Thought Picnic: The plant

Labours of reluctance

I am not as green-fingered as my father who in his professional prime left lucrative accountancy on an unfortunately doomed enterprise in farming, the first harvest was raided first by monkeys and what was left fell to mould.

Besides, as authoritarian patriarch long before his father died, he had a penchant of starting us off on some laborious earthy project and conveniently disappearing off for some more important activity. We noticed that sleight of hand long before and it probably informed how we sometimes distanced ourselves so as not to be enthused into another wild scheme.

The plant

I was given an orchid when I bought my home in Amsterdam, it needed careful tending and it only flowered annually, it was the plant.

The plant in some ways was something I desired, I was ready to invest in it for the pleasure of the bloom and so the tending began. The right flower pot, a place to put it to catch the sunlight, the watering done not to drown the plant, the soil sometime fertilised to nourish the plant and I waited.

Religiously, the tending became routine, as expectation grew, but the flowering and the pleasure came once, then the waiting for a second as the routine continued after which one hoped the season may shorten for a more frequently flowering.

I’m done

For all the hope, it began to look hopeless, there was no bud and no flower, the plant took the sun and the water, it was trimmed and pruned to the point that if it were possible one would pull out a flower like a magician pulls a rabbit out of a hat. All to no avail.

By the third year, I was tired of the orchid much as I have grown tired of the plant, this love interest that one is apparently trying to woo with all charm, concern and compassion is taking sunlight and water, and giving nothing back in the colour of nature. I am quite done with this, time for another plant, though maybe that is why I am not green-fingered, I'll place an order for Gardening for Dummies.

Thought Picnic: Painful hours of nothing done

Waiting in vain

He is at the point where exasperation is plumbing the depths of incredulity as the simplest task is gaining layers of complexity that defies logic.

It is not rocket science if the people with the responsibility get on with it and do their jobs, but as one expects somebody to do the job, everybody thinks anybody can do it but nobody ends up doing it and with that comes email churn with all the traffic but not progress still.

No matter how much those who matter fume with anger and fury, there isn’t much one can do to tackle disinterest and indifference borne of petty rivalries played out by minions of an organisation.

Hours by nothing

Being brought up on the principle of dignity in labour and the honest application of self to duty for which one can be handsomely remunerated, it does not sit well to be present without the presence of productive activity to justify one’s keep even though the situation is no fault of the principal.

As the middle management ran around like headless chickens making some bend over backwards to the extreme to fulfil some fleeting purpose, contrast was drawn between one and the other.

Doing hours for nothing can somewhat be more painful than doing nothing for hours neither case is comfort for anyone, whether things will change is left to hope forlorn, they don’t work like we once thought they should.

The day I was born

Springing a prayer for offspring

Chatting to my dad yesterday as he congratulated me on my birthday with incessant prayers about my getting married and having children in his lifetime, I was on the verge of getting emotionally blackmailed.

Indeed, one is press-ganged into the henotic and obligatory amen in response to every stanza of required, desired and unwanted prayer, I would suppose the ones answered would be the ones in which we are in agreement – it would appear the exception clause I invoked sometime ago has lost its potency.

Ask daddy first

As the conservation went on, I asked, since I had only heard most of the information second-hand, what really happened on the day I was born, some 43 years ago, even though I also spoke with my mum, I was not sure asking mother would elicit any appreciable response apart from the memory of the agony of labour; only in exceptional cases should such an enquiry be made of the mother.

What transpired was an amazing review of differences and changes between then and now, my father’s memory was quite keen and I listened with rapt attention.

What really happened

Quite early on the 21^st of December 1965, my mother felt some discomfort such that she arrived in hospital with my dad around 2:00 AM, nothing was expected because I wasn’t really expected; but my mother was kept in for observation whilst father returned home.

When he woke later that morning around 7:00 AM, there was a telegram under at the door announcing that he was the proud father of a baby son born at 3:20 AM; he danced for joy and went immediately to the hospital. (Telephones were not in most homes then, a telegram was the fastest way to get messages around in those days.

By the time he arrived at the hospital they were already expecting him, his consent was required to have me transferred to a teaching hospital where I could receive more care as I was born at least 10 weeks early.

He said I looked so small, not quite bigger than a hamster, when a name was desired he suggested Young Akintayo for the meantime until when a name arrived from home in Nigeria. (In the Yoruba culture, the child is not named until the 8^th day and the parents usually defer to the elderly generation of relations for given names.)

Waiting around the incubator

When I was transferred he enquired about what should happen to his wife and he was told she could return home with him – hardly anyone knew she was pregnant, talk less of having a baby that was now some 30 miles away in an incubator.

She was back at work within a couple of days, though the Christmas holiday allowed for them to share my first Christmas with them as visitors but not being able to come too close.

I eventually had a room to myself with a nurse taking care of me morning, noon and night – to which a cheeky friend alluded the Genesis of my liking to be waited upon, apparently, it had always been part of my survival, if not upbringing – don’t know where people get all these silly ideas from.

Anyway, I was in an incubator for 2 long months before I could go home by which time I was much fully developed. He also noted that I was one of the very few boys born into the Nigerian community in the West Midlands then.

Good job! England

My father surmised that he was both grateful and impressed with the attention and care lavished on my fragile being to keep me through the early critical hours to the point when I was ready to leave for home.

That little hamster in a time when the father was not necessarily in the maternity ward holding hands, when telegrams were the quickest messaging system, when the mother was back to work almost immediately and you could trust the hospital to do all to preserve life is now 43 with not one iota of littleness about him.

What a story, the story about the day I was born.

Abort this preschool finger-painting politics immediately

It was not a joke afterall

With the sound of the television in the background, I just heard that there was going to be a Labour Party Political broadcast. Prick up your ears, instinctively.

Then like the surreal morphing into the ethereal with so much to chuckle about, I remembered a scene in Just for Laughs where on three occasions; three unassuming men were accosted by a team of uniformed men who jumped out of van lifted up the unsuspecting victims and carried then back from crossing the road, that was a laugh.

The comical voice started about true blue, red, yellow and then something about being conservative to the core to being the heir of Blair and then a liberal conservative. [1]

Surely! A democratic campaign seeking the votes of intelligent Britons cannot have boiled down to this triviality, which would make Telly Tubbies seem a complete bore.

I see your true colours

However, the full import of this message did not dawn on me till I heard the Conservative Party Political broadcast, which ended with Vote Blue, Go Green.

Suddenly, the campaign for the local elections is looking like a Hindu Festival of Colours as another colour, white this time seems to be so turned off mainstream politics they are about to vote for a party that is extreme about colour – the British National Party.

They are hardly representative of the Britain today, there is nothing national about their outlook, but I agree, they are a party.

Disinterested misrepresentation

This does not augur well for anyone, if our politics have become so juvenile that apathy and lethargy would offer yet another low turnout record.

We have definitely reached a point where democracy is failing us, when majorities are not so much about the majority of the populace that are eligible to vote but a majority of the minority that care to exercise their civil duties.

Representative democracy too seems only to matter at elections beyond which the elected seem to ignore the need for representative accountability till the next polling day.

Party politics rules even if it is not the party and policies you espouse.

Enough of the finger-painting

Politicians debating can be a sequel to the Comedy of Errors, but when it comes to leadership, governance and policies that really do matter, we deserve better than reds, hitting on blues with yellows looking on and whites running off as the lack of green brings our aching world to an end.

Enough of the preschool finger-painting exercises and let us move on to the grand work of art. [2]

References

[1] Blair resorts to cartoon jibes at Dave the chameleon – probably biased

[2] Hebrews 6:1 paraphrased and culled from the Message Bible