Your Love Bores into My Very Being

Over the past few weeks, a refreshing and catchy love song has aired over TV. It did not win my musical soul from the start; but repeated play has made it bloom brightly on my mind. And, now, I look out long for it every night. Its title is ‘Odo Pa’ (True Love), and it is sung by Kofi Tanoh whose sin and suicide in not picking out a performance name can never be explained to me. Plus, he looks a bit too knobbed and knotted, ribbed and rugged, to be cooing love words while his poker face remains unchanged throughout the video clip. He features another, K Twum (alias Rasta). It is rather Rasta who appears to be swinging some wicked amusement, but the song comes across as older, richer and more mature than him. Especially devastating to any resistance I may have had to this song is the nonce word at the end of the second refrain, ‘Wo do n’ako me gedem’ (Your love has pierced / penetrated / arrested my very ... ‘gedem’ can only mean something like being or soul.

Opposites Attract

A deep-fried, corpulent chicken dressed all in white with lacy tails trailing her everywhere. She’s chunkily checking me out at Equator because she’s standing there alone, and I am all by myself. She greases this way and sashays that way half in dance and semi-tease, turning her beefy head over her soft shoulders to give me a sidewise look of rousing meaning. She seizes the attention of all fifty-something kilos of me for a moment; then her flabby overhangs take over. I turn away from her, and have to get a very strong drink.

Two Faces of Tilapia

It offered savoury delight in the golden ages, and was prized with tenderness before the Europeans made landfall. Then, the civilised (as if they were formerly benighted) and the sham-show nouveau riche came to look lowly upon the fish as cheap chow.

Money began to drip into the doddering economy in the 90s. The condescending gentrified or dolarised saw their indifference curves shift right. Demand hit the ceiling overnight, outstripping the Volta supply, and now poor men cannot buy the 'poor man’s food'. The rich like it so long as it is too expensive to be bought by just anybody.

One day soon, roast plantain (called Kofi Brokeman) will also be priced out of the average purse.

Few Live; Most Exist!

A quaint quote that flashed on TV. I have no naked notion what this maxim means to you. Language has mutated into a baffling, defensive tool today. We shudder at the fishy smell of our own prattle in the mouth of another person. ‘Few live; most exist’ is as clean, clear and classic as human expression will ever get. I have an idea – think over the quote and, if you will, share what it means to you in the comment section. Inspire us all!

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I dismissed it,
not denying.
And it grew up,
while in hiding.
Now it's screaming
wild confessions!
You have me yearning
ten times ten!
So, yesterday,
I came to start accepting!

The Talent Tizzy in the City of Accra

Shall we honour it the bounty of an economy now light of heel that T.V. is turning out talent finds everywhere? I do not fancy that the talent fund in the City of Accra is swelling or that it will ever wax or wane. It is the avenues to descry and hone the fine faculties that ring the changes, no? It may well be a direct answer to the hoggishness of producers to come out with money acts, for most of the talent hunts stalk only musical or football talent. I nurse a funny little idea that two out of every three young persons in the City of Accra think they’re an undiscovered diva or lion. But it is not too bad, as there appears no intention of the city’s rich and powerful to share a bit of the mainstream money. And I would rather have barely-gifted, tooth-skin surviving performers than red-eye desperate hard broke.

Confusion Twice Confounded in the City of Accra

They stand like sentinels at the skirts of the streets burgeoning higgledy-piggledy from shrimp size to big-as-a-house. They stunt, check and colour out the red, white and blue regular road signs. You’d be pardoned for confounding that the City of Accra had dada place names like ‘Dressed Chicken for Sale’, ‘Local Brown Rice’, ‘Moringa Sold Here’ and ‘Great Provider Furniture Works’,

Don’t get me wrong – the signs are helpful if your car would crab-crawl at that awkward spot, or if you were taking the air on foot. But, at 60 kph, when the boards flash just a quick blip in your sight, the advertising principle is crowded out. Besides, if you aren’t lost, or are simply sight-seeing, the pesky collection simply gangrenes the scene.