In My Time

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Songs that touch the heart

There are many songs that I have heard that touch a part of me that nothing else can. Sometimes, it is just the music, the easy listening that brings a calmness and restfulness to my spirit, I feel I want to play it back continuously until I fall into slumber.

Then, beyond the sound of the music, you look at the lyrics and find such meaning that you can completely relate to as if the words taken out of your life and published to the strains of music that take your thoughts to another place.

All that I know now has to go

Recently, I found a life experience I never thought I would ever have again, I have a long history of relationships, some good, some bad and the others are forgettable. Some of my past loves are still friends and I cherish their friendships, but there would be no rekindling of what we once felt for each other, that has gone.

How again I realise experience limited my ability to move on and find new love, I built crenellations around my heart for it had been hurt and broken too many times, I did not want to hurt anymore. I was protecting myself from heartbreak and by that not opening my heart to those who might have been more caring and careful, considering and considerate, in love and loving, I was exhausted.

I let my heart be touched

Even with that, I thought I was on guard by default, then someone came and in a short embrace, my heart settled, a calmness enveloped me, I felt peaceful and drawn to this person in ways impossible to resist. There was no conflict between my head and my heart, both were telling me, there is much in this than you could ever imagine. Go with the flow, dare to ask and fear for nothing about what might happen.

I followed my deepest premonitions like I was walking through caves towards a welcoming light and comfort, I was being led into love unbeknownst, I was in love before it dawned on me that this was happening to me. I accepted there was no escape from this feeling. Crazy as it seemed, it was real, it was true, and it was growing in strength, in meaning and in prospect.

I let my heart be touched, I let my mind be caught, I let my life be changed, I let my love be shared and the past has become its own story because the present is a miracle of dreams that come true for the very few. In that, I have been blessed, for after all I have been through, in my time, I have found love – it is a wonderful thing.

This song touched me deeply

In My Time by Teddy Pendergrass (Love Language)

You know, I'm no beginner
My heart's been to the wall
I'm a tried and true romantic
Who's seen and done it all

And when you walked into my life
Suddenly I knew
All the love I had inside
Was leading me to you

In my time
I've lived and loved so much
Through each high and low
I let my heart be touched

In my time
There isn't much I've missed
I've seen love come and go, but heaven knows
I've never loved like this in my time

After all that I've been through
I'm in love with you

I've won some and I've lost some
But us dreamers don't complain
We keep reaching out for passion
No matter what the pain

When I looked into your eyes
It all fell into place
I found, what I was searching for
Shining in your face

In my time
I've lived and loved so much
Through each high and low
I let my heart be touched

In my time
There isn't much I've missed
I've seen love come and go, but heaven knows
I've never loved like this in my time

After all that I've been through
I'm in love with you

In my time
I've lived and loved so much
Through each high and low
I let my heart be touched

In my time
There isn't much I've missed
I've seen love come and go, but heaven knows
I've never loved like this in my time

After all that I've been through
I'm in love with you

Songwriters: Cynthia Weil / Michael Masser

In My Time lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Universal Music Publishing Group

To My Funny Valentine

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When the time lags

What the passage of time is, long and enduring like tomorrow would never come and then in its passage, the speed at which history takes hold is amazing if not unfathomable.

I once lamented where my funny valentine was having just lost one who I so desired to take that place, it was painful knowing the person had passed away just exactly 4 months before.

Blog - Where is my funny valentine?

Three years later, I wrote about the quest for love and companionship that had so eluded my grasp in many ways I could not understand. Much about love unrequited or the knowledge of what one did not want beclouding what might have been available. In the background, grief still held one back from exploring opportunities, I guess I never found one to lead me into love again.

Blog - My Funny Valentine, 2013

When the time comes

We arrive at another Valentine’s Day with a different story as a journey that appeared to start 9 years before, now has the hold of something meaningfully amazing, for I have found my funny valentine and in him the words of the song brings a reality that I could not even dare to dream when the last season passed without event.

In paraphrasing an excerpt of the lyrics to the contemporaneous, we find the truth to something that transcends everything, for love conquers all.

Blog - South Africa: I was caught in up the rapture

My funny valentine, now I know where you are – Sweet comic valentine, so would I like to laugh to the sound of your voice – You make me smile with my heart, such joy you bring.

Your looks are laughable, who cares you are the best – Unphotographable, but I see you every day so perfect – Yet you’re my favourite work of art, and nothing can compare to what I adore.

Source

A play on the lyrics of My Funny Valentine

Dedicated to my funny valentine, you know who you are.

Thank you!

Opinion: Resurrect your dead blogs

Dead blogs as Internet zombies

Sometimes I go checking on blogs I once read fervently and notice there has not been a newly written blog for years. It makes me wonder about when blogging seemed to be a trend and once the novelty wore off the interest in blogging died.

More so, I visit corporate and establishment websites with links to blogs that were enthusiastically written for a while and have had no recently new content. Now, apart from my personal blog that I have consistently contributed to for 15 years, I do have a professional blog that has had no new content for almost 5 years.

We all have stories to tell

The question then becomes, have we all run out of stories to write about? On a personal level, there is always an idea, an event, a circumstance or a personality engaging enough to write about along with having a perspective of things that can become a blog.

My view has always been, we are story people, we all have stories that can only be best told in our own voice, written in our own style and related uniquely from our own perspective. A blog is who you are, what you see, how you feel and the way you are affected or unaffected by that or other situations.

Blogging is easy, honestly

That means, there can be no reason not to have a blog in the first place and then keep it running as much as you could. There was a time when people religiously kept diaries and journals, captains of ships kept logs. The issue of documentation and record keeping is both for reference and posterity, removing dispute from ascertaining the facts as the reckoner has archived the situation.

Not that a blog is as formal as that. For where some have seen blogging as a means to a livelihood, mine is written out of interest, I have opinions and I write them down in a blog, I address social issues and those sometimes find resonance with other people, they begin and interaction that leads to a conversation.

Resurrect yourself in a blog

A blog does not have to be a serious endeavour of academic rigour, do your proofreading, do not dispense with the rules of grammar for the chosen language of communication and follow the common sense of a good seamstress making a skirt; make it short enough to keep the interest and long enough to cover the detail. I hope that analogy is relatable without appearing sexist.

As you read this, why did you stop blogging if you were once a blogger? The excuse that you haven’t the time for it would come across as lame; you can knock out a blog in less than 15 minutes and it does not have to be a treatise. Then the other question is, why are not blogging? That is, if you have never had a blog before, you cannot convincingly say you have no ideas, no opinions or no perspective of the things that surround your life.

There are too many blogging tombstones on the Internet on which we have written; Here lies the exhausted ideas of a person who once regaled us with stories that many once came here to read. Alas! You can resurrect your blog by posting one today.

Shortening time with longing

Time is a measure,
In which we find the pleasure,
Wandering for leisure,
With a heart full of treasure.

There comes a time,
For which there is no chime,
We come into our prime,
With the hopes of a lifetime.

Counting down the days,
The weeks you dare set ablaze,
The months you want to raze,
Till when you face their gaze.

If time will gallop on,
To finish the marathon,
No more to wait upon,
The wish to liaison.

The heart is full of love,
Like a blessing from above,
Time is like a dove,
Freed and better off.

We wonder what to do,
With what we never knew,
As sure as we come to,
The day to meet anew.

Furloughed: Checks, posts and views

A furloughed week

As a consequence of a frank professional assessment of a situation I was working on, I have found myself inadvertently furloughed to work just one day this week, as that is the only billable activity on my schedule. The disadvantage for me is that I do not get paid for days that have no billing, I am dependent on my resource manager to assign new projects to my schedule, or I am technically out of work.

However, not to be idle, I chose to book a sexual health check today, as before now, each visit to that clinic has me spending almost 5 hours there, I seem to always be the last to be seen. They have changed the arrangements from a walk-in clinic to an online appointments system that is open at noon for slots the day after. I caught the first slot of 8:30 AM today and still did not get called by a doctor until 9:15 AM. An improvement, but I arrived first, two people arrived after me and they were seen before me.

In any case, we had a pleasant session from answering questions that were heretofore embarrassing to me giving a detail medical report of my situation. Blood was drawn, swabs taken, and I gave a urine sample; all done in about 30 minutes.

I left to post a letter that was processed as registered post, taking time to ask questions about the normal operations of equipment and systems in the Post Office as part of my activities in the last few weeks included investigating the performance of Post Office environments.

Legacies that last

Then as I made my way home, the Whitworth Art Gallery which had undergone renovations a few years before became a point of interest. I decided to consider some appreciation of art, so I walked in first for a coffee and a croissant before looking around.

The gallery is named for Sir Joseph Whitworth Bt. who donated funds for the gallery and is renowned for setting the standards for the screw thread known as the British Standard Whitworth and the pioneer of the sniper rifle. His name features prominently around Manchester on Whitworth Street; where I live, Whitworth Hall, the Christie Hospital which he funded and is now one of the foremost cancer treatment centres in Europe. His legacy also funds 10-15 scholarships for engineering degrees and now to doctorate level.

At the gallery, is saw prints by Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746 – 1828), known to all as Goya and William Hogarth (1697-1764) in a curated exhibition titled Prints of Darkness: Goya and Hogarth in a Time of European Turmoil which runs until August 2019. The subtext is these men challenged orthodoxy and the abuse of power in times when the powerful had an untrammelled ability for impunity without accountability.

History is panels

At the exhibition, I learnt that Hogarth as an active governor of the Foundling Hospital founded by retired sea captain Thomas Coram in 1739, persuaded other great artists to donate works to the hospital and thereby pioneering socially engaged artists.

Then in his moral depiction of the Four Stages of Cruelty, he works progressively from childhood cruelty against pets, to adult cruelty against beasts of labour, then criminality that includes robbery to murder, ending with the reward of cruelty where the criminal having been condemned to disembowelled when brought down from the gallows.

On seeing the print of The Cockpit, I did wonder when the meaning evolved from watching a cockfight to being the helm of a water-going vessel or the flight deck of an aircraft.

We always need rational thought

Hogarth like Goya was a fierce critic of organised religion that held sway over people with superstition leaving little room for rational thought. In his Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism, he satirises and excoriates the belief in the Cock Lane ghost and a Mary Toft who was the perpetrator of an elaborate hoax suggesting she gave birth to a litter of rabbits.

One can aver that we desperately need a Goya and a Hogarth in these times to challenge the illogical and mad dash to Brexit along with the lies and terminological inaccuracies that has bewitched the populace into accepting that what is essentially damaging to them is more desirable than the status quo.

Another exhibition, Four Corners of One Cloth: Textiles from the Islamic World, filled me with fascination. On show was a piece of Kiswah, the cloth that covers the Kaaba the holiest shrine of the Islamic world which is apparently changed annually on the 9^th day of the month of Hajj, divided and sent around the world.

Until I saw the narrative of the items of clothing from the last nomadic tribe of the Qashqai from Iran, I had always wondered where Nissan got the name for their Qashqai. Now I know.

I guess I made more use of the day than I could ever have envisaged.

Some of the pictures of panels, prints and exhibits I took at the gallery are in this slideshow.

Our mother, the example of community involvement

Our mother, the partisan

My sister, Ibukun Olawepo-Johnson, wrote on Facebook about our mum and her activism, even I learnt a few things too that I had to ask if I could share what she had written, below.

Yesterday I was talking to my cousin about the presidential visit (to Lagos), I told him I can bet my last kobo that my mum was at the stadium in Surulere.

It dropped in my mind that we have a lot of lazy youth in this country, my mum retired from the civil service after 35 years of service. I think she was even kept on for one extra year because of the beautiful work she did when she was in service.

Our mother, the principal

All throughout the time I knew her, she was a principal and she was a principal in all the trouble areas in Ejigbo, Okota and Oshodi where she had running battles with thugs and difficult students, (I would add, teachers and some presumably family friends who thought she did not deserve her position), she fought them to a standstill and won the battle. She was last promoted to special principal grade.

[Some backstory information, my mother was asked to start a school from scratch at the age of 34 in 1977, she created and ran Ejigbo Community High School for probably 13 years. Just over a year ago, I think in the 40th year of the establishment of the school, the alumni of the school honoured her with a commemoration and thanks for her leadership, mentorship and contributions to the community.]

Our mother, the activist

After she left service she was still very active, later when she moved to her house in Ejigbo, she joined the Community Development Association (CDA) group on her street and became the Chairman of her CDA, somewhere along the line she joined politics and she is a strong member of APC in her area.

My mum had the option of retiring and watching things unfold in her community, but she chose to be involved. Even when my younger sister was ill, and she was her primary caregiver, she still found the time to be involved in what was going on in her community.

When glaucoma almost made her blind, she was still attending CDA and APC meetings and activities at over 75 years old. [We were able to get some of the best medical help to save her eyesight. She is even more up and about with community, political and church activities.]

Our mother, the example

It's a shame on all of us that are under 70, we have the power to be involved in our communities, yet all we do is make noise on social media, criticising the government in our various offices and the country without getting involved to bring about the changes we want.

No one will hand power over to us, we need to be involved get involved in politics.

It is time we clean it up if we feel it is a dirty game.

We need to stop all this ranting and noise making, we need to make the next necessary move to bring on change and take our communities to the next level.

The elders will only hand over to the youth if only the youth are actively involved.

Campaign for your own candidate, don't say my vote does not count; go out to vote and ensure that votes are counted before leaving the polling booth. Demand good governance in your locality and attend CDA meetings.

Change begins with you and me.

Start from your house, move into your street, on to your local government area, then your office, all the way until you get to the very top.

Postscript

This characteristic of community involvement is not unique to our mum, our dad is also quite involved in the community also. From as far back as I can remember when we returned from the UK, the renovation of our homestead, the bringing of electricity supply to our village, the building of the new village cathedral, a new secondary school and many other activities to help people in their careers, businesses and general needs.

They are examples of a standard well beyond whatever we have ever attempted, yet they show a way to what can be achieved when we have the commitment, drive and a vision to make a difference in people, situations and communities.

In this, we begin to commend that exemplary lives of our parents.

A Decade on Twitter

A quarter of a century online

I review my life on social media that appears to go back 25 years when it was not a popular term. My first email address in 1994 and then a CompuServe subscription through which I participated in Usenet groups.

When I moved out to Ipswich in 1995, I found an Internet Service Provider (ISP) who I discovered unilaterally blocked adult websites. I paid him a visit and demanded that as an adult, my access to the Internet should be untrammelled, including the ability to view adult sites, as I am an adult and I do not intend to be policed if I am doing nothing illegal.

I guess he was embarrassed for the fact that I was unabashed, my request was granted that evening and he must have glad I did not have to visit him about anything again.

Throwing off and throwing down

Soon, we were on Internet Relay Chat (IRC), I think that was 1997, opening channels for all sorts of interests until people found ways to exploit vulnerabilities in the TCP/IP stack and knock you offline with DoS/DDoS attacks or those that broke IRC connections, called nuking. We had to implement countermeasures to prevent nukes and the takeovers of IRC channels.

As the popularity of IRC began to wane in the early 2000s, I was in a Berlin hotel when decided to start blogging in December 2003. I hope to have written my 3,000^th blog sometime this year. It was not for another few years before I joined another social media platform. In my early blogging years, I formed significant and lasting friendships from which I began to grow a social network.

Along the line, I joined other niche social media networks, many of which have fallen out use, favour or are dead. Then came LinkedIn, which many did not consider social as in other forums we participated in, I guess, we compartmentalised, trying to keep our strictly professional lives separate from our lives outside work. I have been a member since the 16^th of March 2006.

Can you hear the chirping birds?

One morning just before I left for work, I created a Twitter account and waited for a confirmation. Meanwhile, I travelled to Arnhem where I was working, and it was there that I posted my first tweet on the 8^th of February 2009. Today is a decade since I joined Twitter. As I relayed in a blog, I wrote a couple of days ago, I had to change my mode of communication from long-form writing of a blog to the contextualised concision limited to 140-characters. It was a challenge I took on with relish.

Blog - Tweeting beautifully without apologising for it

I might have been more prolific on Twitter and somewhat become less so on my blog, I have tweeted just under 153,000 thousand times with a following just short of 6,000. I find it a very useful forum for sharing ideas and for getting a prompt and effective response for customer service issues.

A call from beyond

In December 2009, just a couple of days before my birthday, I joined Facebook. I probably resisted jumping on this bandwagon for years. My first invitation to join Facebook came almost two years before when I eventually joined the person who invited me had been dead just over 9 weeks. His Facebook page then became a memorial to lay wreaths and bouquets of thoughts and reminiscences at different times of the Facebook.

Facebook also upended the concept of social media, because the network not only exploited proximity, it allowed you to mine your past. By the time you put in names of your old schools and old friends, many long forgotten, you were caught in a time vortex from which you had little an inkling how to escape.

Mimes and rhymes

Until early last year, most of my Facebook activity came from my Twitter posts and that linked was broken. I would comment on things I find on Facebook, but it is more likely that new posts would come from Instagram or blogs that I have written. I joined Instagram on Christmas Eve of 2014.

Most of my Instagram posts are accompanied by bad poetry or musings about the things I have observed. I have not convinced myself that Pinterest or SnapChat would add any value to my social media landscape. My social media life is lively enough as it is.

This all because of my decade on Twitter and long may we have the opportunity to celebrate life, happiness, love, and the freedom of expression.