iyali
on Fantastic Voyage (Nigeria), 22/Aug/2010 20:11, 34 days ago
The usual pattern is that we either have power (or water– the same is true for both) or we don’t.  That’s a stupid way of saying it, and it isn’t impossible to say just what I mean: what I mean is that we have both or either for long periods, and then we have an absence of both or either for long periods.  To explain why this interests me, I’ll explain that with my pitifully logical understanding of Things, in a power starved country I’d expect power to be kinda flickery: sometimes there; sometimes not.  Any minute power could go, and any minute it could return (and the same for water).  But it appears that what actually happens is that someone somewhere flicks a switch (or pulls a mighty lever, like an old train signal box worker– I fantasised about having that job for some years) to give us power.  Or take it away.  And that they do so almost entirely arbitrarily.The good thing about this is that, when power comes on, you know you can do stuff: charge your laptop; cool down under a fan; read during a poo (our bathroom is absurdly dark, and this does significantly impact on my quality of life); take the ruddy headtorch off (while highly effective, I seem to be programmed to drip with sweat while wearing it); find the cross-reference you’re looking for; play a game without shoving pieces of Scrabble in each other’s eyes.You can multiply these positives by about a zillion (that’s probably only a number in the US, where they don’t understand what a billion is.  Re-colonialisation is only a few more financial cock-ups away) when it comes to water.The bad thing is that you’re entirely reliant on other people.  Can you flush the toilet?  Can you wash?  Can you stay up past half-past eight?  Can you find out the football results?  What about tomorrow?  And next week?Someone else knows: there’s a hand somewhere, poised above a lever – one among many (think the only really genuinely cool scene in the Matrix) – but this one is marked ‘Simon And Jenny – They’re White; You Know The Ones’.  I wonder– indeed, I’m becoming increasingly and disturbingly committed to this theory given there’s no actual evidence for it at all and I’ve never read anything about this and know nothing at all about mass psychology – whether this accounts for a general Total Lack of Interest (for this blog, I’ve turned into AA Milne where capitals are concerned) in planning for the future.  Because it’s impossible. There’s almost no insurance system here: this week just gone we saw a car which someone had reversed Significantly Too Fast (see: it’s addictive once you’ve started) in a car park, smashed into someone else’s, which had smashed into someone else’s, which had spun and belted into a flagpole.  None of the cars worked anymore, and the flagpole was less capable of standing erect than a ninety seven year old in a brothel.  What will happen to all these people whose cars have been destroyed?  They’ll buy new ones, because they have to.  Is there insurance?  No.  Do they save?  No?  As far as they’re (mostly) concerned, if God wants them to keep their jobs and maintain their way of life, He’ll sort something out.And that’s the general attitude to everything: there’s no future because you may well die (“death’s got nothing to do with how old you are, hast it?”), and if there is it’s in someone else’s hands.  There’s a glorious freedom to it – and it means you never have to budget for anything – but it’s also a kind of doom laden momentary existence: summer’s day hath all too short a lease, or whatever it is.It also makes thinking about aid quite tricky.  If a school gets a big lump sum here, do they invest it to ensure they’ll exist in ten years’ time?  No.  They buy a computer block, or some solar panels that’ll break in twelve months, or a minibus.  But that trauma can wait for another day.  For now, I’m suspended between the profound appeal of living in and for the moment and the irritable reaching after fact and reason which makes me more prosaic, more fretful, more grumpy, and more (in the sense strained after by most people who’ve seen a TV and heard of Coke) successful.