiae of doing life, spread as it has been between the grey, dull granite of the ‘Deen and the leafy, colour-suffused greenery of the Wey country. ...

It feels as good a time as any to begin to think about beginning again, what with it being the start of the second half of the year (and there being no scientific basis for determining that this point on the earth’s arc around the sun is any more an origin than say 10.53 am on April the 16th). That it is bang in the middle of a particularly emotive season - bookended by H’s birthday and mine, with her passing and her interment looming large over that six week period - also adds to that sense of an ending, and a need to draw a line in the sand and begin again. ...