In a bossy fragrance

Craving a shave

Creature of habit, I might well be and more, but I cannot really say. Yet, I find that I have done things for as long as I can remember out of nostalgia and just familiarity. In my youth, I would watch my father shave having mixed a powdered depilatory with water into a paste and applied it to his face, he was not a razor kind of man to my memory. Magic Shaving Powder it was.

After shaving, he would slap on Old Spice aftershave, I did not particularly acquire that tradition for my time. Now, I did not begin to grow a beard until I was in my 30s, a kind of late development not particularly congruent with my birth or my reaching puberty. I almost thought I would never have that rite of passage defining manhood or otherwise. Magic came to my aid for a while.

A whiff of masculinity

At my neighbour’s, an agemate who I visited often and that’s how I grew to be a fan of Ray Parker Jr, though, for deodorant, he used Brut by Fabergé original deodorant, now owned by Unilever. It had that easy yet light scent to it, that when I saw it about 2 decades ago, I did not hesitate to get it and I have used it since then.

It is now 26 years ago since I first visited Berlin where I met up with an old friend who was living at Karlshorst in the east and a rather daring place to be at night. He was going out with someone who worked in a perfumery, and he had a bag of bottles of cologne, eau de toilette, scents, fragrances, and perfumes, some that stank worse than a skunk.

I found the boss

Asked me to go through the bag and choose whatever I fancied and this was just when celebrity piss water was gaining some sort of prominence, but I was not into any of that. Of the lot, I chose Hugo Boss Number One eau de toilette and that has stood the test of time. Though for years, it has been made in England but unavailable in the stores.

I took to getting a bottle at the duty-free shops in Charles de Gaulle (CDG) International Airport, Paris where I have seen the price go up from around €35 to just under €75. I began to worry when I was running out, though I seemed to have a bottle to spare just because of the scarcity. Then on Saturday, I caught a glimpse of the packaging in my local Superdrug store, though that was on my way out, the price at £56, strewth!

Here I was considering returning some other time to buy it when I ventured on Amazon and it was going for £33.98 to be delivered the next day. It was a bargain and much as I like to shop in the high street, there are times, shopping online is just prudent and so I have a good stock of my eau de toilette for the foreseeable future. Habit and creature meet in one situation.

Magic shaving powder.

Old Spice Original After Shave.

Brut by Fabergé

Hugo Boss Number One

RSS Mischief II - The fundamentals of fluid mechanics

Angelic babies, we were not

When we were sent to boarding school, it was presumed we were innocent, unaware, unspoilt, and undefiled. Yet, nothing to be further from the truth about the kind of knowledge we all had as adolescence and puberty had hormones raging in our bodies that the more precocious and adventurous amongst us found outlets for.

Rumours abounded of boys meeting girls, seniors finding impressionable girls to exploit in the dark classrooms late at night, there was even one instance though unconfirmed of penis captivus where the parties could not be separated after intercourse for a while, the male participant allegedly the son of the principal.

Denial and hypocrisy around us

Sometimes, the girls disappeared for a while, recorded as ill with apparent tuberculosis whilst most definitely, a pregnancy was terminated. The female teachers in school were matrons of ovulatory expertise, they could tell if a girl was pregnant from the whites of her eyes, her continual spitting, and some other natural sign of divination before inquiring wether the pregnancy was caught by contagion if no name of the sexual partner was forthcoming.

I do not think any male got called out for sexual intercourse except in our last year when two girls were gang-raped by a group of boys with whom at least one had provided times of intimacy years before.

All ready to do something

For those of us who were not daring enough to approach the opposite sex, we were not entirely sexless. My first exploration was when a classmate during a moment of being alone together asked if we could copulate. I did not know what copulate meant even though from an earlier age I seemed to have some excitement looking up words that began with sex. I had eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil from 7 and after that, pederasty did occur at home with people employed to care for us.

He soon left the boarding school as he just did not cope with the environment. In terms, it was harsh for many of us leaving home for the first time, but we found ways to adapt. Being one of the youngest of my class, I was quite developed for my age, taller with pubic hair that others thought I had acquired by the application of methylated spirit. I do not know where the idea of hair growth by methylated spirit came from.

The fundamentals of fluid mechanics

Soon, there were partners my age mates were in a lower class but full of sexual needs and seeking some partnership in which I found a few to fumble or frot. Later, there was one, a classmate, with whom fumbling led to fellatio with the experience of ejaculation, he called fluid. That even went on until two or three years after we left school.

I never met with the ones who had homosexual inclinations, at least, not until I began seeing them in pubs, clubs, and parties in the UK. I cannot speak for their experiences as they all seem to want to avoid engagement even as it was quite obvious, they did not miss their way into those places of encounter.

All the others are married, the ones I still remember and are even grandparents. We can agree that those days of our youth were just experimenting in practical fluid mechanics; the physics, the chemistry, and the biology of it, the subject of memories of old mischief.

Blog - RSS Mischief I - Yikes! A snake

Opinion: Our Children Deserve Better - Respect Them

A mental case

A recent news story has brought the leadership of secondary schools under the searchlight where a principal has not only been indefinitely suspended but there is a view that she should undergo psychiatric evaluation.

Mrs. Olufunke Aladeojebi, recently, the principal of Ajuwon High School, Ajuwon in Ifo Local Government Area of Ogun State in Nigeria probably within reason as the person ultimately responsible for the education and welfare of her students might have been concerned that some of the females in her school on reaching puberty were taking liberties with their sexual curiosity.

It’s a dilemma, alright

The principal, in loco parentis was presented with a dilemma of how to react to the onset of adolescence and the raging hormones that accompany such natural human development; she could have reacted in any number of ways that could have presented her with the better opportunity to inform, educate and probably warn her students of the possible issues and dangers that accompany exploring and expressing one’s sexuality.

Apparently, she is notably a strict disciplinarian which in Nigerian parlance almost has nothing to do with discipline and instruction but everything to do with severe punishment as a means of re-education that exploits the pain thresholds of the recipient whilst dealing an atrocious emotional battering to all including the innocent.

These innocents are then literally scared out of their wits unable to think intellectually of the consequences of their actions apart from associating it with the fear of shame - that is usually the only weapon in the strict disciplinarian's arsenal of imparting wisdom - Fear nurtured by terror.

This is sadism

Deterrence has its functions but when school leaders use their authority as an instrument of pathological sadism to maintain control of a situation that has probably gone awry, more suffer unnecessarily and can be so seriously traumatised without essential mental health help that this might have life-long consequences.

The principal, on suspicion, and I state again, on suspicion; not that any of the girls were caught in the act of sexual intercourse. The principal suspecting some of her students were engaged in pre-marital sex and she was particular about the girls and not concerned with the boys; she invited a nurse as surety whilst she and the nurse proceeded without the consent of the girls’ parents to conduct a virginity test.

Crude is making light of it

This was not some questionnaire to elicit the truth of her subjective reasoning posited on a warped moral duty to maintain a sense purity in her school. Rather she proceeded to subject the girls to the heinous and reprehensible indignity of probing their private parts with fingers as if to determine if the hymen had been broken and with glee and euphoria greeting the confirmation of her instincts catch the girls in the most compromised of situations allowing her to probably expel the girls from the school and in the process temporarily destroy their future prospects.

It so happened that whilst engaging in this act of criminality that goes to the extremes of sexual abuse and the violation of the civil liberties of the girls, the unprofessionally crude and barbaric act led to injury presented as bleeding which can only be due to these women having damaged the hymen they were not expecting to be intact.

At the very least and this is not to condone or offer the remotest absolution to these terribly wicked women whose savagery is unspeakable, this rotten test should have been conducted by or under supervision of a qualified gynaecologist.

Society’s acquiescence

This kind of egregious violation of the students, especially females is played out without respite in many secondary schools all around the country and even in universities that somehow act as if undergraduates are adults who need to be treated as prepubescent or adolescent.

Sadly, we have a society that condones these acts in the name of maintaining some communal morality imposed by fear rather than by information and knowledge.

It is then so unusual that parents have raised the alarm at this sententious abuse of authority that the Ogun State Ministry of Education have moved to act in the best interests of the civil liberties and rights of the students than default to type about falling moral standards that need to be addressed urgently.

We must help better

As the principal is sent for psychiatric evaluation presaging committal and consequently barred from ever being in charge of students, I do hope the students affected are offered professional counselling and therapy to assuage the trauma they have suffered.

It is important that we recognise that children have inalienable and inviolable rights that should never be infringed upon in the name of maintaining some moral standard regardless of religious instruction or sense of moral duty.

The outrage is more than justified because we are at a time when between the conflicting influences our children face, the best we can do for them is to treat them first as individuals, respect them as human-beings, instruct them with empathy, educate them with understanding and inform them to enlightenment.

We must learn better

We should unschool ourselves from the primitive and outmoded forms of corporal punishment as a means of effective instruction to engage their intellect, offer them responsibility, entertain their searching questions, expand their horizons, praise their good work, inform their curiosity and when we are inclined to condemn anything they do we should be mindful of what change we want to see and lead with a greater sense of duty, love and compassion.

All children grow, they reach puberty and there are emotional issues that come with that development; on matters of sexuality what our wards need is information and education, we must agree that is not offered through intrusion and violation of their bodies – certain things need that we address them clearly without embarrassment than hope that our wards will gain knowledge through some form of ethereal osmosis.

We must all be involved

The matter of how we violate our womenfolk for the maintenance of some societal norm is an extensive topic and it is seriously hypocritical to place the complete burden of responsibility and dire consequence on the female when in the majority of cases, it takes both male and female to engage in the sexual intercourse that concerned that principal.

Our boys are not entirely innocent of exploring their sexual interests; they are almost always praised for their sexual conquests without moral sanction whilst their female counterparts are left to carry the shame of premarital sexual liaisons that sometimes result in pregnancy.

Boys and girls alike deserve better of their supposed role models on these matters of sexual development, morality, education and direction, if we address their bodies rather than really address their intellect, we have inadvertently reclassified them as no better than animals – eventually, when retribution comes, a psychological evaluation of our mental capacities will be the least of our problems.

I will appreciate your views on this topic.

Thank you.

Thought Picnic: How do you lose your virginity?

Sex before time

There are some things it would take another life to have, a life where all the good knowledge and wisdom one has would have to be readily accessible at birth, but I do not believe in reincarnation, the life I have is the one I am living already.

Sex has always been a fascinating topic from the perspective that I first experienced it when I did not know what it was about and when I finally began to understand what it was about, its uses never found the value that was placed on it.

There have been many ways to explain away the deviations from the norm that have accompanied the loss of innocence on the matter of sex but the fact is, if you are more than sexually aware long before puberty there are many things that affect you just as the sensation of eating unripe fruit.

What is virginity?

That is an analogy rather than a parallel; but this thinking arises from having seen a number of tweets on virginity and I very well commend those who have been able to retain their virginity for all sorts of reasons or at least they have been able to decided when they want to lose theirs.

I write this in the mind of a child who never had a virginity, there is no comprehension of what it means before puberty and once you reach puberty sexual curiosity is hardly what it seems; it is neither exploratory nor gratifying, it probably is an animal passion driven by peer pressure or daring experimentation.

Depending on the level of abuse, there might be an aversion to it completely; a case of being speedily matured and damaged long before one can value what it is all about.

Sparing my children

That part of one’s childhood can make all the difference, the loss of innocence that leads to decisions that are difficult to understand, but I see that there is a part of me that is rational – if in the setting that I grew up in I could not be protected from predators, what chance have I having my own children protected from predators of another generation?

Indeed, there are aspects of the life I have lived that I would hate for any possible children of mine to experience and so I have had no children, the likelihood that I could ever have any was remote for a long time (there are studies that suggest pre-term babies do not generally go on to have children in adulthood), the possibility became less evident as time progressed and well after chemotherapy, we might well have reached the terminus.

All that just makes a simple story long, the question is how do you lose your virginity if you never had one?