When A Car ‘Bumps You’ in the City of Accra

You have cleverly got around the insane traffic by pushing out at a thin hour. You are steering through a dark, ‘un-peopled’ spot when a car ghosts into your rear view. It catches up with you, and you slow down, but it does not overhaul. A small jolt and a jangling sound tell you the car behind has eaten your ‘ass’. You screech to a halt to inspect the damage and maybe replicate it on the other driver’s face. He also slips out (with his previously hidden mates) and holds a piece to your gonads. They zoom off with your valuables (and maybe your car). If you are still wrapping your mind around what is happening, you have just been robbed!

Weekday Hour # 1

The hour after work (6 to 7 pm, as the day kisses the night) is definitely my most enjoyable weekday hour.

The air con is off; team mates have faded away; work files banked in paper and mind folders; and still too early to tussle with the traffic.

I hook up with my friends online, catch up on news of this sinful world, tweet and blog: a little spot of heaven.

What's yours? The most enjoyable hour of your typical weekday?

Tangled Toes in The City of Accra

I shoe ten tangled toes (as do most of the 'kids' I grew up with) from playing barmy, barefoot football. Thus (these days) I shirk slippers outside home.

In those indigent, illiquid economic days in Ghana, we would have suffered parental thrashing if we had dared parade our shoes on the dump (football) field.

We had no sports shoes. Our (not so) patent leather shoes were hardly appropriate, anyway, and were bought on a strict one-child-one-pair policy. Wo de k)b) ball na )kyena w'ahye deEn ak) school?

So, the rugged rocks and rough roots, stone chippings and shards of glass, gnarled nails and snail shells sliced, stabbed, lacerated and etched their gory graffiti into our tarsals and metatarsals.

It is a ten-toe 'mazement that behind those gruesome-gladsome years, we could yet count two full feet of ten (tangled, traumatised) toes.

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The Runaway Music Scene in the City of Accra

Amazing - the way new acts drop (not so) tight tracks and (quasi) vibrant videos every week. The beats are not fresh or the lyrics crisp. The style is neo-Naija (commercially cranked up) and the themes are horse carcasses being flogged flagrantly over and over again. It is like chasing smoke trying to keep up, and you cannot help but think those who popped up 5 to 10 years ago got the cheese.

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Doctors Against Washing Hands in The City of Accra

Philistine physicians! They were in 'our building' all week. It is really their building as we are tenants. In these terrible days when the public-health people are advertising pathological handwashing to prevent Cholera (and other conditions) every single doctor we saw at the loo simply zipped up after and left the men's room. We hope the sterilising standards were higher in the ladies' room. We must also hope that surgical gloves usage is widespread, but (even then) they have to touch the gloves first. Ewwwwww!

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Archery, Shaggery & Other Olympic Sports

My mates and I are having demented delight at Honeysuckle Pub. I offer that Chaskele is the greatest sport in the world and should make the olympics list. Kelvin and Kiz counter it should be shaggery. Males of country A versus females of country B. We all join the imaginary Ghana Males team and quickly choose Venezuela as our first opponent and line up Costa Rica, Colombia and Uganda on the way to the final (a pity Ghana Males cannot meet Ghana Females) Lovely Friday evening.

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Spitting Season in The City of Accra

Get no place fast past an open car window without clamouring your coming. Give no rat's-arse respect to what car it is or you would be soused with stupido-senseless spittle. And then they would say 'sorry'! I see a spitting scene everyday.

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