Agege Bread by desire and amazing consequence

Whistle-stop London

At the behest of Funmi Iyanda, I found myself on a train to London on Saturday soon after a conversation where we decided we need to have a chat.

I left home in shorts and a shirt, wearing boat shoes, a straw hat and nothing else, not even a jacket because we were having one of those unusually glorious summer days in England. Sunday morning was hardly the precursor to a summer's day, it rained and I was not dressed for it.

Arriving at hers, I settled down to a cassava meal with a mix of three different stews that I insisted on having despite her protestations to the contrary, I insisted and enjoyed it.

The evening passed with visitors literally exhausting us, so we never really went out to the US Independence Day picnic because as usual, our good friends are not the best or most reliable timekeepers for engagements.

Good view but the food

On Sundays when I am with Funmi, we have breakfast / brunch at Ginger & White where we meet an eclectic crowd of Bohemian types over scrambled eggs, assorted organic breads and spreads. Their baked beans and peanut butter are just completely something else.

Anyway, as it transpired, we did not make G&W round the corner, but were persuaded to make a beeline to Monument Station to Sky Garden on the 32^nd Floor at 20 Fenchurch Street where the building widens at the top, earning it the name, The Walkie-Talkie. The curve on the building can exhibit the qualities of a concave mirror reflecting and concentrating incidental sunlight to the point of melting parts of cars parked in its vicinity.

Getting in the Sky Garden building almost exceeded the security requirements for international travel at airports; names, phone numbers, metal detectors and baggage scanning equipment, all for the sake of breakfast. We got up there and whilst we might have been bowled over by the views, that was the only thing going for the Sky Garden, the location, cold and unfriendly, the menu was at best perfunctory. A bloody waste of time, to put it mildly.

A place to forget

We left wondering whether to return to the tried and tested or explore the possibilities at Borough Market just one station’s stop down at London Bridge.

We decided on the latter and after perambulating for about 15 minutes, we settled for Le Pain Quotidien where the fare was passable for survivalist mastication rather than for taste or culinary skill.

Femi who had joined us at Le Pain Quotidien was very helpful as I had purposed that on my visit to London, I will get some Agege Bread. She called Anino who suggested we try the Agege Bread shop on Deptford High Street and along the way we would have been able to get some moin-moin for Funmi too.

The Agege Bread adventure

We caught a black cab and made for Deptford, stopping in front of the Agege Bread shop where on entry we were met with a feast of Nigerian delicacies that excited us beyond Pavlovian abandon.

Moin-moin, asaro, ewa aganyin, puff-puff, fresh fish stew, chin-chin, buns, jollof rice, fried rice, fried plantain (dodo), suya and much else, I was whooping with extreme glee that my order probably took the best part of 30 minutes. Visit the All Nigerian Recipes website for an introduction to the vast palate of Nigerian cuisine.

As we were making up our minds about what to get, the proprietor and owner of the Agege Bread business came in and a conversation started, first with Femi and then with Funmi and the next 3 or so hours we were entertained and regaled with his perceptions of living and thriving in the UK having arrived from Nigeria some 30 years ago.

An inspiration and new friend

Whilst Agege Bread might mean many things to many people, the trademark and brand belongs to the Agege Bread business in the UK and it is the standard by which imitation sweet breads are measured.

In all this, we got to visit the East Street outlet of Agege Bread walking through the workrooms and if there was enough time, we might have even visited the main factory in Greenwich.

We were inspired very much by this very confident, self-assured entrepreneur whose perspectives of integration and work ethic left us almost ashamed of what some other Nigerians come to do in the UK. Agege Bread is soon to have a shop at London Heathrow's Terminal 5 too.

Many of the points he addressed are probably best covered in another blog, but the great revelation and achievement of the weekend was how the simple desire for Agege Bread led us to an unforgettable encounter with an ambassador of values those of Nigerian heritage can espouse and exhibit if we decide to be the best we can be.

A friendship was blossoming and part of that was he gave us a lift, not to the nearest station but all the way back home in North West London before returning to his home in Kent.

Thought Picnic: Trepidations of Friday

Let it not be Friday yet

The Fridays come with a regularity that breeds more concern than relief. It is usually not the end of a working week but the end of a week when innumerable applications have been successively and promptly followed by rejections for all sorts of reasons.

Qualified and experienced as I am, the tales of rejection get more incredible by the day you almost want to let out a nicely phrased expletive of annoyance and anger with that element of a put-down to say you are none too pleased.

However, one must exercise restraint because these people - recruiters are essentially the gate-keepers to the jobs I am looking for, they are the three-headed rabid and drooling dog retained as sentinel by companies that do not want to get involved in the minutiae of negotiating the quality from the quantity before they are presented subjectively with people the recruiters think might be suited to the role.

A collision course

The hurdles I am presented with daily range from my being expected to be a Jack-of-all-trades, my being too qualified, my not being exposed enough to bleeding-edge technologies or even my not being able to drive.

Having worked in international organisations of well over 10,000 users, sometimes as many as 60,000 seats, there is enough work of specialism involved that one cannot be spread too thin, rather, you have knowledge of what you need from other skills or teams.

Obviously, it will be difficult to conceal a career spanning over 2 decades doing amazing stuff and much as one has done the mundane, if you are offered the knowledge cheap don't assume I am so driven by greed to jump at the next best opportunity, some of us are still bound by old-fashioned principles of keeping to contracts, doing our best and standing as exemplary gentlemen - if only some people will believe the best of the few than the worst of the many to include the blameless.

Bleeding-edge technologies are fun for the great features they bring and over time we who have experience have mostly contributed to how things have eventually turned out, be it office software or back-end systems, each progressive upgrade has brought glee and fun - we would most likely test the products through beta but rarely get to use the products in production until the business has exhausted the software and hardware cycle they are in.

Back-end delivery systems might be easy to deploy, the front-end is however fraught with more difficulty and that is for reasons of user awareness and broader support systems to accommodate issues, then there is compatibility with legacy system or if you are ahead of your customer base but have to share media and data with them - considerations you should not be dealing with long after you have put out your new toys and found out that no one else can play with you. 

People like me pre-empt this all the time and plan transitions that will benefit the business rather than grind it to a halt.

Wizened with time

People like me bring much more to the table, beyond ability we have awareness, discernment, understanding and experience that comes with constant application, recognition, adjustment, review, remodelling and solution.

A good deal of this will not show in a CV, it comes expressed in discussion, usually at interview. It is possible that we are selling ourselves so short that the one glance at our CVs without certain buzzwords or keywords puts us out of the running in favour of those who have perfected the sell but will not have the goods to deliver.

So, as we approach every Friday, I wonder again how well I have done or how badly I have let the week slip away once again - Thank God for everyday but for a while, I have not expressed the worker's relief of – TGI-Friday.

Incredible India: The Tasks of Men are not Made to Time

Do I have the time?

In the month that I will spend in India, it can become quite easy to want to cocoon oneself and be isolated from the vagaries of life as it happens here.

The European sense of promptness and aversion to idling are already being challenged in ways that draw on my patience but not yet to exhaustion.

Each time I have gone to the hotel reception to either ask for assistance or some service the concierge has always asked me to sit down as if to calm me down if not to remove the urgency of my request, it is to lull me into some sort of soporific amnesia.

Now, I have no aversion to pleasantries but there are times where other things just have a greater importance and priority than to idle away time with small-talk rarely broaching the substance of why I was there in the first place.

A man for every task

There are other little observations of life that might not matter but I still find interesting. There seems to be a man for every job no matter how inconsequential it might appear. That is not to say that there aren’t people who multitask but the leaders in some way seem to have men at their beck and call for all sorts of errands and activities.

Like yesterday, I had a chaperone to the shops, today, there was one man to help convert money into small change and then for even smaller denominations there was another sent to sort that out. There is a man at the door just to keep the door ajar as there is another to welcome.

When we went out for a meal with a friend who was on the same flight as I was, as all attempts to ward away beggars from our window view failed, they got another man to shoo them away. Walking the streets, I saw many situations where men were at work that we would not essentially call work when I am ensconced in my comfort zone.

You wonder about the well-worn ideas of efficiency, productivity, throughput, engagement and careers, I suppose there are ways in which what I have observed in no different from stuff I once experienced in Nigeria.

Waiting for the indeterminates of time

I will not touch the matter of time, I will just assume that at my training centre there is a lot more in professionalism and punctuality than I have seen elsewhere.

It is literally impossible to fix a time, rather a range of time is offered where you can expect the rendezvous to be later than the upper limit of that range – you have to be careful not to be driven to distraction where you depend on others.

Made to last?

Then finally, I have noticed that with most goods not imported into India, at least the ones I have bought that are perishable; there is no expiry date, rather there is a manufactured date. There probably is a rule of thumb followed to indicate how long one should keep stuff – that should be one of the questions to the better learned staff at the training centre tomorrow.

However, imagine my horror when I had to take my pills on the first night and there was only a can of Diet Coke in my fridge with the date I could read being somewhere in October just as we entered the month of December – I took just about enough to swallow my pills before pouring the rest down the drain ready to remonstrate in the morning about expired products in my fridge.

Now, I know better, Incredible India is by all means a very different place.

Thought Picnic: The character of professionalism

Living by the wits of one’s expertise

For the past 16 years, I have been self-employed, within that time; I took full-time employment for two years, was seriously ill that I was out of work for a year and have had the unfortunate situation of being unemployed for nigh on a year.

Difficult as times might have been, there are things that appear to stand out in my career that requires sharing or maybe just documenting for posterity sake.

Trying to get back into work has not been easy especially where I have had to deal with people who only recognise me from what they have read in my resume and nothing else.

Quality and qualification

At interview, the questions are usually geared to the fundamentals of my knowledge rather than my suitability for the job, as I pride myself in implementing systems that work right the first time I have found that I might not have answers to questions that represent the experiences of others who might not be as thorough in their implementations – some problems just seem too incredible and unnecessary but not many are ready to have others fix the poor setups they have created.

That by the way, it so happens that literally every job I have had has come from recommendations of those I have worked with or worked for in the past.

As much as possible, I strive to do my best and that appears to create some lasting impression that keeps me in the professional and sometimes social minds of my ex-colleagues that when certain opportunities present themselves I get a call to ascertain my interest.

Leaving worthwhile legacies

I believe it is a combination of character and professionalism that allows for this including the simple aim of not burning any of my bridges.

For the job I will start tomorrow, I am even the more amazed because I was recommended by colleagues I worked with at a time when I had just returned from a long bout of illness; I only had the strength to do 32-hours a week with Wednesdays off and the greater technical burden was shouldered by a selfless and hardworking colleague.

In many cases, I believe I was accommodated quite well despite my shortcomings and frailties, these same people always seemed to have me in mind all through the times when I had no work which for some reason must have indicated I had left some sort of impression.

I am honoured that they have chosen once again to have me as a colleague to approach new challenges but the most important thing of all is a career that is built on the character of professionalism will always find opportunity when such openings present themselves.

Just too many days of holiday in Nigeria

Naijablog is my thinking window on Nigeria

I got involved in a discussion on my favourite blog Naijablog which is run by an Englishman living in Nigeria with his beautiful Nigerian wife.

He remonstrated about unannounced holidays and the way one religious holiday seems to be a holiday for all religions.

This is true, because extended families are usually comprised of different religious affiliations; it is of kindred importance than religious holidays do not depend on the individual's religion.

Then other commentators went on to talk about work and holidays in the West, productivity, relaxing and getting industry to make Nigeria thrive.

After Miss Anonymous said this, “We'll keep wracking our brains. BUT, who will implement them?” My reply appears below.

Dear Miss Anonymous

I am sorry to sit on the fence on this one.

24 years ago, I returned home from a student's protest when the NITEL building was burning down and President Shagari jetted over the flames to India to receive a doctorate degree, just weeks after they announced Indian degrees were inferior to Nigerian ones.

My father took me aside and said, there was a time Nigeria was worth dying for, now, it is everyman to his own.

My honest accountant father though quite successful never got entrenched in corporate settings because he always thwarted attempts to defraud companies where he was CFO.

Evil bedevils the good

Rather than be honoured or rewarded, he received death threats, he did the smart thing then and branched out into farming with moderate success. Now, close to being a septuagenarian he is back with the accountancy he loved.

Nigeria, no doubt has promise and potential, but many of us also got our fingers burnt trying to speak up for probity, prudence and forthrightness.

Charred fingers and frustrated times

I participated in student union politics in the 80's and had to contend with demigod lecturers who wasted our years there.

I went into consultancy, each time I presented a bill; someone wanted a cut to the extent that I had to tell he that my bill was not negotiable, if he was desirous of payback he had to resolve that without my input.

This is apart from the fact that he had nothing to do with my securing the opportunity, nor did he contribute in anyway to help get the work done.

A bale of money to bail out

Once also, I had to sign a bail form for my employees stating I had not paid anything for their release, having paid a hefty sum under the counter to the police.

This again after my business partner corralled all everyone in the holding company into detention on the suspicion that some other employee from a different company has been stealing company property.

He did not even have the courtesy to inform me of that situation.

Nigeria – a dream I once had

The catalogue of experiences of almost 20 years of sojourn in Nigeria would mark anyone, I had my share.

Nigeria is probably a radically changed place from my own experiences and things are probably better, but it would take some convincing to prise me out of the comfort of Europe to prospect in Nigeria for anything.

Meanwhile, you will have my support advisory and international as hopefully the vision I had of Nigeria in the 70s.

In my way, I died for Nigeria once; I would not hurt one single hair of my bald head again.