Eyes Lined Up

The Art of Making Up One's Mind

I cannot recall where, but I read a quote that gave me a wry smile, probably decades ago, which said, “I put lipstick on my forehead to make up my mind.”

Make-up as applied by people could be to accentuate the positive, conceal the unseemly, or exaggerate the bizarre. I wouldn't know, as I use neither lipstick nor blusher, but I have my mind made up about a few things.

A Modern Avon Lady

After paying for groceries this evening at Aldi, I walked past a cashier at one of the checkouts and my eyes were drawn to hers, as they were marked out with dark eyeliner; you could not miss them. I thought she might be a quintessential Aldi lady, in profession and looks, borrowing the idea of Avon ladies from a time before.

Canal Street’s Spectacle

Then on Canal Street in Manchester, the centre of the Gay Village, there are lots of female impersonators or drag queens in desperately outlandish make-up, and the less said of their apparel and high-heeled footwear that would commit the sensible to the emergency room of an orthopaedic hospital, the better. They regale us with offers of cheap drinks to patronise the clubs they represent.

I am left wondering whether this is for them a profession they get paid for or just a hobby. I had a fascination for that subculture and their performances in the early 1990s, but I am much less enamoured by the spectacle today.

From Subculture to Mainstream

Yet, this genre has gained global reality television popularity in the drag race competitions started by RuPaul. One such drag queen from Manchester was a runner-up in the inaugural UK series.

In my view, no self-respecting woman would go to the extent of a drag queen, except perhaps ladies of a certain persuasion of questionable repute. Yet, in the case of the drag queen I saw on my way home, there was both eyeliner and eyeshadow that would make Nefertiti blush.

The Fine Line Between Art and Excess

The use of make-up can be abused, and it does get abused to garish and grotesque levels. Some end up quite ghoulish, enough to put you to great fright if observed in dim light. However, all we can do is be entertained from a distance. We wouldn’t want to be represented by them so closely that the association becomes difficult and inconvenient.

On Spectacle and Proximity

There's something revealing about our relationship with spectacle. We’re drawn to what's unusual, extreme, even outrageous, yet we instinctively maintain a boundary between observation and involvement. A rather blunt Yoruba saying captures this tension: “A mad man is a sight to watch in the marketplace, but not a joy to have as a relation.”

The proverb isn’t really about madness; it's about how we engage with what lies outside our norms. We watch, we’re entertained, perhaps even fascinated, but we preserve distance. It’s an honest, if uncomfortable, acknowledgement of how most of us actually behave towards those we find bewildering or excessive.

Yet this instinct towards separation deserves examination. We may counter it with the humbling reflection of John Bradford: “There but for the grace of God go I.” We are no better than the other but for grace, mercy, and fortune. What separates the observer from the observed may be nothing more than circumstance, upbringing, or mere chance.

This is not a critique or a celebration, just a neutral observation inviting conversation and opinion.

Blog - I wear lipstick (November 2005)

A Google NotebookLM AI Podcast on this blog

My boarding school story still affects me

Parents in the know

I have been watching with rapt and engaged attention the developments on the Nigerian Twittersphere about boarding school life and bullying, that began following the unfortunate death of Sylvester Oromoni, a 12-year-old pupil of Dowen College in Lagos as a result of an apparently coerced initiation into a cult. [BBC News: Sylvester Oromoni: Nigerians demand justice over Dowen College death]

My boarding school experience which started over 45 years ago was a decision by my parent to give me a grounding in our culture and traditions, as we lived in the north of Nigeria and they were from the southwest, I was born abroad with a good few things well-formed, language and speech, mannerisms and attitude, I was somewhat a stranger not integrating enough into what should be a Nigerian.

Back home to black out

On the other hand, they also wanted to toughen me up as I began to relive the separation anxiety that I experienced in England. For I was preterm by 10 weeks and that was spent mostly in an incubator in Birmingham whilst my parents worked and studied in Walsall. I also had a bit of fostering and being moved around foster carers as they progressively could not find suitable ones, one even starved me that I took to stealing food out of the refrigerator when I was back with my parents. Odd behaviour, my mother thought until she found out what was happening.

Just after my 10^th birthday, the common entrance examination season for secondary school admission started, my parents were not looking for any schools near home, I was in taking exams in the old Western State and Lagos to the extent that I was away from home for over 4 months living with relations mostly met for the first time when they came to pick me up from the airport. For a while, I was with my cousins when the February 1976 coup happened.

Blog - Childhood: Shocked into adolescence

On my return home in late May, I already had another baby sister, amongst other things too distressing to talk about here and then as a listener with wild tales about paranormal activity between my aunt and our new house servant, I began seeing things, apparitions of otherworldly figures that my father dismissed as fantasy. My parents weren’t listening to me.

Blog - Thought Picnic: The reality beyond the augmented

A misfit adrift

I prepared for boarding school with much of what I needed to fit in wrong, my shorts should have been light green, they were grey, I could not tell if that was a typographic error on the part of the school or something my mother misread. I had a hefty machete to cut the grass when what I needed was the equivalent of a scimitar. This introduction to boarding school life was brutal and harsh, so I left essential personal health things undone and resumed bedwetting that rarely ever happened in the past year or so.

Soon, I was seeing things in the night, ghosts, I thought, and recited Psalm 23 all through the night until I was completely tired out. Amongst my classmates, I was in the younger cohort by an average of 2 years and were it not for my early development, I would have been picked on more, just as I was the butt of jokes and extreme ridicule.

That first term was torture and when news of my situation reached my parents, I know that my mother’s best friend tried to prevail on them to bring me back to the north, which they refused to do, confident in their reasoning that the boarding school experience was essential to my education and tough education it was I found ways to adapt and survive whilst keeping counsel of my own situation. My parents weren’t listening.

New terms of engagement

The Christmas holiday was spent in the village with my grandparents and my father came to visit for a week. In that time, we visited grottos and medicine men, had incisions in all sorts of places, drank concoctions, some too vile to describe. All to the goal of curing me of my apparent ailment or psychological illness, but never once did I see a professional, a specialist or a paediatrician in psychology or psychiatry, which with hindsight might have done me a world of good.

The first half of the second term, I spent as a day student living with my aunt because the boarding house could not endure another half-term of nightly disruptions from an apparently unstable child.

I returned to the boarding house in the second half of the second term and appeared to settle down to school. To my parents, their planning was working, I was becoming more independent and may be responsible. Responsible for some things they probably would not have liked me to be responsible for.

You get by even with the injustice

There was bullying and abuse, much that I try to forget, and I made friends with similar backgrounds, though I was more privileged in that when they were returning home for holidays, they got on trains to the north. I was picked up and taken to the airport to fly home, there are things where my parents really did lay out the red carpet for their son. Even when we moved from Kaduna to Lagos, at half-term and the end of term, the driver arrived in time to take me back home. No fuss.

In the last year at school, we returned for summer school which was going well for a few weeks when some amongst us looking for fun in their riotous youthful exuberance raided the girl’s hostel causing damage to property and harming some of the girls. Many of us were oblivious of what had happened, but rather than investigate, the Parents Teachers Association imposed collective punishment on all the boys, and we were expelled from the boarding school for the fifth year.

The vice-principal came to the hostels to see us pack up to leave, and she said to my hearing as she looked at a few of us that she knew we were not involved in that melee. I spent my fifth year as a day student, and it is a huge upheaval to my early education. For that unjust act, I have not forgiven Remo Secondary School (RSS) for that injustice from 40 years ago. I believe I would have had a better leaving school result had I stayed in boarding school.

My education was searing

The result of my boarding school experience is more far-reaching than I sometimes realise. For whilst, I am in contact with some of my school and classmates through social media, I have no enduring friendships. That time represents when I seemed to fall into clinical depression from which I did not recover or find any bearings for 5 years. It also took completely leaving my parents’ and home too. The boarding school experience had schooled me into preferring to be away.

I have not participated in any RSS old student association activities or offered any support for first the reason I gave earlier and out of the fact that part of the leadership has some of the people who bullied me in charge. It is strange that a couple of years ago, one of them attended an event I was at, I would not have recognised him and if I did, I most definitely would not have approached him.

Not another chance to do that again

The most consequential part of this boarding school experience and I was speaking to Brian about it is Nigeria. When I left Nigeria, I left for good. I have family and relations in Nigeria, my father, an octogenarian and my mother a septuagenarian, I have felt a bit shamefaced about not seeing them in a very long time, but the truth is we broke those strong affinity bonds much earlier in life when they were being strong parents.

I can forgive them the boarding school experience, but the result is the result, I am not inclined to get on the plane to see anyone, much as I love them and would probably miss them when they are gone. I do the necessary in supporting them as much as I can and that is where we are at. Boarding school shapes you, marks you, scars you, if you have a child in boarding school, be prepared for the unintended consequences. Yes, I am well into my fifties, and it is a wound that never healed, I just learnt to tend it and live with it.

Blog - Childhood: Ghosts and ghouls of my past

Blog - Thought Picnic: A child has memories that last a lifetime  

This is deep stuff now

In thought without words

All year long, we have been preparing for this, the almost 11 months that we have persevered, supporting each other with daily communication, along with the occasional tiff, it has not been easy at all.

Strangely, I do not have that excitable buzz of youthful wistfulness and exuberance, I seem to be my totally English self, betraying no emotion at all. I guess we are now in serious territory, it is not a longing infatuation with the novelty of discovery even if the pandemic insinuated two 11-month separations in the last two years.

This man means a lot more to me than I am sometimes willing to volunteer, he is my partner and everything in me is yearning to be in his arms. That, itself would do that talking, as at times, the most and best is said when nothing at all is spoken. I’m in love.

Every time we say goodbye

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Chances

Sometimes, we must take chances and when it comes to love, it is best not to lose those chances. That is what I did with the sudden break in activity that allowed for me to review other aspects of my life and wellbeing. Running a long-distance relationship is not easy at the best of time and we are left to make the most of whatever time we can have together as we arrange and plan for the future.

In this, I found the opportunity to combine business and leisure, I flew out to Johannesburg eleven days ago and met up with my partner who flew in from Bulawayo. The hours of conversation on WhatsApp and Skype seemed to prepare us for this as if we had been together all along.

Embraces

All the in-jokes livened up into a celebration of happiness and joy as we held hands, laughed, kissed, and hugged. In that we weaved 9 days of romance, doing wonderful things all around Johannesburg, communicating and enjoying the companionship we hope to make into a life together, somewhere.

As the days went by and the time for us to return to our respective abodes dawned upon us, we tried as much not to agonise at our pending separation but made the best of every moment we have had together until I had to see him off to the airport this morning.

Advances

At the departure gates, we said our goodbyes and damned the consequences of kissing in public. It was a wonderful time we had together, we are also looking forward to just under 7 weeks away when we meet up for almost 3 weeks of fun and adventure.

Every time we say goodbye, much as it looks like we die a little, maybe, I almost cried a little, we also live for the moments of when we would say hello again, embrace each other and plot that story of lives intertwined for the prospect of wonder, beauty, intrigue, hope, love and more.

Thank you, South Africa, for giving me this wonderful and lovely feeling I never knew I had the wherewithal to express with anyone for a long time.

South Africa: Uber despite the annoyances

Uber knows

Being in a strange city or a foreign country, apart from airport shuttles to my hotel, I have been quite confident to use the Uber taxi service to get around town.

In Johannesburg where places could be so obscure, and some addresses are at best a guess rather than a precise location, that relying on the Uber navigation aids is very useful.

However, whilst reviewing some of my journeys to and from our offices dotted around Johannesburg and the suburbs, I could not help but think I was being taken for a ride in some sort of disadvantageous collusion between Uber and the driver against me.

Uber throes

Some journeys just seemed to be twice as long in the distance without really making up for time or missing the traffic and with that an unexpected tour of the periphery of Johannesburg, the cost, no doubt outrageous.

It got to a head that I had to register a complaint with Uber about my trips, because to my mind I was being unfairly taken advantage of, either through design, some Machiavellian scheme or the quirks of technology having a mind of its own. My complaint:

I am unhappy that on a number of journeys between Randburg and Sandton, I am taken on unnecessarily long journeys via the freeway doubling the distance that would have been covered without the need for a bypass especially when there is light traffic going into Sandton.

The idea that the distance from Randburg/North Riding to Sandton should be 33km is outrageous and a total rip-off.

One would have expected Uber to provide options of the shortest and probably the most optimal journeys rather than defaulting to the longest possible marathon coverable between 2 points in Johannesburg.

I have no problems with the drivers, but between Uber and the guidance offered by your navigation systems, this customer relationship is not only badly served, but seriously fleeced too.

Please do not spam my mail box with requests for comment, just sort this matter out.

Thank you.

Uber blows

Uber eventually apologised and offered a ZAR 50 compensation that was deducted from my next journey and whilst it appears things have been a bit better, it does not half ameliorate the fact that I have been well and truly rogered and ultimately fleeced.

The additional annoyance is that for every comment I leave, I get more spam from Uber asking me to comment on my comments, I really do not have the time for more small talk, just have the service delivered with professionalism and consideration.

I guess one other thing that will not go amiss on the Uber app is giving me the list of my most recent locations and destinations as well as not generalising street names when there is a possibility that there are many occurrences of that street name in the same city.

Uber glows

On such event was where there were two Industrial Roads in Johannesburg, the one we first arrived at was not right and in one morning I had a 66-kilometre ride on Uber for what should never have been more than 18 kilometres just because I trusted Uber to know better than I did about where I was going.

Besides all this, I will still happily use Uber, even if drivers end up on the wrong side of the road and I have to hobble across the wide and dangerous Johannesburg roads, cane in hand to join my ride.

For better for worse, Uber is here to stay, it, however, should get better at precision, direction, instruction and value.

Outliers - Understanding our potential

An outlying book

I would not offer further analysis to the fact that it took me 5 days to finish a 154-page book and soon after I finished reading that I thumbed through a 299-page book in less than two days.

I had heard of The Tipping Point [1] and Blink [2] but the hype surrounding the publication of the books and the ideas in it left me thinking they were quick-buck books given advertisement oxygen that would soon run out.

In fact, I did not know of the author Malcolm Gladwell [3] until just about 3 weeks ago when he appeared on a news programme to talk about his new book Outliers [4] and espoused the view that the prevalence of air crashes with Korean pilots was one of cultural significance rather than pilot expertise.

Power-Distance in the cockpit

That seemed an absurd generalisation to make but there was empirical data to buttress the points being made and this lead to the Geert Hofstede Cultural Dimensions Index [5] and the consequence of a high Power-Distance Index on communication in the cockpit.

Apparently, because of the paternalistic nature of Korean society the First Officer always deferred to the Captain and even in danger situations the conversation was always mitigated never direct, however the Captain in his position would just give an order and expect it to be obeyed.

The cockpit is hardly the place where honest and direct communication should be lacking, in fact, there are too many cases of where communication breakdown in the cockpit has been the cause of crashes and it suggests that where the First Officer is flying the plane there is probably a higher level of safety than the other way round.

Essential new thinking

Outliers was quite a good read and it covered a lot of ground as to how the subtext we read about successful people hardly reads like the reality behind their successes.

Obviously, there are many learned scholars who would view some of these analogies and allegories as over-simplification, but then, just because there are elaborate studies of certain human factors for success does not mean that the accepted norms are the embodiment of the complete truth.

I would hear Malcolm Gladwell out first because he breaks down complex characteristics and phenomena into manageable chunks and I can see where commonsense thrives over convoluted preserve of the elite.

The winners of the 2005 Nobel Prize for Medicine had to go against the accepted grain of knowledge in finding out that bacteria (helicobacter pylori [6]) can grow in the stomach and duodenum which causing ulcers and cancers – to think certain cancers could be cured by antibiotics – I am open to new thinking and Mr. Gladwell opens new avenues of interesting analysis, though one should not swallow it all.

Physical maturity over real ability

Malcolm Gladwell is not an anthropologist nor do I think he is a sociologist, but he gets you thinking and he puts together patterns and consequences from how the time of birth in the calendar and the selection processes based on the school calendar year is based on physical maturity rather than ability at childhood, going on to create sport professionals later on in life.

I could well agree that it was my higher physical development that allowed me to be a year below the class average age though it has not really perpetuated into great advantage for me, in areas like sport, that could make all the difference.

In my father’s generation you had to be able to pass your right arm over your head to touch the left ear to be admitted into the first year in primary school, just imagine how many age mates were unfortunately left behind because of that act of discrimination and separation, a few years down the line the ones left behind catch up and they are giants in a class of midgets along with the abuse that it could entail.

Work ethic and legacy

The real story of Bill Gates’ success is in having access to computers at the age of 13 and the thousands of hours spent learning programme and this was long before Microsoft in what he called the 10,000 hour rule.

Much as there are a combination of factors that made the Beatles a runaway success in the 1960s, he suggests that did all the graft work in Hamburg through long hours of practice and performance, I would suppose Tiger Woods and Lewis Hamilton come to mind as people who started very young honing the skills we now appreciate and celebrate – basically, there is no overnight success without the initial graft work.

He then covers the issue of background and generational influences that seem to endure even though we have moved on from those times, how the number systems of Far East Asian countries allows for them to be better at mathematics and how more time at school allows for children from seemingly poor backgrounds to perform well.

My early opportunities

Reading this book allowed me to understand even better why I still think my primary school education was the best gift from my parents and how having been in an very international setting albeit in Nigeria gave me a number of personality traits that allow me to be both respect authority and engage authority.

My father always said, I knew how to talk, I could make conversation with anyone if they are in the slightest interested in being engaged. No one could understand why I could sit for hours chatting to my great grandmother at the same time, I found I could walk into any office and feel comfortable without being enamoured by power or influence.

In secondary school, I found it strange that my other colleagues were scared of the teachers, what some might call disrespectful because of the very high Power-Distance Index meant that teachers never really got to interact in ways that allowed their passion for a subject to be infectious – in fact some teachers used their positions in sadistic domination of students.

Even in that kind of setting, I was able to make friends with teachers because there was no fear to engage them and what might have looked precocious was simply an inquisitive mind, it might have appeared smart but it was because I was not bound by the cultural encumbrances of obsequiousness and unnecessary genuflection – I think adults noticed it, engaged it and responded positively to it.

The gift of opportunity

There is much more in Outliers that gets you thinking about how our lives are shaped by circumstances that seemed to look like some destiny but the is fact we are gifted with all sorts of opportunities and where we have been able to grasp those opportunities we have been able to make radical difference to our lives.

It goes without saying that heaven still helps those who help themselves and as the Chinese saying goes – “Don’t depend on heaven for food, but on your own two hands carrying the load”. Outliers is a book that should have those who have suspended their intellect and God-given abilities for some system of false religion and fate to wake up and become Outliers too.

On the scale of Read – Skin – Toss, again, Outliers is a good Read.

Sources

[1] The Tipping Point - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[2] Blink (book) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[3] Malcolm Gladwell - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[4] Outliers (book) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[5] Geert Hofstede - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[6] Helicobacter pylori - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia