Clear and present Chaos

After the first weekend. 11.01.2010
Okay-day 3 and my first day at work-there is no internet or email, or a sketch pad (A3 photostat paper is all there is and will do) -nor any work for that matter-but the year is only but a puppy.
The weekend was more or less okay as the survival instinct kicks in and I revert to my original animal state. Lets start with Friday night…
Flight on Arik was safe with one Whitey and one local bloke in the snakepit and Lagos airport, much smaller than I thought, was more or less a breeze through immigration and customs and I was out of the building in a few minutes-walking into the outside is akin to walking into a sauna- to have a fag and wait for W, a colleague who came back with me, to be released by immigration. I mean-are you serious-he travelled with an expired visa. So they arrested his passport, rightly so and released him to go.
I meet my future driver, Adams and we introduce ourselves. Him : “You are welcome”-the general term for Howzit in Nigeria…we drag my 67kg’s of luggage into the boot and get accosted by several men in various dashing and immaculate uniforms and a cripple for dash. Adams says “No”-they say “Next time”…Same old, same old.
And head off into the chaos that is Lagos.
I’m not going to waste your time and talk about what you already know-except, it is worse. Attempted Kamikaze all around, a lick of paint front, back, sides and all four corners-but nobody died! Well, not for the next 30 minutes while I get whizzed through the landscape-how would I descibe this aptly; me, a bee, African no doubt, in a rabied hive perhaps. There are sooo many people! A sea of humanity in among driving cars, busses, motorbikes. They say, you can leave your home naked in the morning and arrive fully clothed, shod, shaved and groomed, watered and fed at work. Anything at all gets sold in the traffic. Lots of unrecognisable car wrecks, broken concrete and mounds of rubble mixed with rubbish, half finished buildings, derelict buildings and more rubbish everywhere. The locals are cocky, to say the least-confident, fearless, resourceful-African. Thankfully, there are hardly any animals, except for the colourful lizards in the most stunning orange and blue with a lick of white-little clowns. No, you can’t be a sissie in Africa…
One strange thing-
Coming from SA we are used to incredibly bright, sunny days with everything in hyper focus. Here, it’s semi dark in comparison, misty, murky, polluted, with an odd yellow tinge to everything, even the sky is a dirty yellow. I’m told it’s the Hamattan desert wind blowing in from the Sahara. For Africa I see little colour-everything is greyish, greige-brown with the exception of a myriad of yellow busses.
We arrive ‘home’. I’m in one of 2 units upstairs-3 meter high gate off the street (in brown) directly behing the Federal Secretariat which is several stories high and was vacated by the government when the seat moved to Abuja, into a broken concrete courtyard, 4 apartments in the building in an okay state of repair. We park and I get out of the beautifully airconned car and am immediately conned out of air outdoors-sweltering, humid hell. I am damp and everything sticks.
I meet my steward, stewardess really, Janet who greets me with the standard “You are welcome” and proceeds dragging my luggage in 2 parts of well over 30 kg’s (elegantly on her head, no prob) up a pitchblack and cooking stairwell to my front door.
Voila-I’m in my own personal interior décor hell-everything is brown and magnolia. And everything is like what I think it must have been like in SA 50 years ago. Although it’s fairly clean and has a beige tile floor. It’s a open plan dining/lounge effort with a mega size flatscreen on the wall. The dining chairs are covered in a quasi African print which I could have lived with ordinarily, matching the lounge suite in, you guessed it, beige and brown. The walls have the colour of the sky outside. From there one enters the bedroom on one side and the mini kitchen, no cats to swing here, on the other. Bloody hell, it’s boiling in here! I hunt for AC’s, turn both of them on it’s coldest setting. Haven’t mentioned the curtains, yes beige with brown drapes made out of some sort of negligee material. And the dining room 6-seater has a lace curtain on it.
From the main bedroom with a supersize double bed, hard enough to double as a wall, covered in frigging brown and beige roses (I think I’m beginning to get a neurosis) you find the en-suite at the end and alas, not all is lost in the colour department, enter into an underwater world of sickening blue, Dolphin border et all. Sort of underwater torture.
Image the ubiquitous Avocado Bathroom Suite in blue…Too much blue!!!! Omigod…
I retreat to beige and brown and realise I need a clean-up, drenched is an understatement. But first for some basic sustenance with Adams to the Goodies Supermarket around the corner. I quickly run through the shelves and grab some bread (SWEET), cheese (PRETTY GOOD) , cooldrink, Dettol, Milton’s etc and find a bottle of gin at a surprisingly cheap rate-salvation. Everything else is hideously expensive and the little trip sets me back about R 1000. Listen, there is nothing there I normally eat, okay?
Home and bath time. By the time I get to run the bath, boil the water in the geyser for at least 1 hour, then add cold and 5 capfulls of Dettol, I’ve had about 20 powercuts-I kid you not. It’s all very well, but everytime the power konks out you get up and put the AC on again-it does not restart automatically and of course you stumble around in the dark, cigarette lighter in hand. Needless to say, I gave up on TV some time ago. I’ve brought my own sheets, coverlet and neckroll and rip the flower linen off the bed, exchange it for my crisp white 500 threadcount cotton sheets. Instant bliss. And after 2 stiff gin and juice fall into a deep exhausted sleep.
Sarturday morning –I’ll come back to this.
One last thing-when I came to work on Monday morning after my weekend spent in solitary confinement in the beige and brown, I got to work and found myself in the same depressing, yes, you’re right, beige and brown office interiors. FCOL!!!