Seeing the strange in strangers exhibiting strangeness

Curls adrift with the shade of blonde,
Walking up the road with an angelic visage,
Looking into window panes every few steps,
Hands running through the hair,
For vanity, we must live.

Then interests came as desire does,
To wit, what we must do to enjoy,
With pleasure is tacked a fantasy,
Never satisfied to attainment,
They must for another thing ask.

Just as the thought swelled with admiration,
A chance encounter revealed a surprise,
As he passed a man on the street,
Without cause, his voice was raised,
After which he cursed and railed.

Then back to the other episode,
My race is an exotic find for the curious,
My state is incomplete for a date,
To which I must boldly and crossly aver,
Have me as I am or be gone with you.

In the stranger, we expect the good,
But in the unknown, you can see the strange,
Beneath the skin is much human strangeness,
Sometimes to be held in contempt,
If you are uncomfortable in your skin.

We, the people said, 'Silly girl.'

Catching up on it all

No doubt, reams of commentary and analysis would be written about the just concluded UK General Election of 2017, but I will like to write a postscript to the event.

When Theresa May the incumbent Prime Minister suddenly called an election on the 18^th of April 2017, the ruthless streak of the lady was to completely annihilate the opposition and put the Labour Party completely out of the reckoning.

The polls suggested the Tory Party would win a landslide and Jeremy Corbyn of the Labour Party would lead it to its worst electoral defeat in history. There were analysts who until the day before the election who completely underestimated Jeremy Corbyn and believed their prognostications to the point of annoyingly projecting it on any platform that would accommodate those views.

Giving Jeremy a closer look

Until the election was called, we were coasting to a somewhat ruinous separation from Europe called a Hard Brexit, Theresa May believed she had read the minds of us Britons and came to the conclusion that it was the freedom of movement that bothered us the most and so her headstrong Brexit strategy was gathering moss in that direction.

Invariably, we also had our doubts about what Jeremy Corbyn could achieve and probably would have voted for someone else until Theresa May’s arrogance, audacity and effrontery presented us with a stark choice of giving her free rein to take us over the cliff edge or we begin to subscribe to the reasonableness that became the hallmark and demeanour of Jeremy Corbyn.

The media bias against Jeremy Corbyn and his team was unrelenting and palpable as they brought up every ghost of the past to scare and terrify us into Theresa May’s ‘Strong and Stable’ corner.

Yet, the hashtag #EndMayInJune bore an amazing resonance as we began to look at Theresa May’s record as Home Secretary and then Prime Minister, we began to see leader that probably stood for nothing, all goals, aims, ambitions and promises given the oxygen of rhetoric, sloganeering, soundbite and endless repetition was just a lot of hot air and nothing else.

A broken record it was

We were not convinced that giving Theresa May a stronger hand in the #Brexit negotiations would give us the kind of Brexit that would be good for us. The referendum is a done deal, however, it is my view that if the politicians decided should ask us about whether we wanted to stay in Europe, it is right for them to return to us and review the manner of our leaving.

Basically, if we want to get off the EU bus, it is best the bus gets to a bus stop where we can safely alight rather than us jumping out of the window whilst the bus is in motion. There was a streak of British bloody-minded daring-do that was beginning to inform our manner of leaving the EU that was patently unacceptable.

Then again, even if Brexit was an important electoral issue, there were seriously pertinent local issues that were left by the wayside, those were the issues that Jeremy Corbyn brought to the fore as Theresa May sequestered herself away from needed scrutiny to challenge her record in government.

We had to stop this gamble

She was either clueless or given to sophistry that the gamble she took calling an election was beginning to write itself out as political folly. I had to vote and so I committed myself to a 500-kilometre roundtrip from Edinburgh to Manchester to vote on Thursday morning.

I believe, there were many like me who decided they had had enough of politicians in the mould of Donald Trump who took everything for granted and had no scruples gambling away our future on the whim of egotistical and reckless abandon for personal ends portrayed as a national interest.

Invariably, even after two terrorist attacks within weeks of each other and the local elections that appeared to buoy the Tory Party, the gamble did not pay off, and rather than increase her majority in the Parliament we are met today with a hung parliament with the Tories needing the support of the anachronistic, provincial and primordial Democratic Unionist Party of the Northern Ireland to form a minority government.

What a silly girl

One is left to almost blurt out, ‘Silly Girl’, but a lesson has been harshly taught and history is being penned with the enthusiastic aplomb of an epic-making thriller. Theresa May will go down in history as the incumbent leader who called an unnecessary election to bury the opposition into irrelevance giving her the freedom to traipse about like an empress, only to be reduced in clout, authority and effective mandate.

Unfortunately, the stiff-necked woman has learnt no lessons, the core of the team that heralded the shambles we are in have been retained to continue in shambolic plunder of our commonwealth. The Tory Party is, however, a restive hornet’s nest, it would sooner implode over something before the next scheduled election of 2022. I do not expect Theresa May to last this new Parliament as the leader of the Tory Party.

We, the people

What we have learnt is that people do feel strongly about the way we are governed, they are concerned about the NHS, social care and our communities, but would not be terrified into making choices like the ones that brought us Brexit again. We want a managed exit from the EU that involved consultation, consensus and agreement.

We are done with UKIP and its immigrant poison, the people persuaded of the UKIP agenda did not automatically file into the Tory column as Theresa May expected, they dispersed into columns that appealed to our greater sense of being as the Labour Party that was supposed to become history claimed more seats off other parties than they lost, a net gain of 21.

A strengthened opposition is what we need for the kind of Brexit Theresa May was cooking up for us and we have one led by Jeremy Corbyn who by terms is in the ascendancy. For that alone, I’m in clover.

God Save The Queen!

Related notes

Blog - The UK: One Vote! #GE2017

Blog - Fuck #Brexit, there are people suffering

Blog - Opinion: He was British, what changed him?

Blog - Manchester: Our humanity is our strength

Blog - Homelessness: Make June the end of May - #EndMayInJune

The UK: One Vote! #GE2017

One vote

One vote; that is all it is, that one vote that you can only cast for yourself as one person, an individual, independent, inspired or instigated.

You cannot cast a vote on behalf of your household, when you enter the voting booth, you alone, persuaded by truth or lies, passion or indifference, concern or apathy, duty or routine to exercise a right that much blood has been shed for over centuries. That amazing right of self-determination.

Yet, you also can decide not to exercise that right to vote, leave it to others to decide your fate or fortune, where you have sight you can choose to be blind, where you have hearing you can choose to be deaf, where you have a voice you can choose to be silent.

It is just one vote, but each one vote taken together constitutes a majority for the person who wins against the other who might have won if others who chose not to vote did decide to vote.

A vote that changes things

It is one vote, the doorway to policy that can shape and alter the future for a country, for a people, for a lifetime and more pertinently for each and every citizen, the ones who voted, the ones who didn’t vote, the ones who cannot vote and the yet unborn who will access this world in the circumstances created by that vote.

We can choose to vote as informed people, checking out what is promised against what is possible, reviewing the record of incumbency and projecting that over the possibility that they might or might not have new ideas or we can choose to vote persuaded of soundbite and rhetoric, platitudes and talking points, mantras and slogans, empty boasts that tingle the ears but mean nothing in reality. We have the choice of ignorance and if we boldly embrace it, our folly lays before us.

A moral duty to vote

To vote is not only a civic duty, it is a moral duty, yet there has been no general election voter turnout above 80% since the elections of 1950 and 1951, on average since then, over 30% of possible voters have decided not to exercise the right to vote. [UKPoliticalInfo]

This cohort of ‘can vote – won’t vote’ people can make the difference in the kind of government we elect, clipping the wings of the tyrannical using the dividends of democracy to pursue an agenda that only serves the interest of the few. We are all affected when we vote and we are all affected when some of us do not vote.

Do everything in your power to vote

In the 2015 General Election, I was about to travel to South Africa when the election was called, I was fortunate enough to have ample time to plan to vote that I was able to avail myself of the opportunity of a postal vote, which I did.

I would have like to have a more streamlined process of applying for a postal vote, but the system appears to be a voter suppression scheme that does not lend itself easily to that option, this time around. Working out of Edinburgh I could have let my opportunity to vote pass, it is just one vote, but my one vote is valuable, it is my sight, my hearing, my voice and my full participation in our democracy – the government of the people, by the people, for the people.

My plan to vote

I will not let some people decide for me what I can also get involved in and decide for myself too. It comes at a cost of time, resources and strength, and if you believe in participatory democracy, you will support this view.

I am taking a train to Manchester tonight to arrive home just before midnight, I will be up first thing on Thursday, thankful for the people manning the polling stations from 7:00 AM to vote and then I will be catching a flight to Edinburgh to arrive at work just around 10:00 AM.

That is the plan and I am looking forward to being fully part of this democratic privilege.

It is one vote, one vote from me, one vote from you, all votes taken together become the key to our future, if we choose wisely, we would have a bright future ahead, if we don’t, the prospects are bleak and the pains we suffer today would just be the beginning of a future of more pain and agony. Have you seen nurses at food banks and the homeless on our streets? Those are results of failed policy.

If we are to have a United Kingdom that works for everyone, then it is our duty to go out and cast that vote. On Thursday the 8^th of June 2017, the polling stations are open from 7:00 AM to 10:00 PM, change the future by voting tomorrow.

A deluge in the Lothians

From new moon to new moon,
Marvelled I at the city,
For not once did the eyes of heaven,
Shed a tear of nature,
The month of April thirsted,
When May shrivelled for the heat,
Told of a turning that never came,
My unbelief hardened by the day.

Then suddenly was a drizzle unexpected,
To hand a brolly to hold,
Then in a moment not too wet,
The petrichor rose to the nostrils,
Nature sweetly wafting a fragrance,
Of coolness fresh and life,
Then for many dawns beyond,
The damp was of the dew.

Cats and dogs will hide this time,
Whales will play tunes with their blowholes,
Edinburgh became heaven's drain,
The clouds flushed through without end,
Umbrellas tested by winds and gusts,
The dull became a sad pall of the horizon,
For to see not too far ahead,
This is not stopping for a while.

Appeal: My sister and her husband are being terrorised by an armed robber gang

My people robbed

On the night of the 23^rd of May 2017, my sister and brother-in-law were brutally attacked at home by armed robbers, he was inflicted with head injuries and the bandits made away with their mobile phones, her laptop which contained her PhD programme activities, her glasses, their bank cards and identity cards.

The thieves or an accomplice of theirs then raided my brother-in-law’s bank account and the money was transferred to a beneficiary account number (6018594851) with Fidelity Bank belonging to a Izuka Chukwuemeka Onyema, this apparently happened between 5:57 AM and 7:47 AM on the 24^th of May 2017.

They are terrorising them

My sister and brother-in-law on finding that moneys had been transferred out the account, informed their bank and a block was placed on the account of the beneficiary. Since then, the robbers returned and my family was saved because they were sighted at the point of breaking in again, but they are terrorising my family and that is just unacceptable.

Izuka Chukwuemeka Onyema needs to be picked up and interrogated to reveal who his actors and accomplices are to stop terrorising my sister and my brother-in-law. They are living in constant fear away from home and other places where their identities might compromise them, terrorised by criminals who have been thwarted in their atrocious enterprise.

Stop this lawlessness

This is lawlessness that cannot be allowed to continue any longer and I appeal to anyone who can initiate, expedite and help apprehend these people to save not just my sister and brother-in-law, but anyone else from being terrorised by this brigandage of menace.

The key person is Izuka Chukwuemeka Onyema, his account number 6018594851 with Fidelity Bank should have other pertinent details as his photograph and address where he can either be picked up or the investigation that start to build a picture of his contacts towards stopping this criminality once and for all.

Obviously, in nabbing this man, it is also possible that lots of stolen property can be retrieved and hopefully returned to their rightful owners.

Help me nab them

Now, this touches me more because, my sister and brother-in-law are newlyweds, who just started a new home, it is only over 7 months ago that we lost our baby sister. My brother-in-law is recovering, but they both need to be back safe in their home without being fearful of armed robbery reprisals.

My appeal is to the good offices of the law and process to get these criminals off the streets and allow the citizenry live their lives in peace and happiness.

As with most things Nigerian, we are left to do our own do-it-yourself detective footwork and investigations, the police have been redolent and nonchalant even with the evidence we already have to hand. The only alternative left is to drive a social media campaign in the hope that a resolution is possible. It is my hope that you will be engaged, interested and help bring these criminals to justice. Thank you.

Edinburgh: Then I found a hotel that shouldn't be in this business

I’m a sleeping dog, let me lie

As a tourist to a city, a guest in a hotel or a customer in a restaurant or any establishment that provides a service, I am a quiet unassuming, disinterested and unperturbed person, quite so if everything is just as it should be. I am rarely effusive with praise and loath to excoriate.

However, shift out of the standard deviation of expected service and I have a broad tolerance of excellence to incompetence and you will for posterity become a search result on the Internet, my perspective of my experience.

Having worked in Edinburgh for 5 weeks, I have found myself in a variation of the theme of The Frog Prince, I have already stayed in 5 hotels and have proverbially kissed just as many frogs seeking a prince. Now in my sixth hotel, I seem to have kissed a toad, maybe even something as dreadful as a lamprey.

Why were they advertised?

This Centre Townhouse is anything but what it purports to be. From the next day after I booked the place on Hotels.com, it has been an ever-increasing debilitating nightmare. The warning signs were there, I gamely ignored them and considering the booking was made late at night, I probably was not alert enough to the little troublesome elements this establishment and that word I use under advisement.

I had booked a room with an en-suite bathroom and it was one of those instances where I decided not to pay up-front but pay at the hotel, the first clue being there were no reviews of the place yet. Hotels.com as the broker of the transaction guarantees my booking and acts as an escrow service, my booking was confirmed through my credit card.

The next morning, I received an email from the hotel, suggesting my card had been declined and that I should offer another means of payment. That should never have happened and so I contacted Hotels.com to inquire as to how my card that was accepted through my booking on the website could now be declined by an establishment that was only to get paid on my arrival.

Hotels dot incomprehensible

Hotels.com informed me that my booking had been cancelled by the establishment and that the issue of my declined card was being investigated by their internal transactions team, they had no other information for me, however, someone from the team would call me in under three hours.

The status of my confirmed booking did not change on the Hotels.com website through to the next morning when I called to remonstrate about the unsatisfactory customer service and unnecessary distress about having a declined credit card, a long way from home.

The staff then called the hotel directly, gave them assurances that the booking will be paid for on arrival and reconfirmed to me that everything was fine. Not an hour after that call, I received another email from the hotel still asking for a guaranteed and alternative means of payment.

A dishonest ruse

I then called Centre Townhouse directly to determine what the problem really was and as it transpired, they did not have a means to take credit/debit card payments. So, rather than come clean that they were unready for modern hotelier business they set up the ruse that my card had been declined to prompt me to contact them to agree to pay cash on arrival. Dishonest does not begin to describe my view of that behaviour that I called Hotels.com the next morning to complain about this underhand business practice.

Hotels.com did not help ameliorate the situation and had I not accrued a loyalty reward scheme over 4 years of being a customer, I would have immediately transferred my loyalties to a rival hotel booking site. The agent at the other end of the phone, probably in an outsourced location completely oblivious of typically first-world problems and angst could not for the want of trying comprehend the distress of having a card declined and the risk of carrying around hundreds of pounds in a society that is progressively a cashless society.

My feedback to Hotels.com on this situation has not garnered a response yet. The Hotels.com agent seemed to have taken the side of the hotelier and their cock and bull story. I was none too pleased when I learnt that the hotel would hopefully by the weekend have a card machine, it was not going to happen, these people were chancers, they got by, by bending the truth without scruples.

Is this the hotel?

I arrived at the ‘hotel’ by taxi and there was no signpost outside, the main door which was ajar and the cab driver was a tad suspicious and concerned that I might have arrived at the wrong place, but that was the address I had. I walked in and I was welcomed into what seemed to have been a big townhouse converted into a number of apartments. The self-contained living quarters on the ground floor had been rejigged into a configuration with a big bedroom accessed by a keycode lock which became my room.

The living room had a split function as my sitting room and the hotel reception, with access to a kitchen where I could use the microwave oven but not the gas stove or the oven. The combined toilet and bathroom was not en-suite, the lock insecure, the toilet brush broken, and the toilet was exclusively mine to use except when others came to use the living room to entertain guests and their cacophony became my disturbance.

On my first morning there, I had a face full of shaving foam only to find that the shower was not working. I sent an SMS text message to the hotelier to have it fixed which was sorted whilst I was at work.

There were no towels in my room and when I asked for towels, I was told I had to pay £2 for the use of a towel. My room does not even qualify as a bed and breakfast arrangement, but for the perfunctory wireless internet complimentary service, I am at loss as to how to class this rip-off.

These are bounders on the make

The £400 for my 5-night stay I had already withdrawn from the bank and put in an envelope that I gave the albeit pleasant hotelier with whom I had a long friendly conversation, but the truth of the matter cannot be lost to pleasantries.

At the very minimum, an establishment masquerading as a hotel or at the very least aspiring to the standard of a bed and breakfast would have a signpost outside, a reception, the room and bed as advertised, a chair and table, a television, tea making facilities, a hair dryer (not that I need one), toiletries including a towel, probably ironing facilities and everyday housekeeping. I was not aware my bed would not be made every day.

Close this travesty

The setup as it stands at the Centre Townhouse is probably best suited for a motel for a night or a brothel by the hour, going by the charge for towels. This is no hotel, these people though pleasant, have no business being in the hospitality business, it is disastrously amateurish with a money-grabbing hand absent of understanding what it takes to run any semblance of a hotel facility. To suggest I am appalled is to be effusive with praise.

I should have at the first opportunity cancelled this booking, I will endure the 5 nights, it is not the end of the world, but the end of this charade running in the hospitality industry and having a berth on a hotel booking website cannot come soon enough. One is not by terms impressed.

This is a review of my own personal experience of staying at Centre Townhouse for five nights at the end of May into the beginning of June. It is written honestly, without prejudice and truthfully, each individual experience in a hotel establishment varies, I cannot speak for others, I speak for myself.

Centre Townhouse
70 Gilmore Place
Edinburgh
EH3 9NX

Fuck #Brexit, there are people suffering

This is Britain today

As I descended the Playfair Steps towards the Scottish National Gallery after work, I first heard him before I saw him. He was asking for change, his voice weak, not particularly dishevelled, by the tear in his jacket and his trousers meant he was in rags.

I could not look away and I did not have loose change, I had decent money and an open hand, that was what I did as I secreted a note into his hand. He noticed and called after me to thank me and shake my hand.

That is the reality of life of some of my fellow Brits, they have nothing, not an inkling of where the next meal is coming from, not a place to sleep, not a prospect for a future beyond the now, if something radical does not happen from individuals like you and I, from civil society groups and fundamentally from the government and we are choosing one in a week.

Complex waffle at simple problems

On April the 30^th after Theresa May decided to gamble with our lives by calling an unnecessary and unneeded general election, Andrew Marr posited that nurses were using food banks and this is what she said, “There are 'many complex reasons' why nurses were using food banks, but 'not having enough money to eat' was not one of them.” [Independent]

No Theresa, the reason why people use food banks does not involve any complex reason, it is a simple reason, they do not have the money to buy food. Full Stop!

This whole preoccupation with #Brexit, ‘Strong and Stable’ and whatever rhetorical mantra that has become a cacophonous jumble of the governing party in the mouth of Theresa May, does not once address these fundamental issues.

Why are people sleeping rough everywhere I go in the UK and why are nurses using food banks and what are you going to do about it?

She can’t do it, simples

These events are fundamentally the bread and butter issues that keep people on the lowest rung of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, they have basic needs now, the psychological needs and the self-fulfilment needs are hardly on their minds. #Brexit is not front and centre of their minds.

With a 7-year term as first Home Secretary and now Prime Minister, Theresa May has had the scope, opportunity and privilege to implement many of the new promises she is trotting out as electoral pledges and failed dismally as achieving any, be it on immigration or social policy. What she could not do then, she has not done now and will not do hereafter, let us not be carried away and cajoled by this political talk.

Theresa May is completely out of touch with the pulse and the heart of what ails the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, she is just on an opportunistic jaunt projected on a #Brexit negotiating stance in the hope that we are scared enough to trust her.

#Fuck Brexit

Now, negotiating #Brexit is important, but at the expense of national real life issues that affect everyday lives is where the Tories campaign gets it wrong and much as the prospect of Jeremy Corben as Prime Minister is a hard concept to countenance, I dare say, he knows where people are hurting, needing and ailing – in social welfare, in services, in making the country work for everyone, even if it would hurt some of us to help the people who appear to have been left behind or forgotten altogether.

Whilst, I commend Amber Rudd for standing in for the Prime Minister at the debates just two days after she lost her father, I sympathise, but politics is about the living, I have no sympathy vote to give, I have a vote that makes a difference in my life and the lives of others that I see as I walk the streets of the UK.

I say it as it needs to be said – Fuck #Brexit, there is more to life than that at stake.