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.

Thought Picnic: My regret at doing nothing about that love

I was crazy in love

Yesterday would have been Chris’ 44^th birthday, the 8^th since he passed away unexpectedly in London in mid-October 2009, just a few days after I was discharged from the hospital.

I loved him and yet could not stand him because he had this hold on my heart that left me too crazy to think with my head, I was just crazy for him.

Then again, I was afraid, I was unsure and I was hesitant. We were conducting a difficult long-distance relationship that had us rendezvous everywhere abroad but at home, except for the first time when he visited me in Amsterdam. I should have had him come over to live with me in Amsterdam, with all the sacrifices it would entail.

He was a crazy man

There is nothing I can do about it now but work with hindsight and hope that I have learnt some hard lessons about love, commitment and following your heart. Chris ticked all the boxes of looks and passion, great fun, wicked sense of humour but with an evil streak that sometimes made me wonder how I got involved in this crazy game.

There was a past that haunted him that sometimes clouded his better judgement, I could make allowances for a lot, but there were times I needed to escape from it all to give my heart a time for recovery.

This was crazy news

One such time was at the time when I fell ill, I did not respond to any of his messages, I was hurting too much, in the pain of love and indifference, his calls and questions in messages left unanswered and then I was in hospital without telling him I was gravely ill. He probably was gravely ill too, I did not know.

It was two weeks after I was discharged from hospital that I sent him a message, being sorry for not keeping in touch and how much as I love and miss him, we just had this crazy, crazy relationship. When I received a response, my heart skipped a beat, the first sentence literally killed me.

His housemate responding informed me that Chris had died just two weeks before of renal failure, the love I thought I had, had gone.

The message of the massage

Rubbing and drubbing

For years, I have endured and suffered a niggling pain in my right shoulder blade, it has not been too uncomfortable, but I only had to swing my arm in a certain way to feel that sudden stab of pain that made you either gasp or groan.

However, recently, my waking moments have had that pain arrest my attention that no amount of posturing and stretching alleviated, I was beginning to accept it as a norm.

Last night, I decided to do something about it and I went online searching for locations offering deep tissue massages, but after reading up a bit about it and conjuring in my mind the idea that a 'no-hands massage' meant I could be both be elbowed and kneed in certain delicate places, I decided on the more common Swedish massage.

That muscle from another

I have had massages before, but I was more interested in the professional angle of things rather than those that purported to offer a happy ending. I settled on one that offered sports massages called My Sports Injury with the view they’ll probably know more about muscles and what to do.

Making an early appointment for 8:30 AM and paying through PayPal, I made for the clinic and met up with Ray, the therapist who was outside and probably waiting for me. Friendly and nice, he introduced himself and took me into the basement gym that had the therapy rooms.

I filled in a few forms about my health and regions where I was having muscular pain, the particular muscle I was told was the rhomboid muscles that connect up to the upper end of the vertebral column.

Stripping down to my underwear with my socks kept on, I lay face down on the massage table and as he moved my arms, I felt that stab of pain again, he provided some additional support for my arms and began to rub and knead my muscles.

Pins and needles

In our earlier consultation, he talked about acupuncture and I related an experience when I accompanied a friend to see his acupuncturist. Each needle being tapped into his back was exaggerated in my mind as a re-enactment of the crucifixion, big crooked nails being hammered into flesh with humongous mallets. That impression kept me off accessing this ancient Chinese therapy for my muscle pains.

He worked my shoulders down to my lower back before he suggested acupuncture to ease the tension in my upper back, he assured me it would not be painful. Meanwhile, he had also done some deep tissue massage that did not involve being kneed or elbowed, I was beginning to trust him.

So, I let him put in the first needle, a bit of a tinge, but no pain, and before I knew it there were 6 needles in my upper back. Then working on my lower back, he tapped in another few needles into my back and at final count, there were 16 needles in my body. All the while, we were talking about life experiences and how to approach issues, he was a listening and interested therapist.

Cups and mats

I had pictures taken of the needles because being subjected to the acupuncture therapy has never been something I would have considered ever, and here I was the literal semblance of a voodoo doll, only that I was both the doll and the target. Working down to my legs, he introduced suction cups to my calves before removing the needles, offering a final rubdown and then a few exercises on a floor mat.

One must always be open to new experiences and this was both relaxing and rejuvenating, Ray was a consummate professional with an easy and persuasively encouraging bedside manner that eased me into situations I would never have countenanced. I’ll be back for another session, a massage done by those who know what they are doing, is good. The message in the massage is, muscle, shape up.

I would never have thought I would allow this to happen to me, acupuncture, that is a story for a blog to be written later. I feel amazingly good after it. Ray was exceptional, professional and just the best.

A post shared by Akin Akintayo (@instaforakin) on May 27, 2017 at 2:15am PDT

 

My HAND on my head - Memory Screening Tests

Now I Remember

‘It loves the brain.’ He said. In fact, there are many things that go after brain for all sorts of reasons my lack of medical expertise cannot explain.

Quite particularly, sexually transmitted diseases, everything appears to happen down there and once contracted they want to travel to the very top and take control. Nature seems to have beings in the ascendancy.

I had an appointment at the hospital on Thursday, if I can remember clearly, I thought it was in relation to the abdominal scan I had just two Saturdays ago since the letters literally arrived at the same time.

I took an Uber cab for the 9:50 AM appointment which was on a surge pricing and we made it on time without any of the stress of the appointment before the last. Ushered in by the staff, rather than stand on weighing scales I sat on one and it appears with clothes on, I am dropping kilogrammes.

Correct in my assessment

My blood pressure also read within the limits of acceptable for the first time in 4 visits which was really good news for me. I was called in to see the consultant where I was told it was my appointment for the HAND clinic or the Memory Screening Clinic.

Now, for a person above 50, I needed to be sure that certain elements of my activities in forgetfulness, responsiveness and anxiety which I somewhat have found compensatory mechanisms for were either age degenerative or as a result of my long-term condition.

The session which lasted almost 90 minutes started with filling in a Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale form that pointed towards elements of anxiety that needed a bit more analysis. However, since this was our first clinical assessment, much was dependent on what I subjectively thought were issues bothering me.

Suffice it to say, I completed that form and even annotated a grammatical correction to give a sentence a finality in context rather than the open-ended inquiry. Then I was passed the 'Questionnaire for HAND clinic' that required long form writing and I probably gave a detailed treatise to about 20 or so questions.

Convention is indistinct

After that, a number of cognitive tests were performed on transcription, memory, recall, acuity, reflexes, alertness and so on.

One such activity required drawing a clock with time 10 minutes past eleven, I went for a square face with 4 cardinal point numbers and then the minute and hour hands. A majority, I was told, draw a round clock face with all the numbers in before putting in the hands. Minimalist and functional works for me and that was some reflection on the kind of personality that I am.

I was good with the numbers tests, but I was never able to recall the words in the right order, even though every time I got all the words right and then after ten minutes of other activities. The reflexes seem to be fine and it would appear I have good cognitive skills that fall well within the standard deviation of normal.

Remember to smile

It would take a couple of tests over years to determine if there is any degeneration and whether through the results of the blood tests there are other noticeable indicators that can be controlled with reference to my thyroid, my liver, blood counts or folate functions. I might be in for a computed tomography scan of my brain – awesome, but will not be keen on a lumbar puncture for the drawing of cerebral spinal fluids.

By process of assessment, analysis and elimination, it is good to have this kind of activity in professional hands than leave it to my personal perception and watch some deterioration as a matter of course. It would appear there is not much to be concerned about, but I can in future request clinical psychiatric assistance if needed.

The ‘It’ at the beginning of the blog is HIV and the HAND is HIV-Associated Neurocognitive Disorder which in my 15^th year since diagnosis, though on my 8^th year of treatment seems to be well managed with an improving CD4 count and an undetectable viral load. All other indicators from my blood tests of two months ago seem fine too. I guess I remembered most of what happened and kept some back for privacy.

Everyone with HIV should consider attending a HAND clinic and at least every 12 to 24 months thereafter.