Tuesday, July 28, 2009
You dirty rat!
The house is in a mixed area of human striving. There are several biggish homes of which this is one and all the land between them is in-filled with shanty development. The house, itself, is built round a quadrangle. There is no glass in the windows, only mosquito netting which means we don’t use air conditioning which means we are a little more ecological. In this sprawling, fissured, sandy-tracked part of Accra, unlike the various guarded, sentry-posted estates nearby, there is a sense of nature close in tooth and claw. A cobra scaled our wall and our squatter neighbours came to warn us. A big thing lives in the roof space. It scuttles and sometimes we can hear the despairing last gulps and moans of its prey which it has brought home to feast upon. Chickens and goats scratch and munch around the little lawn in front of the high walls of the property. Birds boom, warble, shriek and make electronic beeps. The goats bleating at night sound like women in labour.
All very well, producing an acceptable sense of cohabiting with all except the mosquitos, the over-loud stereophonic speakers of the evangelical churches, nearby - and the RATS.
For the last few days, the rats have come, probably, judging by their intelligence, from being stowaways on a ship that passed a nuclear power station in Le Havre where they have been fast-breeding in the dark spaces by the reactor. Naturally we want rid of them fast. They may be only six feet from you wherever you are in any urban environment in the world but not materialising in your own kitchen and living room. Last night they were chortling as they dropped into the courtyard and tap danced on the tiles.
They were triumphant because, it turned out, they had discovered our last stash of poison, stored high but, unfortunately, not out of reach. They had dragged this box of ratty hemlock down to the floor and then devoured the contents by first shredding the polythene and cardboard. Like some horror film we have no more poisonous gifts until tomorrow! What will become of us tonight? You see, they enter the house by biting holes in the mosquito netting. Nowhere is safe. Not even the bedroom…
If we survive, then it's off to the shops for more armaments. Do we buy these seductive pellets again? We can’t set traps because they may harm the dogs who are largely empty-headed creatures that would investigate them with their muzzles. The locals use something interesting but perverse, rather like an artefact out of a Laurel and Hardy sketch. It is sticky paper. Mr and Mrs Rat investigate, love the smell and the expansive dance-floor, practise their tango, becomes gummed up and finally, totally incapacitated. Thence to our own abattoir – the gardener, because killing them by machete or whatever, is a step too far for me.
It will only be a temporary reprieve in the war for, as we know, The Rat is dead – long live the Rat!
The house is in a mixed area of human striving. There are several biggish homes of which this is one and all the land between them is in-filled with shanty development. The house, itself, is built round a quadrangle. There is no glass in the windows, only mosquito netting which means we don’t use air conditioning which means we are a little more ecological. In this sprawling, fissured, sandy-tracked part of Accra, unlike the various guarded, sentry-posted estates nearby, there is a sense of nature close in tooth and claw. A cobra scaled our wall and our squatter neighbours came to warn us. A big thing lives in the roof space. It scuttles and sometimes we can hear the despairing last gulps and moans of its prey which it has brought home to feast upon. Chickens and goats scratch and munch around the little lawn in front of the high walls of the property. Birds boom, warble, shriek and make electronic beeps. The goats bleating at night sound like women in labour.
All very well, producing an acceptable sense of cohabiting with all except the mosquitos, the over-loud stereophonic speakers of the evangelical churches, nearby - and the RATS.
For the last few days, the rats have come, probably, judging by their intelligence, from being stowaways on a ship that passed a nuclear power station in Le Havre where they have been fast-breeding in the dark spaces by the reactor. Naturally we want rid of them fast. They may be only six feet from you wherever you are in any urban environment in the world but not materialising in your own kitchen and living room. Last night they were chortling as they dropped into the courtyard and tap danced on the tiles.
They were triumphant because, it turned out, they had discovered our last stash of poison, stored high but, unfortunately, not out of reach. They had dragged this box of ratty hemlock down to the floor and then devoured the contents by first shredding the polythene and cardboard. Like some horror film we have no more poisonous gifts until tomorrow! What will become of us tonight? You see, they enter the house by biting holes in the mosquito netting. Nowhere is safe. Not even the bedroom…
If we survive, then it's off to the shops for more armaments. Do we buy these seductive pellets again? We can’t set traps because they may harm the dogs who are largely empty-headed creatures that would investigate them with their muzzles. The locals use something interesting but perverse, rather like an artefact out of a Laurel and Hardy sketch. It is sticky paper. Mr and Mrs Rat investigate, love the smell and the expansive dance-floor, practise their tango, becomes gummed up and finally, totally incapacitated. Thence to our own abattoir – the gardener, because killing them by machete or whatever, is a step too far for me.
It will only be a temporary reprieve in the war for, as we know, The Rat is dead – long live the Rat!
Labels: Rats. Accra life. Ghana.
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Obama in Ghana
It’s summer in England and winter in Ghana. Having just got back to Accra, my last social event being what turned out to be a swine-flu party, I find the skies grey and the daily temperature around 28 degrees centigrade. Now this might, for you who manage to be numerate with a weather eye to boot, seem rather warm but here in Ghana it means that workers can don their woolly socks and anoraks. At night, blankets appear. Being conditioned by English grey skies I often emerge in the morning, only to find, without fail, that it is blissfully warm. My morning swim of forty or so lengths is in delightfully cool water but the locals treat it as though ice floes might impede my path or I will be dragged unconscious with hypothermia from the 24 degree waters. In the warmer seasons when the air temperature is 34 to 40 degrees, the water is as warm as a cup of tea left standing for ten minutes.
I was warmed in a more emotional way by a new sign on the back of a taxi (you may have discovered a dozen or more cryptic, aphoristic or beautifully ungrammatical signs in this blog over the months), which said Don’t Underrate. I can sit, as I am being driven to work and meditate on the various levels of meaning in these taxi-proclamations to passers by. It is an injunction. But who am I not to underrate? The taxi? Myself? Life in general? God? In Ghana it is the last, most probably. Anyway, such signs are manna when the traffic is grinding along, the daily paper has been read, the street sellers and beggers need to be pointedly ignored and there is a final quarter of an hour to kill.
As you may know, Obama was here when I wasn’t. I saw his speech on Sky Television in England. It contained many a hardly veiled reference to corruption, dictatorships, coups, poverty and general mismanagement of peoples and countries in Africa. The assembled throng cheered and clapped his every criticism. A white American president would have limped home with a chant of ‘racist’ drumming into his ears. But being black and speaking the truth has a certain dynamic consonance here. A good thing too. One hopes that the speech laid down a few pointers to despots and dictators about what might be coming to them, at the same time as wakening a concerted Africa-wide movement for democracy and even-handed, sensible governance. Obama was kind to Ghana but it, too, suffers, even if less than most, from tribal in-fighting, bribery and sloping playing fields. Coming through customs a female official asked us for a ‘present for Auntie’ after demanding to see inside our bags, which brought a curt response from my Ghanaian partner who naturally feels deeply let down by such blatant behaviour. I like Ghana very much. The people are generous and not inclined to aggression, yet, like everywhere, those that enter politics can be the exceptions that prove this rule. Even here in the oldest democracy in Africa.
Monday, July 13, 2009
Wild Water Swimming
Occasionally these blogs devote themselves to environmental issues, though not in the usual polemic sense. Rather, they turn out to be ecological as a by product of reminiscence. Those blue remembered hills and meadows. It is only when a news headline catches the eye that I am forced to think (with a gulp) that, indeed, nothing is as it was and I am now rapidly becoming a living memoir of what used to be. Even at their most mundane, conversations can home in on life as was. I enjoyed a London party on Saturday night, a small gathering of artists and designers where strawberries in jelly raised the observation of how we used to pour Carnation Cream over it as the proper topping. Indeed, being a northern boy, jelly used to be attended by brown bread and butter, too.
Well, if Sunday High Tea was jelly and Carnation Cream, Saturdays and the remaining part of Sundays (if visitors weren’t in the front room and I wasn’t being forced to be present) would be spent doing boys’ things. This might involve damning a stream like Just William, setting a trap for the farmer (digging a pit and covering it with sticks and grasses) or fearless walks across the sewage pits. These were deep and foul smelling receptacles of fetid liquid, open to the air, formed by concrete grids. The walks were for the foolhardy, as they measured maybe a foot across and, I imagine, methane mists hung over them on still days.
I am a strangely unfortunate being because my elder sister died in a drowning accident, aged six, before I was born, in India. She preceded me through life as a maturing girl and then young woman, remembered my mother on what would have been her birthday. “Little Margaret would have been twenty today..” All the way through adulthood. My ghostly sister is still a few years ahead of me, calling…
Anyway, I saw the news story about wild water swimming. Some unfortunate boy drowned in a gravel pit while out swimming with his pals. The story flagged up modern concern about ‘wild’ water, naming dangers such as weeds, hidden underwater obstacles, currents and the like. The people being filmed to illustrate this pursuit wore bathing caps and trundled around a lake doing prim breast strokes, with a disgruntled duck watching them, nearby,. Hardly wild and hardly a newsworthy tale.
I’ve always swum better than most but never as well as my younger sister who was effortless and did well in national championships. I was good enough, though, to swim natural waters wherever I have found myself, including the Mississipi, The Volga, The Thames, The Seine and a number of other rivers, fast flowing, cascading, erupting and fierce. At one time, recently, I thought I ought to dip in all the ‘capital rivers’ of the world and write a book about it called something like The Big River Library before I realised that I had enough to do in this life to finish the trilogy I have begun. But it gave me a plot line for one of its stories. The hero will swim fabled wild water in search of his dead sister but not as the media could ever know it and the event will be placed in an epoch thousands of years before sewage farms and bathing caps.
Occasionally these blogs devote themselves to environmental issues, though not in the usual polemic sense. Rather, they turn out to be ecological as a by product of reminiscence. Those blue remembered hills and meadows. It is only when a news headline catches the eye that I am forced to think (with a gulp) that, indeed, nothing is as it was and I am now rapidly becoming a living memoir of what used to be. Even at their most mundane, conversations can home in on life as was. I enjoyed a London party on Saturday night, a small gathering of artists and designers where strawberries in jelly raised the observation of how we used to pour Carnation Cream over it as the proper topping. Indeed, being a northern boy, jelly used to be attended by brown bread and butter, too.
Well, if Sunday High Tea was jelly and Carnation Cream, Saturdays and the remaining part of Sundays (if visitors weren’t in the front room and I wasn’t being forced to be present) would be spent doing boys’ things. This might involve damning a stream like Just William, setting a trap for the farmer (digging a pit and covering it with sticks and grasses) or fearless walks across the sewage pits. These were deep and foul smelling receptacles of fetid liquid, open to the air, formed by concrete grids. The walks were for the foolhardy, as they measured maybe a foot across and, I imagine, methane mists hung over them on still days.
I am a strangely unfortunate being because my elder sister died in a drowning accident, aged six, before I was born, in India. She preceded me through life as a maturing girl and then young woman, remembered my mother on what would have been her birthday. “Little Margaret would have been twenty today..” All the way through adulthood. My ghostly sister is still a few years ahead of me, calling…
Anyway, I saw the news story about wild water swimming. Some unfortunate boy drowned in a gravel pit while out swimming with his pals. The story flagged up modern concern about ‘wild’ water, naming dangers such as weeds, hidden underwater obstacles, currents and the like. The people being filmed to illustrate this pursuit wore bathing caps and trundled around a lake doing prim breast strokes, with a disgruntled duck watching them, nearby,. Hardly wild and hardly a newsworthy tale.
I’ve always swum better than most but never as well as my younger sister who was effortless and did well in national championships. I was good enough, though, to swim natural waters wherever I have found myself, including the Mississipi, The Volga, The Thames, The Seine and a number of other rivers, fast flowing, cascading, erupting and fierce. At one time, recently, I thought I ought to dip in all the ‘capital rivers’ of the world and write a book about it called something like The Big River Library before I realised that I had enough to do in this life to finish the trilogy I have begun. But it gave me a plot line for one of its stories. The hero will swim fabled wild water in search of his dead sister but not as the media could ever know it and the event will be placed in an epoch thousands of years before sewage farms and bathing caps.
Labels: Wild water. Swimming. Ghosts.
Monday, July 06, 2009
Anyone for Tennis?
The Wimbledon men’s final lasted so long that I had time to take in vital games while doing a decent garden weeding, hovering the attic, preparing food, writing emails and that was probably only half of it. It was like a painting that came alive whenever I looked at it. I’ve always liked tennis and could claim, once upon a time, to be more than a bit good at it.
It began when I was about twelve. My father was an Edwardian with fixed opinions and a sense of certainty that dismissed whatever contradictory knowledge might be found in expert literature. He was an ex-army captain in the PT Corps who gave rise to my birth in India when helping establish the Indian Military Academy in Dehra Dun. I suppose he was an obdurate product of his times and so, naturally, made life uncomfortable for his son. We argued, which was futile as I could never win. The competition between us rumbled on throughout his stay on this earth. Anyway, being in the PT Corps and expert at all things physical such as gymnastics, diving, swimming and all the regular sports, he decided to make me a tennis player, largely because he would have an opponent on tap but maybe also because he needed to feel he had passed on this selfish sporting gene.
Over the course of the next three summers, I played and improved but that was not the real cause of my flowering as a serve and volleyer. It was the winter practice in the north east, near Newcastle. Each day we would do three different sessions. At the back of our council house he erected two eight foot steel poles and strung between them a piece of tennis netting, about a metre and a half wide. I served a couple of hundred balls every day. In the attic he placed an old mattress over a side board. I pummelled it with forehands and backhands, the ball dropping dead at my feet after a healthy thwack. The last practice involved going out on the field, covered in corn stubble and, sometimes, snow and volleying. Aiming for ever higher records. Could we keep it up a hundred hits, two hundred and so on. He was obsessive, my father and I think that his fantasy life was strong enough for him to believe he could still go on to win something.
The upshot was that I became reasonably good, which led to my being school tennis captain, captain at badminton and captain at cricket, despite being dismissed as ‘four eyes’ for the first four years of secondary education. Confidence flowed whenever I had something in my hand with which to hit a moving object. And that has led to other spheres of confidence.
There’s a lesson in all this. When I am presented with some seemingly intransigent problem, particularly one that also tosses me into some kind of emotional vortex, I think of those three practice technologies in that working class environment, one that was not blessed with the sophisticated paraphernalia that every child expects today.
The strung net, the cushioned wardrobe and the snowy stubble.
The Wimbledon men’s final lasted so long that I had time to take in vital games while doing a decent garden weeding, hovering the attic, preparing food, writing emails and that was probably only half of it. It was like a painting that came alive whenever I looked at it. I’ve always liked tennis and could claim, once upon a time, to be more than a bit good at it.
It began when I was about twelve. My father was an Edwardian with fixed opinions and a sense of certainty that dismissed whatever contradictory knowledge might be found in expert literature. He was an ex-army captain in the PT Corps who gave rise to my birth in India when helping establish the Indian Military Academy in Dehra Dun. I suppose he was an obdurate product of his times and so, naturally, made life uncomfortable for his son. We argued, which was futile as I could never win. The competition between us rumbled on throughout his stay on this earth. Anyway, being in the PT Corps and expert at all things physical such as gymnastics, diving, swimming and all the regular sports, he decided to make me a tennis player, largely because he would have an opponent on tap but maybe also because he needed to feel he had passed on this selfish sporting gene.
Over the course of the next three summers, I played and improved but that was not the real cause of my flowering as a serve and volleyer. It was the winter practice in the north east, near Newcastle. Each day we would do three different sessions. At the back of our council house he erected two eight foot steel poles and strung between them a piece of tennis netting, about a metre and a half wide. I served a couple of hundred balls every day. In the attic he placed an old mattress over a side board. I pummelled it with forehands and backhands, the ball dropping dead at my feet after a healthy thwack. The last practice involved going out on the field, covered in corn stubble and, sometimes, snow and volleying. Aiming for ever higher records. Could we keep it up a hundred hits, two hundred and so on. He was obsessive, my father and I think that his fantasy life was strong enough for him to believe he could still go on to win something.
The upshot was that I became reasonably good, which led to my being school tennis captain, captain at badminton and captain at cricket, despite being dismissed as ‘four eyes’ for the first four years of secondary education. Confidence flowed whenever I had something in my hand with which to hit a moving object. And that has led to other spheres of confidence.
There’s a lesson in all this. When I am presented with some seemingly intransigent problem, particularly one that also tosses me into some kind of emotional vortex, I think of those three practice technologies in that working class environment, one that was not blessed with the sophisticated paraphernalia that every child expects today.
The strung net, the cushioned wardrobe and the snowy stubble.