Life

It’s Hotel Life, Jim, But Not As We Know It.

#adventure, Uncategorized

Who Needs Breakfast at Tiffany’s?

Who needs Breakfast at Tiffany’s when you can have evangelical Nigerian generals for breakfast? A fair question, you might ask, but one that stands out as a trifle bizarre.

I’m holed up in the Al-Rayyan Doha Hilton for three months. We’re currently three weeks into a long, luxurious stay, with two months of room service to run. Outside it might be 43 celsius, but the hotel is an air-conned hotbed of the weird and the wonderful. They dump their bags from all over the world before disappearing behind fancy room numbers in this six-storey prism of marble and bronze leaf. The atrium is magnificent, it must be acknowledged. Tiered on two sides with hotel rooms tastefully set back from balustrades. On the third side, resplendent as you enter the vast lobby, is a kind of architectural fixture – I know not the technical term for it – a 100ft-high banner of bronze, cross-hatched glass panels, and abstractions of light and three-dimensional relief, perhaps. Whatever it is, it’s a showstopper. There’s so much marble in this one establishment that the mountain it was quarried from lies now in ransacked ruin. Trump was here in Qatar last week. He quipped something about loving all that marble. Trust me, he wasn’t kidding.

Back to the breakfast anecdote. It was Friday, first day of the weekend, and I was sitting there digesting yet another unnecessarily generous buffet breakfast, minding my own business, when in walks a black man, middle-aged, definitely West African. I had a feeling he might be Nigerian, as a large delegation had encamped there on official business as few days before. In fact, i was chatting with one of them at dinner the previous evening.

The chap turned to me and asked, “Are you South African?”

I answered i wasn’t but that the question had been asked of me in the past.

“Is there something about me that has that Afrikaner ring to it?”

“Well, yes”, he said. “Your face. And you are tall and white, so why not.”

I wanted to reassure him that in various parts of the world, stretching from Dunedin to Dundee, Manitoba to Moscow, there are a lot of white fellas over 6′ tall, and who could pass for a Springbok.

Soon, we fell into talking. Not afraid of physical proximity, as West Africans have to be, he shifted across the padded bench until inches away and proceeded to tell me that he was none other than a general in the Nigerian army.

“Funny, that,” I countered. ‘Until last week, I can’t recall ever meeting a senior military officer. But since then I’ve rubbed up against British Lt Colonels and Qatari Brigadiers.”

Life is either predictably predictable or else bloody bizarre. You wait an age on one red double decker and then three turn up in rapid succession.

Our conversation went from surface to deep sea within minutes. Our first scheduled stop on the pelagic dive was about the conspicuous wealth in the Gulf. Another hundred metres into the inky leviathan and we were on the subject of the corruption of money and greed in public life. Deeper still, it was the ecological crisis, rampant deforestation and Africa’s – and the planet’s – dwindling biota of all creatures great and small. But it was our next scheduled rest on the deep dive into the profound that he strong-armed me with a term i had never heard of before: prebendalism. What the? Can you repeat that, Emmanuel? P-r-e-b-e-n-d-a-l-i-s-m. The politics of cronyism and corruption and the curse of a democratic Nigeria. It refers to a closed culture in which state offices and civil service privileges result in a shared feeling of entitlement among elected officials to basically cannibalise the state’s resources for their own ends when that commonwealth should instead be fairly redistributed to those most in need. And among Nigeria’s 200 million there are many. It was, alleged my newfound general friend, Emmanuel, the reason for Nigeria’s impending doom. Reason further still to suspend democracy and restore military rule. He had a point, to be fair. He claimed, plausibly, that when civilian governments rule, they cannot help but slide in a culture of prebendalism. Popular vote by virtue of self-interest groups close to government demand booty in exchange for ballot loyalty. Those entitlements can be as innocent as a bag of rice or as sinister as cash bundles. A military government, on the other hand, seeks no such alliances of convenience and is therefore more adept at tackling strategic problems, like bringing immediate aid to whole regional populations who have, say, had their crops fail due to extreme weather, or civil unrest.

Emmanuel propounded a theory massively unpopular in the condescending West. But a theory nonetheless that made me sit back and think from the perspective of one of the heads of the Army who frames his country’s current plight in near-calamitous terms requiring martial law, redefining martial rule as a corrective instrument for a nation gone badly off the rails. Though in spite of the prebendalism hollowing out Nigeria’s (and i suspect much of Africa’s) civil governance, it was something else that led me to turn a quirky but original experience into this written record: namely, Emmanuel’s confession that he would rather be saving souls than saving lives. There is a deep evangelical streak running through the heart of all human life in developing nations with runaway population pressure. I saw it in Brazil. In him I saw it as casting a divine shadow over realities we in the west cannot imagine: where someone like Emmanuel’s father loses his own father to preventable disease aged six, before wandering alone across brutally hot savannah for weeks before being rescued by European missionaries – Anglicans, actually. From that trauma to the balm of Christ, in a West Africa preceded for millennia by animistic shamanism, the superimposition of Western scriptural doctrine onto little lost sheep has this intoxicating effect. Not only was the son fervently Christian in both beliefs and deeds in a way we in the secular West could no longer be, Emmanuel had the shaman in him too, for he believed that God spoke through him, anointing him with divine powers to change others’ fate. He was convinced, for instance, that he was able to grant his father a stay of death until the time was right to lose him. Like the missionaries who plucked his father from sad obscurity aged six, beyond the temporal to the spiritual Emmanuel considered being a general a drop in the ocean compared to being a servant of the people prosecuting God’s work.

Pitying my inbuilt scepticism, and mocking my quasi-Darwinian metaphor of the chimpanzee and the human hand being one in the same, he was not going to let me go without taking my hand in his, and praying for an end to my lifetime of doubt. Clasping a white hand in two warm, black hands he squeezed with all the conviction of a man who knew nothing but. He sealed his eyes and screwed up his face, beseeching God to give Scott a long life. And when it was over, gave me his number and invited me to stay with his family the next time i was in Nigeria.

Who needs Breakfast at Tiffany’s when you can have breakfast in Babylon?

2024: The Year That Put Hope on Hold.

history, humour, Life, Oddities, Reflections, reflections, Society, thoughts, world

Here’s to 2024. May you retreat into the past with all the obscurity you deserve.

Good riddance to you. Like all the worst salesmen, you promised so much while ultimately delivering so little. You raced off the blocks at the stroke of midnight last December 31st on a 10th floor balcony in Krakow. You even heralded a new year with pyrotechnics the likes of which I saw only once before over the Sydney Harbour Bridge during headier times. You were so presumptuous about how swimmingly the rest of the year would go that you exploded into life in an 1812 Overture by sending a chaotic crescendo of fireworks in a great ring around Poland’s southern capital.

It boded so well for the year to come. Despite the January rain, signs were green that ’24 would ripen into a vintage. You gave me late January in Italy. O Italy, si bella e perduta. You followed that little boon by gifting me February on Brazil’s emerald coast, March in the otherworldly beauty of the Atacama desert, and April where Eve’s apple fell, right in the heart of Rio. But that was where the year peaked, before spring hadn’t even had the chance to spring.

You made it hard on me after that. I’m convinced your ultimate aim was to humble me. Is that because I returned to the place whose welcome I had long outstayed? You tamped down my hopes in one disappointment after the other; too long a rap sheet even to mention. Or maybe you were teaching me a lesson that when it comes to little lost souls, they can’t always get what they want but if they try sometimes they might find they get what they need. You taught me that life doesn’t always go our way, but if we hold on for long enough with our pleading hand outstretched it probably will pour us a cup of kindness, mainly out of pity for our unwavering stoicism. So good riddance to you, but not without a begrudging thanks for staying true to your unpredictable self. Everything is as it has to be, and when contextualised by subsequent events even duds like 2024 will start to unravel the mystery of why they had to act so mean.

I have a feeling that you were a spiteful bitch to many a poor soul. You thwarted many a dream while compounding many a misery. And hey, while you were putting the squeeze on many of us, you also managed to serve up a dull summer marred by clouds. At least you did your damage at a brisk pace. You raced through yourself, burned your candle from both ends with a ferocity even faster than the year you buried. You were a bull in china shop minus the valuable crockery, but not minus the awful sound of shattering plates.

So, there it is. I won’t miss you unless your replacement turns out to tread still harder on my dreams. But given how salutary a lesson you delivered, for the sake of harmony 2025 really needs to play good cop to your bad. When I look at the wider world with a cold and hard stare, the augurs don’t look great for times ahead. The view out the window on day one of 2025 is hardly inspiring. A hard rain is already fallin’, and I’m thinking it can only get better.

24? What kind of number is that, anyway? Divisible by 12, 8, 6, 4, 3, 2, 1, and itself. Broken down by a host of lesser numbers, it’s impossible to predict which way you’ll go and with whom you’ll decide to sub-divide. From the end of the first quarter of your ignominious year, you chose rather selfishly to divide into yourself, but instead of the wholeness of 1, you left me with less than that. Come on, maybe you were mean because we deserved it with our collective stupidity, a flirtation with human disaster that shows no sign of abatement. But please spare the individuals among us who just want you gone and your successor to show a little clemency and a lot of succour to guide us along on our life’s journey. ’25 is only divisible by 5, 1 and itself, so surely cannot go off the rails like ’24. I’m banking on the new year multiplying by 4 to give me the perfect 100, but perhaps a little overly optimistic.

In case you didn’t hear it the first time around, good riddance and don’t come back any time soon. Here’s a parting shot: we can only hope and pray that in 364 days from now our resolutions don’t involve pining nostalgically for you. For that will surely mean that the year to come has been even more of an eventual let down. Keep wearing that epitaph, the year to remember for mostly the wrong reasons. When all is said and done, at least you left me with my health intact, and, well, you did show me the Atacama desert. Okay, granted. You were a mean bastard and refused to show me the way ahead, but in your defence at least you showed me emphatically where not to go, And, more indirectly, how to call upon the power of grace to let go of the things not meant for me, even though I remain puzzled as to what is.

To Live With a Loss That Has No Purpose.

animals, Buddhism, death, dogs, ethics, fate, free will, human mind, kindness, Life, Meaning, meditations, Menaing, Musings, Natural Law, natural philosophy, Reflections, Religion, stoicism, thoughts

So, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer bloke.

We often use the verb ‘to stumble’ when employing metaphor in describing mishaps on the road to personal progress. For instance, ‘I was doing so well to make this dream happen until i stumbled into trouble.’ Thing is, we don’t often apply the term literally when describing the very moment that things took a definitive turn for the worse. Take this example: ‘He stumbled on the escarpment and fell to his death‘. Exceptions prevail, of course. Sometimes people stumble literally and the ensuing fall is even more consequential (and somewhat more inexplicable) than if the stumble had been figurative in a metaphorical sense. What happened the other night was not exactly a stumbling block on the road to Middle East Peace; being real and not abstract it was arguably more compelling than that.

Soon enough we’ll come back to this nice bloke for whom it happened to. It must be foretold that I’ve got this far in life without throwing the towel in by consoling myself that we inhabit an orderly, law-abiding universe. A chaotic, lawless universe is too hard to countenance. In this universe of mine watchful, seemingly benign forces act upon our individual conduct to pave our way with either help or hindrance. You might call this ‘the blind watchmaker’ syndrome. A classic call to monotheism’s central tenet that God is everywhere and judging. He maketh even that which He cannot possibly maketh. My take is more Tao of Physics, more Oriental holistic, more interconnected subatomic networks with inbuilt natural laws of justice than your run-of-the-mill divine, omnipotent Father-figure there to restore the cosmic balance of justice in favour of the kind and compassionate over the cruel and selfish among us. Intelligent design? Only in so far as subatomic matter is mystically connected to each other despite time and vast distance. Protons telekinetically agreeing that so-and-so is worthy, through honourable conduct, of synchronicity with benevolent time. On time’s elevator, the good don’t even need to punch in their desired floor. The lift knows where to take them. Whereas, the black of heart, for all their frantic prodding of buttons on the console, the elevator nevertheless spits them out precisely on a floor where only woe can find them. These we call the natural laws. You get what you give, no more, no less. Except my story betrays this as fanciful thinking dreamed up by those who need to know that behind every senseless action lurks a just reason. My story tells of how our foundations can be shaken by events that have no purpose other than to reaffirm the popular, secular belief that shit just happens. If everything happens for no other reason than to provide no other reason, then please stop the whirring cosmos for i want to get off.

My neighbour, for want of a better word, was coming home two nights ago. Now his home is rather unconventional. To get there he has to park his car by a canal bridge in a hushed little village full of fairytale thatched cottages, then walk a considerable distance through the quarter-lit gloaming along the black waters of the canal towpath. The towpath is narrow and the banks steep. On one side foliage arches over like a line of tall, bowing hunchbacks. On the other is the water, sullied and still like a river of weak tea with a dash of milk. This garden path of his is neither for the frail nor the faint of heart. Seeing that he answers to neither of these calls, he was walking home with his six month-old pup, Patsy, off the lead with shopping bags in each hand. The Irish terrier, still in that delicate stage of training, would ordinarily have been on the lead but for the fact that the shopping won’t carry itself. Learning to walk independently and by his side, she was beginning to make great strides toward obedience.

Emerging from under a small brick bridge, he put one foot in front of the other, feeling his way through the rapid darkening. As if from nowhere his toe stumbled hard against an exposed tree branch and the forward momentum of his body coupled with the weight of the bags sent him headlong into the canal. Head first he fell, scattering his shopping everywhere, disappearing under the stagnant water. When he emerged from the shallow water he panned his vision around but she was gone. The dog had hightailed it in fear. Now this ‘flight-mode’ is not unheard of in young dogs once spooked by something. Their calm demeanour snaps, leaving their primitive instinct in the driving seat.

All night he paraded up and down the towpath, calling her name, coaxing her to come back. The following morning I got wind of her disappearance and so, without hesitation, joined the hunt. We combed the coppiced fringes of the canal, straying into neighbouring fields, all the while calling her name gently. By now a proper search party had been raised. People being people, dog people being even more divided by canine opinion than non-dog people, theories starting flying thick and fast. She’s gone to ground, some said. The fear has triggered her amygdala into making her cower timorously in the undergrowth until such time as hunger snaps her out of this fugue state. Other theories centred on her terrier nature. She must have found a drain pipe. Others still wondered if she had run and run and run until, young and utterly bewildered, she could no longer find her way home to her master and their boat. I asked the owner what his instincts were telling him. She’s gone to ground, he averred. Agreed, we vowed to resume the search the following morning, though I knew his search would go on undaunted throughout the night.

The following day came and, well, nothing. So again we theorised as to where a panicked puppy might go. We covered a radius of maybe five kilometres in all directions. Meanwhile, other kindly souls had mounted a search and rescue effort. Word was out. Even a local drone pilot wanted in on the action. By the end of the second day I could see his facade of bravery start to crumble. It’s all in the downward sloping of the eyebrows, exposing these two vertical furrows leading up from the bridge of the nose. Again I asked him, what do your instincts tell you? She’s in warm room somewhere beside an old lady who’s picked her up. There and then, a crack appeared in his sixty-eight years of tough stolidness: English passion, I call it. I don’t want to entertain that thought, he said. I have to stay positive. Granted, in such a rural area, where could she have got to? No main road for miles. Only a mainline from Bristol to London, but she wouldn’t, she couldn’t, clamber through the thorny brambles, scramble up the track ballast and onto the lines. Too gnarly, too steep, too pointless for even a pup with no sense of anything other than love for every living soul.

He kept a vigil, returning precisely to the spot where the stumbling had taken place two nights previous. The owner even left a scent trail of his socks, his t-shirts, her basket, blanket, every last little clue he could muster to coax her back from her ‘safe’ place in the undergrowth to their safe place on the boat. I watched as his initial optimism turned in on itself. Two days cowering in a damp bush without food? This theory was beginning by now to sound wishful. By the end of the second day, my thoughts turned to the likelihood that a six month-old Irish terrier, a rare and desirable pedigree, had been snaffled by a lucky passerby. She had to have been sequestered by someone, being such a ditsy and trustful little thing. Question was: what manner of character would this passerby possess? Would they be honest and self-effacing enough to know that this was someone’s prized possession? Or would they be a finders-keepers-losers-weepers type who justifies their deceit on the grounds that property is nine-tenths of the law, whatever that means?

This morning i awoke late. Powering up my phone i received a ping. It was him. He wrote to thank me for my help, but that it wouldn’t be any longer needed. She was found late last night dead by the rail tracks right next to his boat on the other side of a thicket of oak trees. She must have found her way back to the boat but took a wrong turn and ended up trotting along the tracks alone in the dark, afraid. She could hear him calling her but was stricken and helpless to go to him. So light and frail, she was struck by either the London train or a freight train. Her – and his – only solace was that her death would have been instant.

I told my mum, who has loved and lost dogs. She answered, life can be cruel sometimes, son.

Why do terrible things happen to good people? Why must the most vulnerable have to live in fear? Why is love taken away from us only when we’ve found it? Where is the natural justice in all this? I refuse to believe we exist in a dimension where senselessness and meaninglessness is a defining feature. That said, today my eyes are welling up wondering if my grip on an orderly reality is slipping and that, in the end, it’s shit that happens and no one knows the f&ck why.

The Buddha implored us not to get too attached as it would only cause suffering when weaning occurred. He must have known, however, that as humans our attachment to objects – both animate and inanimate – can be both profound and wholly natural. Within this paradox we must make our last stand. This is our eternal condition.