The Author I Have Not Yet Become

From Bricks to Code

Just imagine you had a Lego set, and a spurt of inspiration allowed you to build interesting structures consistently. Taken together, someone might think you had the makings of an architect; providence, or perhaps persuasion, might spur you in that direction.

If you did eventually become an architect, and a successful one at that, you might think your earlier Lego experience was the genesis of your talent, and indicative of it.

My exposure to computer programming and code goes back almost forty years, if I can remember clearly anymore, because dates can become fuzzy. Yet what I got to do and what could be realised were completely different things.

The Elusive Slipstream

I can write code to do utilitarian things, such as administrative activity, converting complex repetitive tasks into structured automation with logging and reporting. However, I have not broken the mould by writing a productivity tool like Microsoft Office, a game, or an app.

The ability to do this is probably there somewhere, but I have not caught the slipstream that eases me into the knowledge that it can be done. I find myself hoping for a Eureka moment that makes the scales fall from my eyes and puts my mental capacity in gear, allowing me to do something that feels extraordinary to me, yet is quite perfunctory to others.

Doubt and the Page

Everyone harbours a modicum of self-doubt in areas where others have seen a scintilla of skill and assumed it is the crack in the doorway to the expression of amazing talent. Indeed, looking at my compendium of almost twenty-three years of blogging, you could conclude that I am a good writer; I am, however, nowhere near where I would consider myself an author.

In considering a return to school, this is one area where I am ready to be taught how to put my thoughts on paper. Not for the blogs, which alone are hard enough, carrying a train of thought through three pages of verbiage with a sense of coherence, but for taking that to a book of 300 pages or more, which looks like comparing a swim to a voyage.

Both are journeys of a kind on water, but the preparation and mode of travel are so totally different that they are not the same. There is writing blogs and there is writing books; I probably have enough material in my blogs to write many books, but I feel overwhelmed at the prospect. I think there is a slipstream of authoring somewhere that I need to catch.

Stories Worth Telling

Over a decade ago, I began writing the elements of a biography, and I would be the first to suggest that we all have stories to tell. I could probably tell the most fascinating story, or the most soporific yarn, of my life, but in either case you would sense the gratitude of privilege, blessing, and hope as the substrate of everything told. None of the first four chapters look like what my blogging prowess would suggest I do so well.

Could I have this story ghostwritten? The idea alone of using another mouthpiece to give my own life story in a second-hand narrative weakens me to total impotence. Where I have not found the impetus to get ahead by myself, I suppose that means I need the education and tutelage to bring that ability and facility to the fore.

If this were to be achieved by pep talk, daring, acknowledgement, or the recognition of what others see as my talents and gifts, I promise you, it would already have been done.

There is the truth and there is reality: even men of great renown have their fears, their misgivings, and their doubts, all part of what makes each of us human and, hopefully, part of the appreciation by others that we are all still a work in progress.

A Google NotebookLM AI Podcast on this blog

In the absent books of writhe

The un-chronicling of naughty

“You’re a naughty boy”, that’s something I had heard many times from when I was a boy and even so now that I am someone’s lover boy. With that comes the threat of something one might or might not enjoy, but that is left to be seen and felt.

Apparently, there is a journal, a mythical black book with fictional ideas of what a naughty boy has done, written in invisible ink, one would suppose because evidence of all that is as scant as watching the divinations of a shaman, for only they can see whatever they see and interpret what is not within the purview of the supplicant.

It could be put down to the usual banter the jousting between a black book with blank pages, then again; if the pages were black, what is written therein might not be seen but for the sake of highly fluorescent ink against the fact that the evident notepad with a pen always within reach and the propensity to tap away at a keyboard to produce a blog.

Maybe it is not a contest, just a whimsical notion of readiness and lethargy, no winners to celebrate, just that naughty is all part of a spectacle, present with many and left to fester by some. Then, rather than call someone else a naughty boy, history came crashing in with an excellently deployed putdown, along the lines of before your cheeky face appeared. That should leave some chuckling with a naughty giggle.

Thought Picnic: There Really Was A Country

Of lives and wars

This is one of those spontaneous blogs that started from an exchange on Twitter that moved to Facebook where I for the first time abused the etiquette of leaving a status to write a treatise.

It revolves around how a friend and I were affected by the Nigerian Civil War, his was by reason of experience, and mine was by reason of the effect of pictures on an impressionable young mind. We both found there was a story to be told from our perspectives all the more after the publication of Chinua Achebe’s There Was A Country.

The Facebook thread appears here and below you will find the comment I posted and because I have more scope on a blog, I will allow myself the latitude of more detail.

I walked into Blackwells on Charing Cross Road this evening and there were 5 books prominently displayed near the enquiries desk. Foyles when I went there just over a week ago had sold out and had 23 on order.

When we returned

My parents observed the events that changed Nigeria radically from the UK, I was born a few years before the war but I remember clearly how keen my parents were to return to help rebuild Nigeria. So keen, it was a few months after my dad had qualified as an accountant, winning prizes in the process but he also had to be cleared for travel after having gone for an operation hours after he completed his examinations.

The last picture we took before leaving England had me nestled in the trunks of the legs of the adults that came to bid us farewell, my mother a good 7 to 8 months pregnant with my sister, I am still surprised she was allowed to travel.

Up North, an amazing Nigeria

We arrived in Nigeria and after the hometown and village visits that still have my parents recalling my amazing precocity we were headed up North, first to Kaduna where my parents were lecturers at the Kaduna Polytechnic and then to Jos where I witnessed the many times Yakubu Gowon came home with Gnassingbe Eyadema, he had to drive past my primary school - I have the fondest memories of childhood, Nigeria and the North from those times.

[In the past few years, my heart just breaks when I hear of the indigene-settler conflicts of Jos and the Boko Haram bombings in Kaduna – I remember the neighbourhoods affected quite vividly.]

My visions of the war

The war, our house was full of books but there was one I could not miss, it was Peter Obe's photographic documentary of the war, [Nigeria: A Decade of Crises in Pictures, Peter Obe] I was sat down by my parents and we leafed through every page and for many years afterwards, the horrors of war were imprinted on my seriously impressionable mind.

I must however say, for a long time, I found no scholarly records of the Nigerian Civil War through primary and secondary school, I was a voracious reader of history and by 8 I had devoured all I could learn of American history from our school library, was teaching myself French at 9 and then read up on World War II in secondary school - the World Wars remain some of the material I still find too engaging to drop.

Rekindled interest

I will eventually read Chinua Achebe's book, but it was for good reason that I knew and listed on Twitter at least five names on my Social Network that I really wanted to review that book, Pa Ikhide R. Ikheloa being the most prominent of them all.

I see each time that we are missing complex and informed narratives of the Nigerian Civil War and this especially is lacking amongst our present day youth. I hope they can divorce themselves from the sentimentality of their affinities and allegiances to devour this tome as objectively as their minds will allow them.

My Nigeria

I lived in a Nigeria that once really did seem to work and even more so, my childhood experiences make me feel Nigerian first before any other thing. We left the North in the late 70s but I retain a good deal of the Hausa I learnt in my childhood and since this is about amazing mothers, the pride I have in mine is even more exemplified in the fact that she can pass for Hausa or Igbo just as much as she is Yoruba and the greater feat she achieved was learning to speak Igbo fluently without first setting foot in Igboland which she did decades later.

My regret is having never learnt more Nigerian languages apart from passing conversation in Berom and greetings in Edo.

The story needs to be told and we will do ourselves the greatest justice by dispassionately reviewing all the good material we can find.

I still believe mobility around Nigeria culminating in residency and imbibing the language, traditions and customs of the people in our surroundings is key to Nigerian integration and necessary for the cohesion that will make the entity called Nigeria grow as one united nation and the identity Nigerian mean more to us than where we are from. That challenge falls to our youth today, the generation before mine did live in Nigeria as a whole.

AKO is hardly the best at rush hour

Shopping time for the commuter

In the commuter world, the station is a place where everyone should appreciate the context of time and the instant gratification required by customers to get in, grab something, catch the train and relax in a seat fiddling with whatever was acquired.

I have however come to the conclusion that many shops in Amsterdam Central Station have no idea of the setting in which they are based.

The shops may very well know they have a market but they do not understand their customers, the characteristics of shops in the high street are quite different from those in a train station and very different from those in an airport.

The psyche of a shop

In the high street, you have time to browse and flit around in perpetual indecision till you end up with something really expensive that you never really needed.

When you shop at the airports, the purchases could be impulsive or based on the need to acquire gifts for those back at home – you may not have as much time, but you would hardly be in a panicky rush to get on your plane, except where you do not arrive on time to check-in, in which case you would hardly be shopping.

Corner shops or late night shops are a different genre; they are open until just that time when ghosts have finished putting on their makeup; they are that last refuge to interact with retailers because you have missed the regular shops and just need a quick TV dinner or something that prepares you for the next body engine trouble.

Rush-hour in tardy shops

When in comes to station shops, it requires a completely different mindset and business model – those shops are in premium rent areas, the customers hardly have the time and they definitely want prompt and efficient service, at least, that is my opinion.

For three days now as I have half-rushed to catch my train to work in the rush-hour at because of the newsagents in the station, the experience has left me quite seriously annoyed.

First off all, these newsagents has three shops in the station and somehow have failed to get it right for all sorts of reasons.

A Knock Off

For the want of controversy, AKO [Source: AKO.nl - Online boeken bestellen – In Dutch, the online site of the store] which prides itself as the best bookshop in the Netherlands seems to be failing in its prime purpose at Amsterdam Central Station.

It is almost unimaginable that at 8:00AM in the thick of the rush hour the all the newspapers are yet to be stacked up, at the most accessible store at the East side of the station, half the papers are still on the trolley in cellophane wrapping and chance has it that the one I want is in the pile.

One can go to the West side but the queues are just interminably long, with much more variety, the choices are their to keep you there for longer than it healthy for your heart; further down near Platform 14, the papers are staked up but the price scanner cannot read the barcode, forget the queues, they are long too.

Poor staff management

It is absolute chaos at times, as you find staff that should be at the tills doing other things around the shop and the queues stretch out into the concourse – I would presume the customers have another hour before their train.

In my case, I only have minutes and by the time one has walked to perimeter of the station for what should have been available 10 metres from the entrance of the station, one is almost running for the train – it is utterly beyond the pale.

The other day, they put a greenhorn on the till, he spent minutes charging the wrong price and giving out excess change along with his obvious state of discomfiture, I heard enough of the Dutch in the customer’s frustration when he cursed about how they could have put an inexperienced lad on the tills in the rush-hour.

I do wonder if these stores realise that people who pick up a newspaper really have no time for food parcel queues – in fact, I have seen setups in London where on trust people are able to use a paper dispenser, saving time for them to catch their trains with dignity.

Today, it was the Platform 14 store, a queue 10 deep and just one till available whilst the other staff were stacking shelves with non-essentials, I just could not wait 10 or more minutes to pay for the paper so I put it back.

They can sort this thing out

I am incensed that I ended up having to travel an hour without my paper just because there are three shops in the station that cannot seem to be managed properly with a clear knowledge of their setting.

These shops probably have to open earlier to stack up their shelves in time, they definitely need to have staff manning all the available tills in the rush-hours, the greenhorns should only do the quiet hours, in the meantime they can be stacking shelves if necessary and the prices of all major international newspapers should appear on a price board, just in case the scanner cannot decipher the barcode.

Thankfully, I am not the regional manager of that group of stores, else a good few heads included mine might have rolled for what is just gross incompetence and the lack of attention to the possibility that customer impatience could have lost them a good deal of business.

Nary a dry eye

Drag me into the first and I might see the rest

Being one not easily persuaded by the rave reviews and hype surrounding Oscar-nominated films or even ones enjoying great critical acclaim; one has finally given in to the excitement to the two recent trilogies of drama and action.

The Matrix and Lord of the Rings series were films one first watched long after the cinemas are ditched the influx for other new Hollywood servings.

In the case of the Matrix, one had opportunity of borrowing the DVD from a colleague at work and that suffered six viewings in quick succession over 4 nights. That one missed the theatrical release was like being in the midst of the news but not hearing the news.

One could not wait for the next in the series, which was, then another year away.

The Fellowship of the Ring which was the first part of the Lord of the Rings trilogy came into one's possession as a bundled-bargain of three Douwe Egberts filter coffee packs and a VHS video with Dutch subtitles.

One must confess there was not as much excitement to see the next instalment as one had with the Matrix. One did see the next two theatrical releases of the Matrix, which had the ingenious direction of them being filmed at the same time, and the road exclusively built for the chase scenes.

You will have to rob me for that

Shopping on Saturday, there are now three bookshops that cater for English books, Waterstones and the American Bookstore on Kalverstraat and the New English Bookshop on Leidsestraat. [The main tourist and shopping streets in Amsterdam – there are others but not for the middle incomer].

The latter offers affordable books more of the reference quality and not necessarily as contemporary as the other bookshops.

One has run out of decent bookshelf space and the furniture store beckons for a domiciliary makeover.

Anyway, one was in Waterstones and sauntered to the video section to view what could be purchased. One did not get to see the theatrical version of the Two Towers, second of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. It behoves one to see that before the popcorn night for the Return of the King.

At €40 for the theatrical version and €60 for the extended version of 42 extra minutes on the version that went to the cinemas, one could be forgiven for thinking videos were like music that you listen to time and time again.

Nay! Videos might get a second viewing, music gets many more playbacks, apart from the extras in commentaries, reviews and other snippets of versatility, and the DVD from my perspective is hardly worth that financial outlay.

It is interesting to note that about 20 years after the Indiana Jones series, one can get the whole DVD pack for under €50 and watch at leisure.

No surprise the everyday person of regular film-going age would either go to the cinema or download the film from the internet than spend what could be term larceny on DVDs.

I, for one, walked into my local rental and got the extended version for an overnight viewing at €4, and was able to watch the whole film and one half of the commentary over 24 hours. €56 saved from acquisition and €5 saved from a theatrical viewing in the summer.

Cry me a river

Two days after watching the second of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, one was determined to catch the third being The Return of the King in the larger cinema halls.

In a rush to catch the bus to the station from the office, one had inadvertently booked a ticket in the wrong cinema at the Southern end of Amsterdam rather than in the centre – The Pathe group has a number of cinema halls around the Netherlands and allows for internet reservations of tickets with mobile phone SMS confirmations.

Getting into the city centre was a bit fraught because of some train scheduling problems and rare but increasing occurrence in theNetherlands.

Finally, one was just in time to get a seat in the main hall for a three-hour sitting, a serving of Coke and sweet popcorn with the inconvenience of a full bladder. Endurance and excitement what gives?

In the last 20 minutes, there were screens of reunion and happiness in view of the suffering that of the whole trilogy, the flood of tears from the macho men would float a whale.

For those in the know, whilst Justin Timberlake has a contemporary release of a track Cry Me A River, however, a 1953 version once also sung by Billie Holliday has more relevance.