Coronavirus streets in Manchester - LXIII

Sights and sounds very natural

On my exercise walks in Manchester, there are things that I see that sometimes would be considered insignificant and yet together creates an experience. I can be attentive with a lot of spatial awareness, and I am not distracted by looking on my mobile phone or listening to music through headphones as many people I see are, that there are times we almost bump into each other because of their careless use of public spaces totally not considering the fact that personal and public safety is a function of everyone acting with respect to others around them.

That a man would pull up that early in the morning at the Sikh Gurdwara in his Bentley coupe without the accoutrements of Sikhism but in a suit and tie seemed quite strange even as there was no one at the gate to let him in. I did not wait to see what he would do next; I had my pace and cadence to keep.

Abandoned to canine distress

We are however dogged by different levels of irresponsibility when it comes to dogs being taken for walks. There are a few kept on a leash and even one menacing one I have met a few times that is muzzled. Many dog owners do not seem to be aware that other people they meet in public spaces might be terrified of dogs and so, they should have better control of their animals.

One was pretending to throw a stick for the dog to fetch, the dog deceived ran forward and then realised it had been tricked and few times. Just as I noted that was rather bad behaviour on the part of the dog dad, the dog appeared to race up towards me gnarling with rage and then backed off.

Somewhere else, a couple let their dog run up ahead and it fouled up a garden, but as the dog was out of their sight, they would not have known to clean up after their dog. It is likely, they do not bother to do that in any case. I do see many instances of this irresponsible behaviour and lest the owners set their dogs on you, you find that you just move on disconcerted by that observation.

A dog amuck

However, it was this that was most terrifying, I was on my home straight from the park, a dog digging around in the grass but off the leash some 20 metres away, saw me coming and immediately ran up to me, jumping and clawing at my leg. I have no idea why; I was not a threat in any way. Obviously, the owner called it off and apologised. But if she had been paying any attention to her dog, this would never have happened, and I am sure it is not the first time.

Then I remember the more responsible dog owners, such that I know the names of the dogs but not that of their owners, like Tilly that has quite an independent and individualistic personality, she is never on a leash and quite well behaved. Her housemate has never been let go of, for all the time that I have seen him in the park. George is a fluffy St Bernard, friendly and likeable, you just want to pat him anytime you see him.

I probably should wear shinpads in anticipation of canine aggression, it could be managed, if the owners were a little more responsible.

Walking the time tunnel of gay youth

To London without a cat

London was a destination over the weekend by reason of an error in my hotel booking last month where I had inadvertently made a non-refundable hotel booking for March when I was planning for February. A situation not helped by the fact that the first 28 days in a non-leap year are the same for both months, you have to be alert, or you will be caught out.

It reminds me of a time when I booked a flight to depart in the third week of the month and the website automatically presented the next month for my return that when I finally saw what I had booked, I was going away for 5 weeks instead of a week. Were it not that I had booked a ticket that allowed for alterations, I would have been paying through the nose to sort it out.

Shorn a sandal to scandal

Now, I only discovered I had booked a hotel for the wrong dates when I was checking for the address to give a black cab at London Euston Station, it came up that my booking was in 28 days. There wasn’t much I could do than to immediately make another booking for that weekend whilst planning that I would return to London in 4 weeks.

As I told the black cab driver, I was going to Dolphin Square, he did not need giving any directions, it was until later that I realised I was going to a place of political scandal and notoriety, famous for the Profumo Affair amongst other notable controversies. If it once housed 70 MPs and 10 Lords, you only needed to speak the language of the walls to hear some intriguing and hair-raising stories. O was not planning on contributing to the list of ignominy.

The apartment was quite well-proportioned, with sash windows, no air conditioning, or modern conveniences as a dishwasher or a washing machine. There were flat-screen televisions in the living room and the bedroom, ample storage space, but wireless internet came on one voucher for one device. I had to tether other devices off my mobile phone. It was at best a bachelor’s pad on the fifth floor.

To memories of youth wasted

Its proximity to the north bank of the Thames made for an easy route for my walking exercises as I walked up Grosvenor Road then crossed Chelsea Bridge to the south bank onto the Thames path to Battersea Power Station to veer off onto Nine Elms Lane, past the US Embassy and to my left I was surprised that despite all the new developments there were parts of an old gay haunt still standing strong.

About 30 years ago, on Sundays, we attended the Royal Vauxhall Tavern to watch drag acts including Lily Savage, until the pub closed at 2:00 PM and off we went to Market Tavern for the afternoon, a darkened venue that served a Sunday lunch of chilli-con-carne and rice whilst we danced away until the pubs opened again at 7:00 PM. Whilst the Market Tavern has long since gone, the memories did come flooding back.

To memories of lives wasted

Then I walked past Vauxhall and the MI6 headquarters where for the first time, I did see someone, a lady, leave the building. You always had the feeling the workers there secreted themselves into the building by some secret passageway, but that would be a little farfetched, it is people like us who work there, not an alien lifeform.

Walking on toward the St Thomas’ Hospital where the wall facing the Thames hosts the National COVID Memorial Wall and a veritable sign of government ineptitude in the handling of this pandemic that has to date claimed 162,738 lives.

I took my turn back over the Westminster Bridge, by the Houses of Parliament at Westminster Palace, the scaffolding was now taken off the bell tower of Big Ben and wended my way to my accommodations to start my day of social events. My 10,000 steps done and a bit more too.

A review of language tutoring in my experience

Speaking Yorùbá with pride

Watching a video clip on Facebook and later shared on WhatsApp from the BBC Yorùbá website of the Portuguese-born Tiago Isola speaking Yorùbá had me thinking of my experience language teaching through the years. [BBC Yoruba: Tiago Isola, akẹ́kọ̀ọ́ Fásitì Ibadan]

Tiago Isola arrived in Nigeria with his mother who was part of a cultural exchange programme with the Oyo kingdom at the age of 10 and has immersed himself in the Yorùbá culture, language, foods, and practices, he appears quite somewhat integrated, and his command of the language is quite well above average. He speaks with pride of his knowledge of Yorùbá and I am sure from his international travel would be a good Portuguese and English speaker too.

I was a foreigner too

I was born an Englishman with a Brummie accent from the West Midlands, my first language and mother tongue is English, and whilst there was some Yorùbá spoken at home, it was never part of our regular conversation, My parents conversed more with me in English, though less so with my siblings. My mother is a polyglot with an ear for languages, my father, much less so, struggled with even Pidgin English, it just did not sound right when he tried.

On returning to Nigeria, we lived in the north for just over 6 years, in that time, between Kaduna and Jos, I picked up some Hausa, read a bit of it, even attended the ECWA church where Hausa was the spoken language of instruction. I still get by on what I learnt in the 1970s, with the occasional opportunity to practice when I meet Hausa speakers.

Getting serious with Yorùbá

It was when I was 10 years old that my mother acquired Yorùbá primer Aláwiyé (To speak to comprehend) books to practice the fundamentals of the language. However, it did not get immersive until I had a psycho-paranormal encounter for which the apparent remedy was reading the Psalms multiple times to cups, bottles, or buckets of water from which I drank or bathed to ward off evil spirits. She compelled me to read the Psalms in Yorùbá, it cultivated my proficiency in the language.

However, before that, I had no serious language teaching apart from standard English reading, spelling, comprehension, and composition lessons. In the fifth class in primary school, I found a basic French-language book in the cupboards and began to teach myself French, not in the pronunciation as I had no guidance, but in knowing the words and the meanings, I did not get very far.

Remembering sadistic language tutors

At secondary school, apart from the English teachers, the other language teachers were basically sadists, quick to punish but slow to impart or enthuse us in their subjects. Mrs Odutuyo could well have been high up in the ranks of the Spanish Inquisition, she conjured up such inhumane punishments, the thought of what she got some of us to do still makes me quiver. She taught Yorùbá and it was a chore. I never passed a Yorùbá test in school, but I mastered the use of accents and diacritical marks, which has served me well until today.

In Form 2, Mr Okonji was the French teacher on secondment from the National Youth Corp Service, French could have been a joy to learn, but he had no wherewithal to make it accessible. What he mastered to the level of genius or ogre, if you prefer was the wielding of the birching cane, going through the classes urging ‘Study-Study’ telling us to lie forward onto our desks whilst he carved welts on our backs.

I always got a language waiver

When we came to Form 3 and we had a better French teacher in class, we were nowhere useful enough for her to lift to any standard, we just trundled through the year expectant of the moment to drop the subject, which I did in Form 4, apart from the compulsory English language that I usually scraped a pass on, as I did not exert myself academically to achieve distinctions, and did the bare minimum that was asked for, I have never had to prove my standard of English as I am a native speaker.

After secondary school, we had some formal English lectures as part of our engineering courses, I always thought a good command of language was essential to being able to take projects from idea, through conception and implementation, to a conclusion and full successful commissioning. I have always priced the need for quality communication, and it has helped me through my career. As for the lecturers, they were poor bordering on abysmal, one took to sesquipedalianism for no other purpose than to impress than educate, I was far from taken by the superfluity of vacuity.

Contrasting language tutors

It was not until 1999 that I took another formal language class and that was German, the lady teaching us in a further education school carried us along and of all my language teachers, she was the very best. Every waking hour, I was playing back German language tapes, brushing up my German and looking for opportunities to use it. At that point, I was also looking to emigrate to live and work in Germany, I ended up in the Netherlands instead.

I enrolled on a Dutch learning programme organised by my employer, and it probably was the worst decision many of us made. The teacher whose business was predicated on providing language classes to blue-chip companies got comfortable with those who had a better grasp of the language and left the rest of us behind, we became disillusioned and dropped out of the class. To my shame, I ended up living in the Netherlands as an Englishman abroad, barely able to get by in Dutch, though not a complete novice.

I am for more language learning

It is likely, I would find myself learning Afrikaans and Ndebele, it would be down to first my enthusiasm and then the quality and ability of the teacher to impart the knowledge in a beneficial way. When I reflect on my use of language, I am quite proud of my mastery of the Yorùbá language, it is challenging at times, but it is one of the richest modes of expression.

I can also be quite purist in speaking Yorùbá, preferring to speak entirely in one language rather than mixing languages. I converse more with my parents in Yorùbá now, however, especially when it comes to my father, English presents the essential mode of address when the power distance index requires the delivery of some hard and difficult things that genuflection in Yorùbá tradition would frown upon.

As Tiago Isola has suggested, we need to give our children a good grounding in the mastery of all languages spoken, giving just as many resources to Yorùbá as we do the command of the English language. On this, I would say, we need to speak Yoruba beyond the rudimentary street talk, with the deployment of fables, poetry, proverbs, and sayings, finding innovative and expressive ways to promote the language before it falls into disuse out of negligence.

Tiago Isola’s Instagram page

Beyond queer theory to the experience of living

Exploring our humanity and expression

Reading of the death of Professor Leo Bersani which occurred a few weeks ago at the age of 90, got me thinking of an area of study defined as queer theory that I have not before explored, yet on perusal suggests many of us of a homosexual persuasion might have lived. To codify the lives of homosexuals and sexuality in academic terms definitely makes for an essential area of research. [Advocate: Leo Bersani, Author on Gay Identity, Dies at Age 90]

Only recently, I was reading up on Anti-LGBT rhetoric which to many extents has been to those of the LGBT persuasion lived rather than rhetorical, in discrimination, in ostracism, in queer bashing, sometimes resulting in death, in legislation that delegitimises and dehumanises our person in the pursuit of some nebulous family or culturally based ideal that seeks to set us apart for repudiation and castigation.

The corruption of conformity

Obviously, at once in our suffering and then in our understanding, we are caught in a situation where our difference from heteronormative structures set us up in conflict with family and relations, in community and society as we seek to have a human voice to exist in a humanity is more diverse than the conformity that is expected of us.

For instance, sex to me has always been utilitarian for the simple reason that my first experience of it was from the age of 7, the innocence I lost has had consequences and it would not have mattered whether I grew up for be heterosexual, bisexual, or homosexual, once that childhood naivety was given the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, my eyes, as much as anyone else exposed to child sexual abuse were opened.

What at first seemed coercive became immersive and the pleasure it provided was natural and untainted by philosophy, religion, or morality. Sadly, the criminality of such was rarely prosecuted, rather, it was hushed up in shame and embarrassment with the hope that the child would outgrow the memory of it. They never do.

Understanding how different we are

Then within the conflicts of appreciating, understanding, and accepting one’s sexuality against the requirements to present as ‘normal’, in that one should subsume sexuality for the heteronormative and fulfil all the necessities of such.

This morning, on my walking exercise, I thought about the many males from adolescence with whom sexual relations have been explored who now deploy their heterosexuality in marriage, procreation, and the profession of faith and creed that supports that existence in their collective amnesia of the past. Grandfathers they are today even as some preach the gospel in various forms.

Yet, as Leo Barsani wrote in his 1987 essay, titled, Is the Rectum a Grave? he lambasted as quoted in the Advocate article referenced above, “the tendency among some gay activists to respond to AIDS by downplaying their sexuality and emphasizing the need to replicate bourgeois heterosexuality.” The point, we are not heterosexual, we have never been, we have to define ourselves as who we are, not in the context of others who have no idea of our lives. [Amazon: Is the Rectum a Grave?: and Other Essays] Ordered today.

Having sex without angst

In that is the tendency to rail against the apparent promiscuity of homosexuals, but fundamentally, once we begin to understand that homosexuals are not governed by heterosexual constructs and norms, we can also deconstruct the viewpoint of seeing homosexuals only through the lens of sex, lifestyle, and inclination, for we are just as valid an expression of our humanity that has existed from the beginning of humankind.

What seems to dog the homosexual is the tendency to want to ape the heteronormative, and so we read personals that include straight-acting, moralising the concept of monogamy, even though polygamy has defined many human relationship until it was morally and legally constrained by recent Judeo-Christian hegemonies seeking to decide the use and utility of sex, whilst removing from public knowledge the pleasure and enjoyment of sex.

We are schooled to think sex as nothing to derive any stimulation or pleasure from except for the sake of procreation, yet, in our private places, we all know that sex is considerably more pleasurable than we are told it is not.

A remembrance and celebration of lives

Amongst us homosexuals, the enjoyment of sex cut a swathe of death in our population with AIDS for almost 20 years when we lost men in their prime at never nearly 40 into the mid-1990s and the AIDS Memorial Instagram page speaks of lives of men who we have refused to forget, for What Is Remembered Lives. We stopped enjoying sex, seized by fear and loathing, exacerbated by bad faith actors depicting a human disaster as divine wrath. Yet, it is human progress and advancements in medicine has contained this epidemic.

I lost a partner and many friends, I mourn some still, though for the society I lived in, I mourned alone, because until 1995 we had no effective long-term treatment and therapies for HIV. I also was touched by the scourge of AIDS, I survived, and I am grateful for the gift of life.

My AIDS encounter has however not diminished my appetite for sex, for it is essentially part of human nature and it is only those in denial that would suggest we do not have that need. Our world presents us with exploration along with some caution and care, but to become puritanical about sex is to censure human expression.

We were never the same in outlook

When for the heterosexual, it might define uniquely lifelong bonds, it would for the homosexual be once of tryst to which you do not need to attach any emotion. It is very possible to separate the act which is practically animal expression from the higher human state of intelligence. That ability to compartmentalise the functions of the physical, the body, the mind, and the heart, devoting the right attention to the fleeting from the significant is something that probably takes the mimicry of the heterosexuality out of homosexuality.

It does not mean we do not understand commitment, it is just not predicated on sex, either through objectification or deification, its utilitarian function is just that, and where intimacy between partners is involved, there is a totally different dynamic at play than when there are liaisons with strangers.

Through generations, we have been on the margins of society, the only thing we have ever asked for is not to be persecuted or prosecuted, to be able to live our lives equally as part of our diverse humanity, contributing to the advancement of our civilisation all around the world.

For that, we can be grateful for the likes of Leo Barsani, Paul-Michel Foucault, James Baldwin, and many more helping the discourse about sexuality and its full expression.

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Coronavirus streets in Manchester - LXII

No power of witchcraft

I have always been fascinated by the whole charade behind identifying that someone is a witch and the means by which the suspected are interrogated and forced to confess under the pain of death that they practice witchcraft, after which they were almost always put to death in the most horrific and gruesome manner.

It makes you wonder how someone who apparently has mastery of the dark arts can just at accusation and threat of untrammelled menace would suddenly be helpless and incapable of defending themselves. Their accusers having nothing but power and manufactured conviction that they are right, and they can rid the community of evil by the propensity of wickedness.

They can’t be that helpless

In my view, if anyone were indeed a witch, whether child or adult, the very least one should expect is something magical challenging the faculties like just disappearing from the midst of their accusers at the minimum or if they were that inclined, they put the fear of real witchcraft in the hearts of the mob usually led by religious or community leaders seeking to bolster their political status by finding unusual and individualistic people to victimise.

Just imagine, a witch in the heat of being pursued smiting one of two of her attackers with blindness or causing fire to consume one of them. For instance, someone with the mastery of martial art when cornered would hardly crumble into a heap of helplessness, they’ll fight back probably breaking a few bones even if they eventually get captured. This is just a matter of muscle in the physical, not to talk of the metaphysical and paranormal that is associated with witchcraft. I am not convinced many of those accused had any idea of what witchcraft was about, they have just been helpless victims of tyranny.

Strange places in Manchester

Which got me thinking of another fascinating setup, in the back streets of the parish of Manchester into the Hundred of Salford (I love old English placenames) as I walked from Ancoats to the centre of Cheetham to do some shopping for ethnic goods. Avoiding the main roads apart from when I had to cross them, I was soon cutting through St Michael's Flags and Angel Meadow Park into NOMA (North Manchester) where architectural monstrosities sway in the skyline.

A rather secluded part of old industrial Manchester had a working brewery taking me back to my teenage years when my first job was in a brewery, along with clothing manufacturer factories bearing names of South Asian provenance and let one not suggest they might be sweatshops. Then I was in Strangeways (it has history), dominated by Her Majesty’s Prison where twice in the week past, I saw someone drive through the gates in a Mercedes Benz car, they must be paying good money there as it was just too early in the morning for the person to be a visitor. Anyway, I look away.

A plague of drones

Up on the walls, were surveillance cameras with screen wipers and then signs indicating this was a ‘no drone’ zone. I guess with one drone, that might present a helpless witch scenario. I can remember which of the recent Olympic games opening ceremonies I watched where thousands of drones were deployed in a light show. My vivid imagination considering a swarm of drones hovering over a prison controlled from so far away that the drones were using Artificial Intelligence to maintain proximity with each other and if one or a few were taken out, they massed into new attacking formations.

This again, not even to deliver contraband to the prison but to get everyone agitated. Who would do such a thing? This is more the stuff of thriller films than anything else. That was my though process on the matter of witchcraft, one would expect a witch to summon the equivalent of an amazing mixed martial arts practitioner controlling with the mind a swarm of drones able to defend themselves from immediate physical danger and create enough of a distraction to escape capture.

Now, where was I? Walking up New Bury Road to get to Great Cheetham East Street. Suffice it to say, apart from the lady at the checkout in the shop, I was the only other one wearing a face mask.

My city living as it happens as nothing happens

Me, myself, and I here

Sometimes, I wonder what separates me from Miss Havisham apart from the promise of a wedding that still endures to be fulfilled in due time and having not stopped any of the clocks in my apartment. Much as I would not leave anything to decay in here, my window blinds are rarely pulled up to let in natural light, there has been a fire, but not here, I quite well can exist in the isolated calm of a hermit, not interacting with the outside world for as long as I want.

None of that should read as being an antisocial being, I love the company of people to converse with, probably enjoy dinner or going out, indeed, I do chat to strangers, yet I am anything but an extrovert, I do not have the mental energy for crowds or big parties, I would soon be sat in a corner alone than be found chatting away network and glad-handing.

Ashes and debris

This morning, as I stepped out for my walking exercise, I saw some debris outside one of the blocks in our village, it is a good three blocks away with a cul-de-sac separating us, but we share the same vast subterranean carpark and the communal gym accessed with registered secure processes. It all looked charred as if consumed with fire and I wondered why anyone would set their rubbish on fire outside the block.

Later, some workmen had arrived to shovel away the debris and I was tempted to ask questions, I did not. It wasn’t till later as I stepped out for some shopping that I met my neighbour in the foyer, and she asked if I knew about the fire in that block. Fire? Yes, there was a fire, a huge one at that with flames shooting out of the roof of the block on the top floor of a 6-storey apartment block, with the main roads in the area cordoned off.

Stranger lights in the nights

It so happens, I never stepped out yesterday, at least not from the afternoon of two days before, there was commotion, and 5 fire engines I was told, and no one even reported the incident on our village Facebook page. This was the same block in which just about a year ago, a human and sex trafficking ring was busted. I cannot find any information about the fire in our city newspaper, like it has been hushed up.

Then I was told there was another fire across the street a few weeks ago that I should have been able to observe from the windows of my side of the apartment complex. There was? I did not ask when exactly, as it might have coincided with when I was away, but I knew nothing of it. It would suggest I am probably not the best candidate for curtain twitching or the Neighbourhood Watch. Much as some might attest to be powers of observation, I have not applied them with any distinction to my immediate environment.

As it happens as nothing happens

Once again, I have been lulled into the apparently deceptive uneventfulness of genteel city living where nothing of note happens and that gives cover to many things you would never imagine happening around here. For a serial sex offender lived nearby, as was the sex trafficking ring, and the Manchester bomber of May 2017 was on the outer side of our village apartment block complex.

Blog - City living in the deception of the genteel

Do I need to get on a nosey parker introductory course or is my penchant for presumably minding my own business in a very English way getting in the way of basic curiosity and awareness? That is something to think about. I might need to start with pulling up my Venetian blinds and I doubt I am ready for that radical change in living arrangements.

Thought Picnic: Life in the times of chicken

Life creates us as we create life

There is a part of me that I probably do not acknowledge that much that some people see in me as being a survivor for which I am thankful and grateful for the gift of life and living. For a long time, what has become the story of my life, mostly unplanned but navigated in the baby steps and the giant leaps that on reflection appears accomplished; everything has just been life and I cannot live another life but my own.

That I have by the accident of events I have lived through sometimes become a shoulder to lean on is not a role I have sought, but it is one to which I hope to deploy my full humanity, consideration, and attention, because for anyone met with infirmity or adversity, things are tough, and perspective is difficult to obtain when you are in the midst of an ordeal.

In the life of chicken

The way reality and realisation begin to materialise sometimes hits us by surprise if not shock that we are probably not as young, as agile, as composed, as strong, as prepared, or as ready to perform as we once were able to. We are dogged by our history robbing us of a moderated present with a difficulty in squaring up how consequential things are that recovery will take time and pace may never return to Peak Me.

A friend opined, “I should accept the spring chicken is more of an old rooster now.” To which I responded thankful for the frame of mind that allows that kind of inspiration in the propinquity of the exchange. “One thing, it is the rooster that announces the breaking of the dawn, that the night and the nightmare is over.” When the spring chicken has matured into an old rooster, the time of spring chicken things and living in danger is over, as the rooster heralds a time of living with peace.

I pray that for everyone going through a storm in their lives, the calm would soon come to give them comfort, safety, succour, and security that they can begin to cherish the little moments, start living from good to better, day to day, and see the days tally into a story of once not being able to see beyond the night to having experienced on the whole, a wonderful life.