Send the Bill

Blogger friend, F, has lost a white shirt. I know it’s hardly the news. He bought a coke. He now thinks it was not a coke. It was a fake. It had “something in it” which effervesced and spilled into his big-event shirt. He kept the rest of the poison. He asked me what he could sue for. I said he could claim the laundry costs. I did not say from whom.

Farticulate

How does real life mimic dreams! I knew I’d have gastric gas this morning from the moment I woke up. In last night’s dream, my work mates had all gathered in a windowless room. When I stood up to speak, I was freely ‘farticulate’ in their midst. Sorry for the information overkill, but it’s Silly Friday.

3 Dashing Dresses

I’ve seen 3 dashing dresses today; all in simple, straight lines the way I like them. At 6, I saw a good (glistening!) grey dress and its girl sailing across the Spintex Road near the Accra Mall. In court at 10, was a weightless white dress on a petite, fair goddess, stopping the judge's show. At noon, I was bewitched by a blue-black dress on an ebony angel on the office stairs.

In Trouble with Men

I picked this up on the radio. What do you think?

'An 'unbeautiful woman' with a killer body is in trouble with men'.

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.

The Melting Streets of Accra

The fiery sun is barbecuing up the sweltering streets of Accra in their own bitumen. I wonder, if a similar sizzle is not sautéing the (delicious?) delicate sauce around the human brain. Might that be why some street Accraians behave like little devils dancing on a bed of flaring coal? We have scythed down all the trees for urban (under)development!

Cascading Buildings in the City of Accra

A college girl dies. Her friend is between a rock and a hard place. They were only leaving a hostel as students do. A canopied walkway avalanches on them. The building was erected decades ago. Money is not for maintenance in Ghana. It is for creating, and then creating some more. Already existing infrastructure can take care of itself.

Her parents were expecting a smarter girl back. They are getting a corpse. It happened in school; on school property. Somebody has to pay. Her parents are grieving, I know. But, they should PLEASE not simply leave it to God. Sue somebody. Sue everybody who should have cared. It won't bring Eva back, but do it anyway. Start with university authorities!

God, I did not know her – why am I so upset?

The Accra Central All-Ages Nudity-Stupidity Circus

The fetid, frowzy throng makes it even harder to breathe in the sun-baked air of Accra’s bus stations. Yet another hapless mayor is evacuating vendors from one of the bus stations. The vendors, who think they own all public space in the city of Accra, have threatened to strip to the scandalous skin to protest. Fools! Did you pay a tuppence for that real estate? I’m always at phone-camera ready. I’ll record your circus freak show. You’ll make Accra uglier than you already have (than I ever thought you could!)

Married at 15

I stray one thousand miles today. A big man in a West African country has alleged nuptials with a fifteen-year-old North African girl. It’s said she cannot be ‘wifed’ off at this nymph age in Pharaohland. So, the ‘dowered’ deed is done in Naija. A ‘mammaried’ minister is asked if anything is being done about the stolen youth. She says consultations will be held. Has a crime been committed or not?

Vampires against Mothers in Ghana

We are not developing – we are primitive! Why is it that in 2010, so many women die during childbirth? It is rubbish! Cow dung! I do not think you need state-of-the-effing-art equipment to prevent these thousands of deaths. What you need is competent medical personnel. What you need is caring people. What you need is less negligence. What you need is strong punishment for negligent medical practitioners and establishments. What you need is a jail term or two for a doctor or nurse or midwife or quack. Don’t no doctor feel tres bien in Accra, Bawku or Half Asini for the next year unless maternal deaths nationwide are below 100! Or may you choke on your stethoscope...or sphygmomanometer!

Albert Luthuli Road, Accra

It is a little, arboreal street turning off the Gamal Abdel Naser Avenue at Ridge, in the city of Accra. Luthuli hosts the Ghana Maritime Authority, and a part of the Passport Office, where Accraians, other Ghanaians (and people who sound Nigerian) queue from 5 a.m. for Ghana passports. It also hugs a long wall around a decrepit colonial bungalow. In seven places on the wall, somebody has charcoaled “Don’t urinate here”. It must be that passersby do not know the great South African Chief, so they pee on his 'Nobel' renown. Would they stop if they found out who he was?