Dublin: A Wedding Speech

An uncle of the day

When I was invited for a wedding in Dublin, I thought it was great honour to be considered. From a friendship and moral support perspective, at best, I thought I’ll be an ordinary uncle amongst many of the day. That for me for significant enough.

However, you can only imagine my shock when I received an email that I had been selected as one of two to make a speech no longer than 5 minutes and without religious exhortation since it was a civic ceremony.

I write and rarely speak

Now, I write blogs, it is quite due to my presumed inadequacies that I rarely write for other forums, at least I have not done that for a well over a year. I am quite comfortable with my blog, what I write, in my own space and without having to voice it.

I probably can count the number of times I have spoken into a microphone and in all those times, my voice quavered as I hoped to finish what I had to say before I lost my voice to nervousness.

Yet, I have been called to give impromptu speeches or even stand in front of congregations to talk and as long it was just my voice, it carried loud enough to the hearing of those present, but has not been something I have so desired to do with much enthusiasm.

The madness of inspiration

Back to the speech, I could not think of what to write as each day passed with all sorts of quotes and stories appearing in my usual reading that derives from news stories, Twitter and other media.

Nevertheless, on Wednesday night, the ceremony being on Friday, I decided to go for the madness of inspiration angle. The one where I have a thought in mind and I just begin to tap at the keyboard. I have written before that when I type I can be like a person possessed, the thoughts almost un-thought, the words never before strung together like that to my reading, something materialises.

Long enough, short enough

The theme I chose was the strength of communication and need to work together at making a marriage work and after my first draft, what was needed was some refinement of parts to make it easy to understand in a speechmaking setting, something I have no particular experience of.

I read it first to my flatmate, it was just 2 minutes 45 seconds long, he timed it and he liked it, but as I read it, I made some corrections. I have found that reading a piece out loud is a good way of proofreading a write-up; if it does not flow or sound right, it needs to be edited.

The same principle applies, as I do with my blogs, it should wear like a good skirt; long enough to cover the detail and short enough to keep the interest.

Reviews

Then I sent it to my best friend who thought the Shakespearean quotes I used were a bit Old English for my intended audience, though I thought otherwise. However, rather than modernising the language, I tried to explain the context better because I was playing with quotes and the names of the plays and to my mind I thought that was good.

The final edition and there were only three was sent to my colleague at work and that inadvertently caused him to suggest I might have to give a speech at his nuptials – surely, I am not that good. In any case, he liked it.

The speech was tested across three radically different cultural perspectives and the feedback suggested it was nice, that gave me some confidence.

Giving the speech

I have never fancied myself a poet, so I don’t attempt such theatrics, recitations are difficult because that means you have to commit the piece to memory, jokes were completely out of the question, I am enough of a clown that I could not afford to make a complete fool of myself, in front of strangers.

That did not leave me out of ideas, the speech just filled an A4 paper size but I decided to read it from a blown-up A3 paper size. The gag being as I talked about being asked to make a short speech, I would unfold the sheet until I had this unusually big sheet of paper in my hands and wait for a reaction.

The registrar was concerned that we did not have all day, but it was effective and though I stumbled through a few paragraphs, I seemed to come across well enough that some even remembered parts of my speech that were not particular quotes of others.

I do not think this is the advent of a speechwriting career, but for the occasion, I hope the words would matter to those to whom it mattered and that they helped to make a lovely day too.

Dublin: A Wedding Invitation

An invitation

Almost two months ago I was intimated with the plans for a wedding and at the same time invited. I accepted the invitation, noting the date and kept it at the back of my mind.

Then a month ago, we had another conversation where I got a better idea of the plans and at that time I decided to book both my flight and hotel as we were chatting.

Now, I have to be quite attentive to my booking regime because I cannot count the number of times I have had a hotel and flight booking mismatch or just got my return dates wrong because of the way calendar months are presented when booking.

At times, I’ll spend extra to have the option to review, reschedule, rebook or cancel, and that came in handy for when I booked my hotel.

Irelands

I have never been to Ireland, in fact, I have never been to any of the Irelands, those being Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.

However, I do remember when I was about to be sent to solve a problem in Belfast in the 1990s and I just refused to go. The office was above a police station and this was during the troubles.

I said to them, there are places where being in close proximity to a police station would present a sense of safety, but I was not going to risk that in Belfast. No sooner had I refused to travel to Belfast did I experience the IRA bombing in Manchester where not even 10 yards from where I stood, shards of glass fell on a man. Those were crazy times.

Last year when I was working in North Wales, I could have taken the opportunity to travel from Holyhead to Dublin by ferry, I considered it many times but never found time to plan it. Dublin, here I come.

Eerie bookings

I booked my hotel, it looked like a bargain; in the centre of town and easy to get around until I had another look at the map and saw it backed unto a garden of remembrance.

Memorials are great and I celebrate them, but I know how my imagination can run away with such vividness that I could begin to see things. There are some things I do not want to see either by error or by commission; that realisation had me cancelling that booking almost before the confirmation email settled in my email inbox. Good thing I chose the cancellation option.

Besides, I need to follow my deepest premonitions more, because there have been times when something has suggested I take a particular action that later on I regret I have not done. Yet, I cannot beat myself up, I just hope that next time I am more sensitive.

Listlessly wireless

My usual booking site did not present any betters deals for the weekend I wanted to visit Dublin, so I tried LateRooms and that came up with a really good deal, I stayed at Wynn’s Hotel for 3 nights, the staff were friendly, the room was good, though the complimentary wireless internet service almost left me wanting to do the unconventional.

In the end, it was 3 nights in Dublin, but I must return because I did not get to see much of this amazing city which at only time in its history was second only to London in the British Isles.

Flight from fright

There are two airlines I would not board if they were the last escape from a dying earth, EasyJet and RyanAir, they have both for the no-frills and cheap flights they offer to places that would never appear on a decent map of civilisation taken the fun out of flying and in the process dragged everyone else down with them.

Gone are the days when not even 20 years ago you got a decent silver service for an hour’s flight in economy class. Now, one just makes do with a drink and sometimes you have to pay for that drink.

I’ll rather have stop-overs than take a direct flight, thankfully, Aer Lingus flies direct to Dublin from Manchester, though when I departed on Thursday evening, my flight lingered in late and left 45 minutes behind schedule.

The service was good enough and as I await boarding for my return to Manchester, the experience has been fun.

Thought Picnic: Living your own life, creating your own norms

Father and son, Justice Oputa and Charles Oputa aka Charlie Boy
Courtesy of Nancy Keshy Ademolu

You do your norms

I happened upon a Twitter firestorm about norms, standards, customs and values. My Nigerian friends were at their sententious best from judgemental through castigation to excoriation, disgust heaped infamy on notoriety, what a sight it was.

Now, it was the difficult case of the son of an establishment figure at his father’s funeral service, where he gave no space for expected norms or decorum that people felt both scandalised and mortified, yet I was unperturbed.

Peace is all

In my view, father and son had made their peace with each other, the father a respected judge, the son an anarchist of sorts, a complete opposite of his father in demeanour and conduct, at 63, still playing tearaway with incredulity. His father knew all that and yet he made no plans to have his funeral conducted by any other than his son as he deems fit.

Beyond that, the funeral services of very important personalities can so easily be gatecrashed by political transients seeking validation through egotistical displays of shameless megalomania. What should be a solemn and sombre occasion can readily descend into farce because of these trashy people. [Information Nigeria]

It can become a protocol nightmare for the family of the deceased, it is probably best to suggest they keep away than have them create a rowdy scene. If the programme does not confer the honour of making a speech, the uppity had rather keep their seats or send in their regrets for not attending.

Trash the norms

In any case, the broader issue was about what was expected and what was observed. The son was never a conformist and the expectation that he would conform to a certain type was at best wishful.

Having broken all the rules of convention, we should have expected the unconventional and that could well be bizarre and lacking in taste, but that was his prerogative and he exercised it to the full.

Many people many not be worthy of example or even close to being role models but as outliers they are bold, courageous and out there, living their own lives happily without a care for what others think about them.

Live your own life

To some, it is almost lascivious, yet it is the ultimate pursuit of happiness and long may we have such amongst us to teach us that we do not have to conform, we can break the rules, jettison the norms and still be well-adjusted and successful people.

The bigger question is, when are we going to begin to live our own lives, the lives we have charted and wished for regardless of what others think they have as influence over us?

The life to choose your own career without sanction, the life to love the one your love without question, the life to live with the full expression of your sexuality without shame, interference or fear, the life to be you and be accepted for who you are.

The themes of tolerance, acceptance, understanding and humanity become the focus as is the need for everyone including ourselves to mind our own business.

Berlin: Pictures that tell other stories

Bottling money

Germany has a way with issues and one I have observed and only just captured a good picture of is the consequence of the Container Deposit Legislation.

Anytime there is a big outdoor event there are people with bags or suitcases, sometimes on foot or wheeling bicycles or even with supermarket trolleys collecting containers.

These are for single use containers as cans, plastic bottles and glass bottles, the empty bottles cost €0.25 each at the returns point and all affected containers are labelled pfand.

What makes this legislation quite bizarre is a black market created by reason of people not necessarily caring about returning their containers to reclaim their pfand deposits. At first, people had to return the containers to their original point-of-purchase; that was eventually eased for them to be returned to any place where the refunds can be made.

So, picking on bottles, riffling through bins and at night peering in with a torchlight, collectors have made a trade that could yield a free €25 for 100 bottles and when a festival is in town, beyond the jostling for the bottle when there is competition, it could be a health sum in these hard times.

The police are your friends

In the past 12 years, I think I attended every Berlin CSD bar one, besides Berlin in June being warm, sunny and fun, there are too many museums to visit, old friends to meet, decent Nigerian restaurants to visit, the main one for me being Ebe-Ano after Fifty-Fifty closed early last year.

Ebe-Ano is central too and quite easy to get to. Ebe Ano, Pohlstraße 52, D-10785 Berlin, +49 30 609 69 627.

However, what is more striking about CSD parades is the presence of the police who act as bookends to the march, in their cars and as outriders before the street sweepers take up the rear cleaning up as if nothing happened.

The Landespolizei are your friends even though they man war-like tanks on football match days and can be quite fierce looking, armed to the teeth, they are rarely, at least not to my knowledge even found in acts of abuse of power as the Sichersheitdienst (SD) or Gestapo of the Nazi era were wont to demonstrate.

The right to be protected

In many other countries, especially to the East of Germany, the police would probably be testing the strength of their truncheons and their preparedness for riot management on demonstrations of great diversity as a Pride march. Here in Berlin, major arteries of traffic and business roads are closed off for the safe celebration of the CSD.

It is not only a celebration of our diverse humanity, but it sounds out the voice of acceptance and the community that Gay Rights are Human Rights too.

Along with the crowds that gather to watch the parades, most of whom are straight with generations of their families, a society at ease with all that inhabit it regardless of persuasion is one destined to thrive.

For many other countries where the state apparatus is used to harass and persecute those that are different, in that picture is a long story from oppression and extermination in the Nazi Concentration Camps to respectful and celebratory co-existence – that is civilisation.

Not just a manhole cover

I could remember when we moved to our new home in Isolo, Lagos in September 1980, the grills on the gutters of the main road were made in Kaiserlautern, Germany.

Nothing could be so distant from the heartland of Nigeria than to have products of other countries cover the dregs and waste of our people, a significant story of what has always been the unrealised potential of Nigeria. The tragedy of our steel industry is best left untold.

Yet, after all these years of visiting Berlin, I looked down at a manhole cover and noticed there was something quite significant about it.

It was no ordinary lid covering the waterworks distribution infrastructure, but a celebration of the City of Berlin with images of the major Berlin landmarks as the Brandenburg Gate, the Fernsehturm at Alexanderplatz, the Reichstag parliament building, the Siegessäule (Victory Column) and the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church of the structures I can recognise.

All of these places are worth a visit when in Berlin amongst other historic places that represent ancient, imperial, Nazi, post-War and united Berlin. They even had an exhibition of manhole covers in 2011.

Just one of the many quirky things that one sees, innocuous but still significant. I love Berlin.

Berlin: Lest We Forget Those We Lost To Sexually Transmitted Infections

Stones of remembrance

Just further down the road at the big junction on the right after Wittenbergplatz but before Nollendorfplatz at An der Urania in Berlin stands a black marble stone with a red AIDS ribbon and one other on the ground, a square with inscriptions.

The quarter of space marked by a number of streets to the right also harbours many meeting places of people who have most been affected by HIV/AIDS as it scythed through the young with the vengeance of an unforgiving and unrelenting Grim Reaper.

However, this memorial did not just think of HIV/AIDS but it included Hepatitis and broadly Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STD).

Before you get holier than thou

Very easily, one can be sanctimonious and sententious as if completely unaffected and that might be the case for the abstainer, the celibate or the eunuch.

We however cannot deny that we are sexual beings and the desire to fulfil that need exists in the majority.

Some have experienced it through consent, some through violation, some as their innocence was snatched away by the unconscionably reprehensible, in violence or by subterfuge, none of which apart from the first are in the slightest, fun.

Death still looms

The greater point is to be aware of one's sexual health regardless of risks taken and to avail oneself of immediate treatment before other complications arise.

The rather innocuous infections can easily be vectors and vehicles enabling greater susceptibility to incurable diseases of which HIV is one and besides there is a rise in co-infections with the difficult to cure Hepatitis C.

Even in the West, people still die of these diseases as in some cases some diseases are becoming resistant to the heretofore effective drug therapies, like Gonorrhoea.

A memorial to all

What really touched me most was not that this was a memorial to the dearly and unfortunately departed, but that many living souls might have walked past a memorial to themselves.

Our secrets, fears, infidelities, embarrassment, shame, habits, ignorance, daring, promiscuity, innocence, naivety, stupidity, carelessness, carefreeness or just our plain humanity can put us in a place of pain.

We can mitigate those issues with accepting whom we are, being honest to ourselves and using the help to ensure we are no sooner victims than we should be.

To those we lost, you are never forgotten. Shalom!

Berlin: That We May Never Forget

A sign of times past

Just at the entrance of Wittenbergplatz U-Bahn Station is a panel board of place names. Twelve in a list that spells the recording of one of man’s greatest inhumanities to man.

A list of Nazi Concentration Camps

These were the Nazi Concentration Camp names of which if you have read a bit of World War II history, Auschwitz is the most prominent.

The Nazis used these camps for various activities as hostage, labour, prisoner-of-war, re-education, transit and extermination camps. It was in some of these extermination camps that they systemically killed off people, most especially the Jews in what is known as the Holocaust.

Feeling the presence of pain

Now, I have never visited any of these places, but in 2007, I visited Pawiak Prison in Warsaw and that experience still lives with me, for I am of the opinion that where innocent blood is shed, there is always a memorial of feeling and uneasiness that beclouds that place.

Blog - PAWIAK!

However, what struck me more about the Nazi setup was their attention to detail that created a bureaucracy of such efficiency that the particularity of things they documented just took your breath away.

Badges of badgering

One good example of this was the identification in the Nazi Concentration Camps where tattooed numbers, badges and armbands immediately identified the type of prisoner you were.

Nazi Concentration Camp Badges – Courtesy Wikipedia

So, you had political prisoners (red), professional criminals (green), emigrants (blue), Jehovah’s Witnesses (purple), Homosexuals and sexual offenders (pink), asocial elements (black), Roma gypsies (brown) and so on. Pink triangle along with the rainbow flag now signify LGBTI causes and diversity.

The Original Rainbow Flag – Courtesy Wikipedia

The two superimposed triangles in the sign of the Star of David depicted Jews, typically yellow but could have other colours signifying Jew and another offender category.

That we may never forget.

The most important lesson to learn from this and in that understand why World War II was fought and won for our liberty, freedom and acceptance of difference and diversity is in the many memorials that say as shown on that sign, “Orte Des Schreckens, Die Wir Niemals Vergessen Dürfen.” This roughly translates to, “The Places of Horror, That We May Never Forget.”

They who have no history and keep no memorials are destined to repeat history, those reminded of the horrific past are quicker to embrace the greater good of humanity and human existence.

More correctly, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” George Santayana or “Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.” Edmund Burke.

We speak of history because there is a burden of truth we must carry for the present in order to secure a future of peace and happiness.

Europe: My Observations of Homelessness in Paris, Berlin and London

My homeless life

The roughest I have ever slept is on a sofa for just over a week when I was graciously offered a roof having become homeless.

I have been a nomad for years but have had the generosity and goodwill of others for periods of time beyond overstaying my welcome, but they have not refused me.

My things are scattered between countries, cities and homes, all of which has taught me to appreciate adversity as it affects people, and yet I consider myself blessed beyond measure for I have choices and in some way, the means to make such choices.

The backstory to this has been written innumerable times on this blog, I own my experiences and my story.

Blog - Homeless! My exciting life takes a new chapter

Blog - England: How Lewisham Single Homeless Intervention Prevention humiliated me

Between Paris and Berlin

Yet, in the capital cities of France, Germany and the United Kingdom, many have not been that fortunate.

In Paris, it was whole families that I observed sleeping rough, it was humbling and quite instructive.

Blog - Thought Picnic: Hard Times

In Berlin, I never once saw a cardboard box, but there was a spirit of humanity that I noticed. Those sleeping rough were not in store doorways but inside buildings sleeping amongst the enclosed automatic teller machines.

This could mean most of the homeless had a support system to fall back on and the few without access just got this alternative.

They obviously were not threatening, which might be why they were allowed in the bank branch buildings.

Maybe, but why?

Maybe again, Berlin businesses have a human heart that beats with compassion and empathy.

However, at a very unholy hour, I saw an old man without lower limbs fast asleep in his wheelchair, his polystyrene begging cup lightly clasped in his hand, my heart melted and I put in some change with the hope that clatter of chinks did not disturb his sleep. There was no need to be thanked.

It should never be on God's good earth that a man end up old and destitute with just his wheelchair for a bed. Not in Germany and not in Europe, but that is the reality and our humanity is the poorer for it, regardless of the life story of the man, the old and the young are the responsibility of the able.

I have no smart answers to the big questions, but what I can affect in my little sphere of influence and impact with the little experience, advice, means and help I have got, I would strive to be a blessing to others.

A bed of nails in London?

London however plumbed the depths of Dickensian malevolence when pictures appeared of anti-homeless spikes and studs being installed at entrances of prime real estate properties, we were scandalised.

You would think fakirs had invaded London and were ready to entertain with one of their interesting bed-of-nails tricks, but that was not the case.

An atrocity of inhumane corporatism

Worst still was when Tesco, the supermarket giant followed suit, installing studs at their recessed storefronts, such corporate irresponsibility that tacks onto the vilest expression of capitalism is utterly, utterly beneath contempt.

Tesco has lost my custom, and though after drawing public ire they have removed the said studs that they deigned to carry out the thought just shows they have no discernible humanity.

I have written before, we have a serious homelessness problem in the UK that the system has not yet fully grasped, it is an issue I would continue to write about until I see changes.