Thought Picnic: Letting blogs flourish in mystery and meaning

Like organic farming

In most cases, my blogs are raw and unpolished, apart from basic spellchecking and some attention to the basic rules of grammar to aid comprehension, I do little else. In fact, I am probably too lazy to even read the blog back to myself to ensure it reads and sounds right, I would think that is to be expected of personal blogs, unadulterated and without synthetic fertilisers.

Then, for those who read my blogs, there is a style and expression that is uniquely mine, you will find obscure and archaic usages and much as you will find unfamiliar words. I could be tempted into sesquipedalianism, but I more frequently resist the urge, though, it could be said the blogs do not cater to the lowest common denominator for readership.

Some air of mystery

I am of the view that the English language is very rich in expression and modality, and I have not mastered the simplicity of writing so fluently to address the broadest crowd that might happen upon my blog. It might be a failing on my part and it is one I am ready to accept as a weakness.

Generally, I hope my blog can retain a kind of mystery to the reader, by that I mean, you read what you see with all the possible interpretations that might arise in your thinking without enquiry as to first my mental state and then my presumed intentions. My blog is more of a journal with a public face, to review my blogs again for a target audience would defeat the journaling and diary aspects of blogging. Should there be a need for unravelling what is written, it might well be written into the blog itself.

Let the wild tree grow

Much as I would hate to be misunderstood, I am not striving to be totally predictable either, the questions anyone might have in their minds and many do not have any other means of contacting me apart from adding comments, certain clarifications can be requested but a full expository would be sating curiosity beyond the mystique of mystery and pondering. Let the blog flourish without the tendency to second-guess the writer.

Even when I do go over old blogs, the only corrections and modifications made are to spelling, grammar and context, rarely and I do not think I have had to rewrite a blog. I have taken down two blogs because they would have created difficulties for the subjects of my writing, beyond that, I follow the advice rather than the threat of the Duke of Wellington, "Publish and be damned."

I guess the question on anyone’s mind would be whether the blog was written for them or written for the writer by the writer themselves. One would think the latter is more plausible, then again, the roots of trees do grow in unpredictable ways and so an audience might think something applies to them, which one would suggest, is quite purely coincidental.

My city living as it happens as nothing happens

Me, myself, and I here

Sometimes, I wonder what separates me from Miss Havisham apart from the promise of a wedding that still endures to be fulfilled in due time and having not stopped any of the clocks in my apartment. Much as I would not leave anything to decay in here, my window blinds are rarely pulled up to let in natural light, there has been a fire, but not here, I quite well can exist in the isolated calm of a hermit, not interacting with the outside world for as long as I want.

None of that should read as being an antisocial being, I love the company of people to converse with, probably enjoy dinner or going out, indeed, I do chat to strangers, yet I am anything but an extrovert, I do not have the mental energy for crowds or big parties, I would soon be sat in a corner alone than be found chatting away network and glad-handing.

Ashes and debris

This morning, as I stepped out for my walking exercise, I saw some debris outside one of the blocks in our village, it is a good three blocks away with a cul-de-sac separating us, but we share the same vast subterranean carpark and the communal gym accessed with registered secure processes. It all looked charred as if consumed with fire and I wondered why anyone would set their rubbish on fire outside the block.

Later, some workmen had arrived to shovel away the debris and I was tempted to ask questions, I did not. It wasn’t till later as I stepped out for some shopping that I met my neighbour in the foyer, and she asked if I knew about the fire in that block. Fire? Yes, there was a fire, a huge one at that with flames shooting out of the roof of the block on the top floor of a 6-storey apartment block, with the main roads in the area cordoned off.

Stranger lights in the nights

It so happens, I never stepped out yesterday, at least not from the afternoon of two days before, there was commotion, and 5 fire engines I was told, and no one even reported the incident on our village Facebook page. This was the same block in which just about a year ago, a human and sex trafficking ring was busted. I cannot find any information about the fire in our city newspaper, like it has been hushed up.

Then I was told there was another fire across the street a few weeks ago that I should have been able to observe from the windows of my side of the apartment complex. There was? I did not ask when exactly, as it might have coincided with when I was away, but I knew nothing of it. It would suggest I am probably not the best candidate for curtain twitching or the Neighbourhood Watch. Much as some might attest to be powers of observation, I have not applied them with any distinction to my immediate environment.

As it happens as nothing happens

Once again, I have been lulled into the apparently deceptive uneventfulness of genteel city living where nothing of note happens and that gives cover to many things you would never imagine happening around here. For a serial sex offender lived nearby, as was the sex trafficking ring, and the Manchester bomber of May 2017 was on the outer side of our village apartment block complex.

Blog - City living in the deception of the genteel

Do I need to get on a nosey parker introductory course or is my penchant for presumably minding my own business in a very English way getting in the way of basic curiosity and awareness? That is something to think about. I might need to start with pulling up my Venetian blinds and I doubt I am ready for that radical change in living arrangements.

Having no fear of missing out

Powering down and resetting goals

I get distracted, something like losing a sense of direction or some focus, it is unsettling and upsetting, but I know it is momentary, it would pass. I have learnt not to try and force things because it only yields frustration, the kind that dogs you with the feeling that certain things you could have done did not get done, all in the wake of procrastination.

Yet, in these times where there is no social activity apart from that which you create in another form of distraction to give your mind that time to rest and recalibrate to matters better absorbing, you might also get some sleep. Like I have written before, this s no time to be driven or set inordinately ambitious goals because of the availability of time, it is a better time for a complete power down and reset.

The world is going nowhere

I think like this because the world is also at a standstill, even in Formula 1 racing, if you took a pitstop, somewhere behind the leader, you probably do not expect to come out ahead, only better equipped to catch up. There is no fear of missing out [FOMO], the world is not running away.

I am learning new things, both for my career and in self-development, all at an easy pace, using the leverage of my curiosity to get beyond the immediate and exploring further to obtain enlightenment.

It goes without saying that the greatest distraction that affects me the most is the desire to somewhere with someone, in the eagerness and expectations, we harbour, we know it would be soon. I can live with that because hope is a good thing, it keeps you looking forward and looking up, who I care for will soon be in my embrace, it is a comforting and peaceful thought.

Experience is not enough to teach you to understand things

Ignorance is a comfortable shelter

Experience is no guarantee of a quest for knowledge, or enlightened understanding of a situation. Nowhere is this more obvious than what I have seen of the broader gay community’s understanding of the core science and social issues pertaining to HIV/AIDS. [POZ]

Despite the public information and community activities promoted by many LGBTQ+ organisations to people, in places, and at events, the appalling ignorance of people to these issues is frightening.

Now, I do not intend to use this blog as an education aid, there is enough for people to search for and update themselves if so interested. However, I was reminded of a conversation I had years ago when someone aware of my situation treated me with disdain, disgust, and revulsion.

Quite inscrutable to understanding

It did not bother me; I have been a recipient of too many negative attitudes to be concerned about the chance encounters. What surprised me was when this same person years after the first brush informed me his parents have been HIV+ for over 20 years.

I held myself back from saying, how can you have this disease embedded in your family and then treat others badly? I could not understand how he until recently had not acquired knowledge or insight to interact with others with a sense of humanity. The absence of curiosity that belied the original conversation was baffling in the light of the shared experience.

It might well be that seeing his parents who he says are thriving today, on their antiretroviral (ARV) medications and in rude health, there were times in the past when they were poorly and ill, that witnessing those times had mentally scarred him. I did not probe any further, I was just weakened by the thought that experience is no impetus for understanding the ‘how is’ or ‘why is’ of anything.

Mind your language

There needs to be something else, an ingredient of curiosity and determination to learn and appreciate things. There are some many things to understand, the vagaries of prevention (PrEP), exposure (PEP), testing, viral load, CD4 counts, and social campaigns on U=U.

Fundamentally, there is also the matter of language and stigma, people with HIV are not dirty and conversely, not knowing your status if you are sexually active does not make you clean. Whatever your preferences, the greatest thing you can do for human dignity is to treat everyone with consideration, courtesy, and respect. Education is a good thing, with your learning, seek to understand the seemingly difficult and taboo things. [Counselling Today]

Blog - Dealing with sexuality and HIV stigma

Courtesy of the Stigma Project.

Thought Picnic: I will remain curious and work on it

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Who is me again?

Recently, I think I have been searching for a better understanding of myself, a kind of review of my past, my present, my prospects, the circumstances in which I find myself, what might need tinkering with and what other things must radically shift.

I guess I am constantly challenging myself to appreciate if I am achieving and contributing, whether my ideas are sound and what I need to do or where I need to go to get inspiration and insight for whatever I am faced with. There are days I do not think I have done much and there are many caught between the shame of being slothful, the guilt of not achieving my goals, the embarrassment of being caught out and the humiliation of being shown up.

Finding my place of vulnerability and being able to deal with it is still a process, the way I find it difficult to ask for or seek help when I need it most. I am working on finding the voice to fix the things I am uncomfortable with.

Guarding the influences

This Coronavirus pandemic lockdown where you are left alone and with your own thoughts, many influences begin to insert themselves in your life, usually from social media and television. I do manage my television influences better than I do social media, especially Twitter. So much jumps out at you to enrage you that you need to condition yourself in terms of initiation, engagement, response, contribution, restraint, disengagement, or indifference.

Then, I am getting better at extricating myself, I do not need to be drawn into issues that drain mental energy, denigrate, or are unedifying. The unpersuadable are just unpersuadable and it is important to see the trait early before the fruitless frustrates. Most importantly, know the unnecessary for it is unnecessary, something to be ignored and where the temptation to tweet must be resisted for your good.

I will remain curious

As I go through this developmental process, I have been trying to find fulfilment in the things I enjoy without having the things that drive others define my sense of achievement. Listening to a number of discussions from many interesting people, the pep talk is quite off-putting to the point of detestation.

The life coaches and motivation speakers who go on about using this period of sequestration or rather retreat to say you should focus on something, have a purpose in life or pursue your passion, without which you have underachieved leaving you an anxiety wreck as you realise you have let another day slip useless away, again.

Blog - Thought Picnic: In the days of useful ideas

Elizabeth Gilbert in a recent TED discussion brought in a new thought process, suggesting we exercise curiosity; a kind of interest probably in the mundane, which I do so well, observing beyond just seeing, the stakes she said are lower, there is no anxiety, for looking closer brings to light things easily missed.

I know I am curious, it feeds my learning, the learning to love myself more, it brings insight, it is questioning, precocious, inquisitive, challenging of the norm and I might just end up being proud of myself, grateful of the wonderful people and things that enrich my life. I think I am comfortable with that.

Dinner in the infectiously youthful company of Chief Jibunoh

Shy and shrinking

Generally, I am not that good at networking, but I have that there are some people I have met who have had such a profound impact on me and with whom I have cultivated interesting eye-opening relationships.

I can strike up conversations with people on almost any topic, from the utterly mundane to the very serious, the theme that recurs is that our lives are stories, yet many of us never really get to tell those stories from the unique perspective of our voices.

I was in London to attend TEDxEuston and had arrived the night before to stay at my very good friend, Funmi Iyanda's place who as I arrived in London was about to go out to dinner with friends.

To dinner

By happenstance, the planned meeting was running a bit late and with it came an invitation to join them for dinner in London’s Mayfair area.

Before we left, she mentioned we’ll be meeting with Chief Jibunoh, his daughters, granddaughters and friends. I had read of his expeditions on the Sahara Desert years ago and this suddenly looked like an exciting prospect to meet an explorer.

Dr Newton Jibunoh [CNN] is nothing like what you will see of his peers in Nigeria, a grandee, no doubt but quite down-to-earth, adventurous, optimistic, interesting and most of all, an engaging raconteur. At 27 in 1965, he drove alone all the way home from London to Nigeria crossing the Sahara Desert, he has gone back to the desert twice again.

Much as I will not share as a matter of discretion the particulars of our dinner conversations, he left a great impression on me.

Adventure is educational

He is an environmentalist; he founded the NGO – Fight Against Desert Encroachment [FADEAfrica].

However, this well-travelled man allowed me to draw a contrast, the unusualness of his activities that we do not generally find amongst Nigerians, who tend to travel but appear to lack a sense of either adventure or curiosity.

As one of my tweeps observed on Twitter a few days ago, London is the main holiday destination of Nigerians, probably with Dubai and New York, not to imbibe art or relax, but just to shop.

Losing our youthfulness

It is a sad reality that there is no inquisitiveness that drives the desire to explore, to discover, to experience, to appreciate or to understand things and differences outside our zones of comfort and familiarity.

This mind-set has insidious and debilitating consequences because it robs us of youth and youthfulness, the possibility of expanded horizons is left to degenerate into disabling myopia, as we allow bluster and bombast to cover for our satisfied and yet stark ignorance.

In Dr Jibunor, who is soon to be 77, I found a man still open to the new, the different, the other and the exciting and as we parted ways, we all knew he’ll be up to something really adventurous and we cannot wait to hear of what he has gotten up to next.

More pertinently, there is a need for us to capture a sense of adventure, the quest for knowledge through the education of experiencing something new, first with our neighbourhoods, like going down a different path, trying a different means of transport, trying different foods, going to museums and breaking out of established norms.

The world is a beautiful place, but until we get out to see that world of people, culture, diversity, amazing colour and breath-taking nature for ourselves, the sense of beauty will only be heard of in the stories told by others, like Chief Jibunoh.

Great British Railway Journeys - Series 3

The exciting things

I always want to be fascinated, amused, amazed and sometimes surprised by things I see, hear, read or experience, I am, I hope a sponge for knowledge and insight about things, whatever they might be.

History resonates with me, the way one can glean knowledge from all sorts of things like this afternoon, I found myself watching Michael Portillo’s presentation of the Great British Railway Journeys now on repeat on BBC 2, is just good tonic for the brain.

He was travelling from Great Yarmouth down the eastern seaboard of Anglia through Essex to London and in the process showing the linkages between his experiences and historical events using George Bradshaw’s Railway Companion published in the Victorian times as his travel guide.

History, geography and politics

In the third series filmed in 2012, the episodes 1 to 4 now available in BBC iPlayer, the history of the founding of the railways linked up with grave robbing [On YouTube] in Great Yarmouth along with a law - The Anatomy Act 1832 - that passed to allow the corpses of paupers to be used for anatomical research, then to the lost city of Dunwich which was at one time as large as London and the capital of the East Angles but all lost to sea - dubbed our own Atlantis.

He comes face-to-face with the skull of Simon de Sudbury – Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor who introduced the Poll Tax in the 14^th Century and was beheaded for it by the Peasants' Revolt, a lesson of history that Margaret Thatcher did not seem to have learnt when she got Micheal Portillo to introduce the Poll Tax in the 1990s almost bringing down the government because of the Poll Tax Riots that followed the implementation.

History will repeat itself if we fail to learn the lessons it teaches studiously, thoroughly and with proper attention to situation and circumstance.

Places and events

Really fascinating stuff like visiting Waltham Cross which apparently derives its name from being one of the 12 night-time resting places of the body of Eleanor of Castile, the wife of Edward I when she was borne from Lincoln to London at Charing Cross – the king erected lavish stone crosses in all these towns in memory of her.

This all culminated in Hackney where we are told of the first railway murder – a city banker, Thomas Briggs was killed by Franz Muller, a German tailor – that did fill people with fear about travelling on trains.

Great and beautiful Britain and Northern Ireland

This was compelling stuff, I cannot wait to see the other episodes as they come online and I have seen many other episodes over the years that just give you the idea that England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are such beautiful and wonderful places to visit as you tease out snippets of history, legends and yarns from city, town and village alike, of people, industry, events and change – I love this stuff.

The official website for the Great British Railway Journeys can be found here – If you can playback BBC iPlayer content, then if you are as curious as I am, that would have been time well spent.

Social Engineering Skype Trusted Contact Inquiry

Even if it was, I don’t care

Yesterday night, I was almost a victim of social engineering based on trusted connections with a contact on Skype.

The question came, “is this you on picc??..” Then a URL constructed to have Facebook in the address.

I should have been suspicious of this because my friend from whom this apparently came does his punctuation and rarely uses strange words, but my basic feeling of trust overrode the logic to my thinking.

I clicked on the link and rather than it going to a page it downloaded a file with the .exe extension, which really got me suspicious – How could he have asked if I was on a picc or picture and then send an executable file rather than a picture or a webpage?

Persuasion of the friendly kind

The genius of social engineering here is that I was first persuaded by reason of the fact that this message came from a trusted contact asking a question that would rouse ones curiosity regardless of if you were on Facebook or not.

He had apparently received this code through his Yahoo email from a trusted contact and inadvertently ran the code but not realised that he had infected his system despite the warning he received from his Antivirus utility. It is possible that the utility might just have said opening a file of that type is unsafe rather than that it was malicious.

The clean-up

We all have the tendency to override such warnings and almost always have to pay dearly for it. His Antivirus utility did not detect the problem after a full scan, however, I also asked him to download Destroy which is a free utility that inoculates web browsers and searches for malware.

The utility detected Bredolab.fb which is a kind of credential logger, it was removed and we can safely assume the system is clean. However, I happen to be one of two people whose Skype profile was online on my friend’s system who received this stuff and like me, we reacted before we questioned the real provenance.

The significance of the second link is that, when I did not fall for the redirect URL on the first inquiry it used the TinyURL link shrinker to give the same reference but deceptively named like a picture (JPG) on Facebook, but I was not taking that bait twice.

The graphic of the situation appears below.