Ya kasance dalibai su:
on Fantastic Voyage (Nigeria), 29/Jul/2010 09:11, 34 days ago
In my previous job (in the UK), about once a week I would read an utterly brilliant little Old English poem called‘Deor’.  It’s quite heart-breakingly sad, and gorgeously written.  It runs through a sequence of nasty historical (or mythical) events, with the refrain (it’s pretty unusual in having a chorus line)þæs ofereode; þisses swa mæg, which means something like‘that passed away; so may this’.  It did, of course, and now I’m here I’m reading a marvellously witty longer poem called ‘Andreas’ (which is about a pretty cool adventure shared between erstwhile disciples of Christ Andrew and Matthew).  Early on in that, God gives Matthew a nice soundbite of advice:geþola þeoda, which for the moment I’m translating (while missing out the rest of the sentence and slightly abusing the grammar) ‘endure these people’.  That line’s been echoing in my head every day of work so far this week.In all fairness, Matthew’s been taken prisoner, blinded, fed a drug which makes him a bit mad (though less loopy than he could have gone, ‘cos God’s batting on his side), and is going to be torn apart as food for a load of maniacs in three days.  And I’ve just received no information, instruction, direction, or support from any of my four ‘managers’.  The good thing about this is that I can spend time in the office reading different curriculum documents and learning theory– and making some quite delightful plans for workshops I’ll probably never deliver.  And I don’t feel remotely guilty about, say using work time to write a blog entry or get enormously excited about England’s test series against Pakistan (from a purely selfish point of view, I wish tests could be played there again because I really miss the week or so of everyone saying ‘Rawalpindi’:possibly the most tingly, squirmy, joyful place name in the world).Really, I just need to remember that jobs everywhere are generally rubbish: that’s why we get paid for doing them.  And maybe that’s why Nigerians seem (to me, at the moment; I’m sure it’s not entirely true and apologies for the generalisation) to be pretty bad at doing them: it’s just not in the culture of these people to be good at doing things that are miserable and tedious.  It’s a slow learning process, that I’m still to fully engage with, that it isn’t possible to live fully in every waking moment: to burn always with that hard, gem-like flame.  The times when I feel the need to be distracted from distraction by distraction continue to disappoint me.