Under Pressure.

I do not know now where I got the impression from, that Lawanson market was the market with highest priced goods in the whole of Surulere and Idi-Araba market which is barely 500meters away was the cheapest. I think the women who own stalls in the market are more serious than those in other markets with a wider variety of goods and that is why this morning, I took my body to Lawanson to buy the plantains and vegetables I needed to make the meal my spirit had been craving for nearly a month.

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Beneath the Iroko

I’m watching cars snarl and drivers curse at Lawanson bus stop while I’m getting series loaded into my Iroko TV app. I’m the last customer of the day, well not a customer- I have an active subscription and it means Success the agent, will get no commission from me.

I am not Wife Material… And It’s ok.

This post has been sitting pretty in my drafts since June 30th, I wrote it at a time I found myself writing about marriage a whole lot. I decided to shelve it until another time and I guess that time is now…

 

Recently, I was having a conversation with a much older man about marriage and a woman’s place in the home. If you know me well- or at least read my blog regularly, you’d know that I do not believe in having specific gender roles in a marriage.

Lantana’s Odyssey – 3

Maimuna opened the door and enfolded her in a hug that should made her flatter than an ATM card, Dr. Ibrahim was smiling as he walked past them into the house, his arms laden with the fruits he’d stopped to buy at the market. Maimuna guided her inside and settled her on her favourite armchair – the one Yohanna had called her throne.

Brazen Mama

On the first Sunday of this month, I got a WhatsApp message from a man I’ve had a business relationship that has spanned nearly five years. He said he’d made a transfer of three hundred and fifty thousand naira to my account on the 24^th of June and he wanted me to confirm it. I wasn’t particularly worried because I knew nothing like that had entered my account.

Lantana’s Odyssey -2

It was the way his khaki moulded his buttocks that first caught her eye, they weren’t big- the buttocks, they just seemed very firm. She imagined they were soldiers on sentry duty, each of them facing opposite directions, resolute in their calling to hold him upright. Her eyes trailed down to his orange jungle boots with its black base contrasting with the red sand of the market floor, she wondered briefly if the NYSC had given him this pair of khakis that were so tight that she could make out every muscle on his calf and thigh or if he had stood in front of a tailor, telling her to make them as snug as possible.

Lantana’s Odyssey – 1

The last time I did a proper fiction series has to be in 2016, since then I’ve done a couple of random series that went nowhere. I’m starting a new series as promised in my last post and it’s set in Bida. It’s about a woman who has to make very tough choices at a difficult time in her life.

Enjoy the first episode and I hope you’ll enjoy the series and the characters I’ve created.

Episode One.

She hated the white walls of hospitals, why couldn’t they paint them something cheery and less sterile? Something like cotton candy-pink or purple like ripe wine grapes. Perhaps the colour of the wall wouldn’t bother her so much if this wasn’t the place where people came to die.

Overjoyed In A Square Circle.

The title of this post is taken from the title of one of my favourite songs and the album it’s from. Stevie Wonder the aptly named Miracle, penned and sang the song in 1985 – a couple of years before I was born. I listened to the song as I typed the bulk of this post and I’m just discovering on Wikipedia that Earl Klugh strummed the guitar for this song.

Cocoa Butter…

I don’t like ice cream.

That is not exactly true, the price of the kind of ice cream I like gallops every month. These days, anything that isn’t essential like Coca-Cola can rest in Spar, while I move on. So I settled for Ooh La La ice cream when I worked at a hospital a few metres away from their GRA store and when the hospital moved to the island, I gave up on ice cream.

Coke wahala

Only two paragraphs are fiction, can you guess which two?🤔

Na Coca-Cola cause this wahala.
An hour before I met him, I had been pleasantly surprised to be entering Onitsha without incident and walking along Upper Iweka clutching my bag without being harassed. I called out my destination to the bus conductors and they all kept saying I couldn’t find a direct bus at that time, I would have to break my journey. By the time the fifth bus pulled out, I decided to listen to them.