The Girl Who Left Me

Next time I go to an office and the first girl I spot has easy smiles and shining eyes and cultured speech and truthful hips, I won’t waffle and wait until the meeting is over before I trade numbers. I will cadge for her digits at once. Why risk her leaving for home while I’m bivouacked for 3 longs hours with her boss?

Remembering Names

To all the people who always remember names and put them to the right faces, I wonder how you do it. Surely it is not subconscious. And if you make a conscious effort, do you use association (and shocking mental images) or is it just relentless repetition?

Zinedine Zidane

The waltz magnifique, the fox trot, the faux step. A shimmy, a dart délicat et délicieux, a liquid lob, a volte-face. Wonderful weave, back heel de toute beauté. G-o-a-l! Incroyable! It could have been a divine dance. It's ZINEDINE ZIDANE!

Thing on Wheels

I was driving past the neat office blocks at Ridge behind a spritely Toyota Corona (remember that car?) I was curious about who had kid-gloved theirs to keep it roadworthy for so long, when a balled-up mangy tissue whorled out of the open window. I overtook to see for myself who had hallmarked such a hideous habit. When I saw his/its face, I understood how the filthy tissue and the vile habit of ejecting rubbish from a moving car all fit in with his/its smutty face.

Kebab-Craving in Accra

Adabraka was too far from Ridge, and the Kebab Boys at Nyaniba Estates Junction were packing up, putting out the naked flame. It was 10 p.m. Fresh out of boneless, they were too polite to my pinstripe to even entice with the almost-bones left on a few old skewers. So I pulled off Ring Road, arced the U away from the La end, hooked the Labone Junction exit and swung into the second right towards Celsbridge. In five minutes I was cruising through Cantonments, the Airport, Tetteh Quarshie and the Spintex. Three kebab sticks and three fully loaded kebabs, lay on the seat next to me.

7 Votes

My totally loud, know-it-all roommate goes to bed at 6 p.m. It is 2001. My roomie has just stood for election as Hall President at Legon Hall in the University of Ghana. I know he is infamous, derided, mocked. He thinks he is popular, famous, loved. He wins! Not the elections. He wins 7 votes out of over 5000. Take away 4 (the number of his roommates). Take away 1 (his own vote). He just had to sleep early, right?

Bringing in the Girls

At college, people know full well what they are down for. Boys will not sprout wings and be humbugged with a halo just because girls are around. So if the whip-cracking Czars of the University of Ghana hallucinate that inserting girls into an all-male residence will lasso and tame the boys, then they should have rightly gone with the dinosaur, the dodo, the caveman and other creature-fossils.

A Very Adult Question

I have a callow college friend – 19 is she! We have only makeshift-met two times or three. We work the cellies when the weeks between become many. Her call comes through one rainy night – I recall how pinching the air was. She says she doesn’t know where I live and thinks it overly odd. I don’t know what to say, so I limn it to her (she has imagination!). She says she’d like to see it, and school is not far from where I live. I parry it with I can only make it on weeknights. She says that’s ok. So, I raise the white flag and say “soon”.

Am I the only one with questions? Is there a lot of trust? Or am I caught in her youthful crosshairs?

Mine is Bigger than Yours

I was lapping up this delicious little book on how to be “seriously good” in court. It had only three hundred pages. At an office, I met an older lawyer who looked inches impressed. He said he had a book of his own to show me ... and onlookers. He lumbered off and returned in a minute with a one-foot-thick titanic tome on the same topic! At that moment, I wanted to drop my trousers to see what he’d do next.

Tyre-Mending in Accra

On a rainy evening on a public holiday, I was just zooming off from work to wolf a pizza. It was already ordered. Ah-woooo! Phhst, a tack retired one of my tyres! I’d fixed that same one the week before. The rubbish tyre men had looked thick and bungling. But it was in the middle of the Devil’s ass – I couldn’t pick and choose. They’d applied super glue instead of rubber glue and a little common sense. So I stood glued in 'Mud Acre' while proper tyre hands did over the punctured pneumatic. It’s just like that, no? So many Accraians only pretend competence.