On comments without root

A dump of verbiage

Looking through the hundreds of comments awaiting moderation on my blog, I could not help but wonder why some people bother. There are scores that are just hackneyed and trite never venturing to platitude, effusive with mock praise and uninteresting, a cat could have walked one their keyboard for a minute and produced commendable prose.

Others are completely off-topic bearing no relationship to the blog, adjacent blogs or my blog in general, whether visitors in a heightened state of psychoactive abandon are attracted to my blog, I cannot say, but by what has been written, I might just be on the money.

Spam you can’t can

However, more annoying are those who insert links to plug their businesses in my comments section, it is spam, no more no less. I have no advertisements on my blog, I make no money off it, it is a personal space that is open to readership whilst managed by me. I cannot edit the comments and I doubt I will grant permission if asked, to publish adverts on my blog.

I do write reviews and that is a different activity because it is one of personal experience with objective or subjective viewpoints and let us agree it is authentic.

Thanks for coming

Now, feedback on my blogs is welcome, I encourage it within the bounds of courtesy, respect, context, and contributions that extend the debate. As abuse and expletives are not my mode of expression such aggressive deployment of language will hardly be entertained or countenanced. One owns the prerogative to publish or delete, a rejoinder might well appear on you blog with a link to mine, if you want more control of the narrative.

I provide Comment advisory and guidelines to help towards making your contribution meaningful and worthy of publishing to my audience. Thank you for engaging and I will try my best to engage too.

What makes my Valentine's Day

For the 3^rd Valentine's Day, my life is full of love and joy because of you. Your smile lights up my world, your love so complete and indescribable, fulfilling and more besides.

I have never ever known love like this before. You to me are everything a heart could ever wish for, every day, every hour, to be close to you and with you, is that dream we are working towards.

Brian, you are my funny valentine, my perfect valentine, my precious valentine, the irreplaceable valentine of my life.

I love you so dearly, today and every day from the first time I saw you to forever. This will be an everlasting love. Thank you for being the amazing wonder you are.

Happy Valentine's Day.

A very befitting farewell

Learning new things

My thoughts have been contained in the events of the past few days surrounding the sending off and interment of a remarkably great man and my father’s best friend from childhood, Otunba Gabriel Ogunjimi Taiwo, who passed on in early November 2020.

Blog - The Vulture died of a ripe old age

The benefit of modern technology has allowed many of us who would have wanted to participate in honouring him with our presence to share in the moments with live broadcasts on Facebook. There are times we could have been swept into the situation and overcome with emotions it entails.

The traditions and the ceremony also revealed to me how somehow foreign everything seemed to me, it is like there has been a fundamental shift in these ceremonies from the solemnity I once knew that greets the preparations, the Service of Songs, the wake keeping, and the funerary rites to the outward flamboyance with performing pallbearers and much else.

Exhausted by spectacle

I could not begin to think of the energy and resolve of my friends in organising this feat whilst shouldering the broadest spectrum of feelings from sorrow through gratitude and joy of a life more than worthy of celebration, I, watching from afar, was exhausted that I feared whether I might ever have such strength.

My father gave a speech at the wake yesterday, he must feel the great loss of a friendship with the likelihood that in a quiet place, he could have let go of his emotions, it is a situation we cannot begin to fully understand apart from giving him support, consideration, and love.

For now and later

Then much as I want to be miffed about the untrammelled insatiable appetite of the clergy who steward our village church for donations, gifts, commitments, and other largesse after all that these men from their youth have contributed to the Ijesha-Ijebu community, using every opportunity to inveigle, plead, and entreat ever so unashamedly and blatantly, I will leave that to another time. Calmness and diplomacy demand that out of respect for our patriarch, we bring to a close the essential as it is needful.

Folusho, Niyi, and siblings, you have done well and done proud the legacy of your dad. May his soul rest in peace and the fond memories of his extraordinary life fill you with hope, strength, and grace into the future. Ẹkú Àṣẹ̀hìndè bàbá, ọjọ́ á jìnà síra. Gbérè!

Rise with your hopes or fall with your fears

Guard your ears, till your heart

Our fears can so limit our ability to thrive, some fears fed by a passing comment in our past that takes root and grows into a humongous impediment to progress and success. The caution we must exercise in who we lend our ears to is one of eternal vigilance, for the grounds in which seeds can grow in our lives, are more fertile than we ever realise.

Words from the mouths of our parents triggering involuntary responses that determine the course of our lives and can make a difference in a lifetime, you wonder, how do you escape the clutches of what you have taken to heart? There are damaging consequences, from people of considerable influence that you can still hear their voices decades long after you have forgotten who or what they look like.

We can be different

We should not however concentrate on the negative, there are other inputs that engender the amazingly productive, that word of kindness, of encouragement, of hope, of prayer, of beauty, of praise and the good of our humanity, lighting up a path for us to travel, rescuing us from danger, infirmity, or calamity, bringing a sense of determination that girds us and strengthens us that we have no choice but to win. Those voices are begging to be heard but we are too attuned to the contrary.

As individuals, we fight our uniquely arranged battles, but when we enter into partnerships where our fortunes are pooled, we can rise with our partners or sink with them because of the baggage that burdens our inability to either live beyond our fears or the grip of the impending defeat sowed by experiences or words we have heard before.

Imagine where you can be

The greater disaster is not to see the newness in life that gives you hope against all situations to write a better story and create a worthy narrative of your life beyond the fears and low expectations of others who stole our power to thrive with their selfish perspective of what your life might be if it turned out different and successful.

If I am saddened, it is with those who never tried to dream of the extraordinary and when given the opportunity take off from the ground, rise to have the wind beneath their wings to soar with the eagles. It is possible, only if we uproot the forests of fruitless trees that took hold clouding the warmth of the sun with the fear of a future we do not know. Fears based on broad stereotypes when they should have based on the uniqueness of the individual.

Even more, the pity is you and your partner are left down in the dumps in an unproductive life just because fear robbed you of the spirit of hope and the experience of better things that you could ever have imagined in your wildest dreams.

We are chameleons of nature

Opening to the strange

I have sometimes wondered about the kind of comfort we find with strangers such that intimate details are shared in ways that we would never consider with those we know.

We engage and unburden freely maybe unconsciously that there will never be another encounter so that the familiar does not visit us again and with it bring some embarrassment. Just as the tongue might be loosened by drink in the midst of friends, the elixir of strange meetings gives an inebriating fillip to unbridled liberties.

The anonymous becomes a comfortable channel for things closed off, a place where there is an expression for which we do not want to be known to others. It is like our secret selves still needs a place to be not so secret, yet not public with a face or some recognition.

Natural inhibitions of nature

Maybe in the embrace of the strange, we find a new range for our passions and our fears, even hopes and desires get to travel in paths we never dared to let them get out to experience. We have a tendency to compartmentalise, manage the facets of who we are to different levels of acquaintance, we are being completely who we are and yet never the complete picture to those who think they know everything about us.

It is probably healthy to be apparently extroverted to the unfamiliar whilst being introverted to the too familiar, whether vice versa is a good thing, I am not too sure. We are chameleons taking on strange and familiar colours depending on the environment; that is in truth not quite unnatural, is it?

A workshop of manufacturing I do not need

The making of obscure goods

I need to step out of this factory manufacturing goods of no description and without any purpose, yet the machines churn, the conveyor belts are in motion, with an end-to-end process fully engaged, the inputs nebulous and the outputs vacuous, what a quandary of automation on my hands, for I am the factory manager.

To unravel this conundrum, I cannot shut down that factory, for there are orders that could be placed for which the tooling can be recalibrated to make something not just of value, but of significance beyond what I might use to share with others.

The same plant has served markets proximate and distant, but a moment of distraction has set in place some disorder, the cost of realignment needs minimising and then time to readjust should by all means to shortened.

A malcontent of discontent

What ails us is simple, external factors that impose limitations that we can either absorb and bear to much operational disruption, ignore and face the consequences further down the line, or take into consideration, making allowances for some drift, but not letting it impact the schedule of activities for which other orders have been properly processed.

The factory is my mind and the manufacturing is the array of thought processes that course through my thoughts and thinking especially around this pandemic and the mishandling of it by my government. The lockdown affects me, but I can get on with my life in general, shopping, exercise and work continue in earnest.

There is no social activity, I cannot meet friends, and travel is prohibited if I was not in South Africa with my partner a month ago, I will not have met any of my friends for literally a year, apart from one who is in my social bubble because he lives in my city.

Briskly manufacturing no consent

I watch the frenetic activity to contain the virus, having lost the trust of the public and the ability to persuade us of a greater cause, they impose hefty fines on a whim and we roll over allowing this travesty as if they are testing how far we can be squeezed by their egregious abuse of power.

We do need to get a hold of this pandemic, but I am governed by consent, that consent is wearing thin as the rank incompetence of this government looms so large that it is impossible not to see where the problem is. Like I said before, the issue is not the South Africa strain of the virus, especially after the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine was found not to be as effective against that strain.

Blog - The CoVID-19 mutations are not the problem

Testing our docility

The South African strain has been the bogeyman and rationale for the imposition of a more stringent lockdown, but the prevalent and dominant strain in the UK is homegrown from Kent. All the restrictions and quarantine measures being put into play now, if they had been imposed 3 months ago when South Africa did, or 6 months ago when rather we were enticed to Eat Out to Help Out, we would not have suffered the death toll of over 110,000 of which half happened in the last quarter of a year and we probably would have eased many of the lockdown measures and be on the path to a semblance of normalcy.

Dare I suggest we tried for this a year ago before it took any hold and we would be filling stadiums attending concerts like they are now in New Zealand, but we played with lives to save the economy and now, both lives and the economy are in peril, compounded by Brexit. It is not a matter of hindsight, time and again, the signs of what to do were there, but the government prevaricated, and procrastinated wishing bluster and bombast will save the day. It did not.

I guess my question is, what will it take for the people to say enough because it seems they will get away with anything and everything if at one point we cannot hold anyone or someone responsible and accountable for the negligence of leadership and the unprecedented trammelling of our liberties by reason of the ineptitude and infirmity of leadership. Closing the strange goods line for the day.

Zakhele Popo of V&A Waterfront

Our regular haunt

One place we always loved visiting when in Cape Town is the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront which is a beehive of activity. From the Foreshore, part of it is linked by a drawbridge and swing bridge that is fun to watch in operation as boats and yachts left or returned to the marina.

Apart from the shopping mall close to the breakwater and the restaurants that line the jetties and wharves, there are luxury hotels and the famous Nobel Square where statues of the 4 South African Nobel Peace Prize laureates stand of Chief Albert Luthuli (1960), Archbishop Desmond Tutu (1984), President F. W. de Klerk (1993), and Nelson Mandela (1993).

Many afternoons, busker musicians gather in front of the platform of statues to play music and perform dances, there are more troupes than solo performers, though you cannot miss the gospel singer-guitarist belting out old and familiar songs, we are taken to open-air church spirituality.

Ease yourself with ease

One thing I am grateful for around this venue is the conveniences, soon after a few kilometres you cannot ignore the call of nature that you have to dash plotting the shortest route to sought for relief, it is a moment to give thanks for more than the birds and the trees.

As Brian waited for me outside the yellow shed one afternoon, he was close to a performer taking a cigarette break, returning, I was looking around for him when the performer all bronze in a general’s attire with a peaked cap and staff called out to me, ‘We are here.’

There began a conversation, we had observed him over many visits to Cape Town as a living statue, still at most times and startling the unwary at other times. From then, we usually arrive at the V&A Waterfront when he is taking a break before he takes another position garnering the attention of the footfall of patrons that out of interest or curiosity approach him and usually leave a tip in his collection box.

Zakhele, our friend

I had wanted to write about him and realised that we had never taken a picture together, searching the web for Sakhele that we knew him as, and I found out I had spelt it wrong along with discovering his surname, he is Zakhele Popo and has been a performing living statue in the V&A Waterfront area since 2005. He is also studying to be an actor, to which the V&A have been sponsors.

There was one day he approached us outside the V&A mall, he was completely unrecognisable out of costume and makeup, a very friendly and lovely chap, one of us as we learnt before. We look forward to seeing him soon again and not forget to take a picture with him.

You can see a short interview with Zakhele on the V&A Waterfront Facebook page here.