London Lagos Chronicles Part 1

Instead of spending 6 hours watching movies on my last flight home, I decided to write and record the experience live and direct. Here's part one of my musings.

Separate the waters. I'm on the British Airways flight to Nigeria.  From the air on a clear sunny day with no clouds, the blue of the sky and of the sea merge into one on the horizon. All around is blue, no up and no down. Flying over England, the land below reminded me of sayings like the land is in the blood or the blood of England flows through your veins. It really did look like an organ with the thick lines of trees like arteries and veins and capillaries carrying thick green sap to England's people. And who are England's people?

The couple next to me are old. They sneeze and splutter and cough a lot. They cover their mouths when they do. Their hands seem ineffectual. Many germs escape I fear and mostly on to me but their politeness is appreciated. We are over France now. Just across the Channel and the landscape seems dryer, more arid and the pieces of the farmland jigsaw are smaller and browner. There also seem to be fewer trees or maybes it's because we're higher up. Some quite persistent turbulence. I am drinking Coke. I fear for your pages. The engine roar grows louder for a moment and then quietens down. I used the loo before I got on the plane but will it be enough? The flight has quite a few empty seats. Perhaps BA is not longer so popular, colonial mentality unwinding.

We're flying over what must be the Sahara Desert now. It's not the Sahara of shifting sands that is so popular in the imagination but the part of the desert that is craggy and brown, unending dryness to the front and the back of the plane. The ground is so unchanging it doesn't feel like we're moving at all. There are thin cracks in the land that look like the beds of where river and streams once flowed. We are leaving behind the crags now and moving on to the more archetypal Sahara. The cracks in the old Sahara look like dried up capillaries and veins, arid England. There are some depressions in the sand. They must be quite deep but from up here they look like pockmarks.

 There is a dark thin ribbon running along the ground for what must be miles. It looks like a grey tarmac road but it can't be. Once you have a fixed point to look from, you realise how fast we're moving. In the few seconds it took to write this, the strange road has already disappeared beyond craning distance. I will make a way in the desert God says in Isaiah, where rivers of living water will flow. There's a patch of sand a lot redder than the rest of the desert, like a birthmark. There are lines running through the desert, swirling and sweeping and it makes you almost think there must be a pattern, some cosmic Artist whose handwork you would be able to fully appreciate if only you could go a little higher. That's how they saw the Nazca lines. They flew.

Stay tuned for Part 2.

100th Post and the Case of the Reclining Chair

One massive deadline has been slain. I feel I can loosen my belt a bit. Incidentally, it is also my 100th post so I've been thinking of something epic and deep and funny to write about. I'll save it for my 1 year blog anniversary. Until then, I thought I should knack you the tory wey happen as I dey come from Nigeria back to obodoyinbo.

The flight was full. Nigerians it seems are becoming more affluent. So affluent that they now travel with their house girls as one woman announced to the whole plane. Her children were sitting together but the house girl had not been put with children. I mean, what is the point of taking a maid to England if she's not going to look after my children. And I can't look after my children because I'm in Upper Class. Did everyone hear that? I am travelling upper class and my maid has been separated from my children. Air hostess please sort this out so I can go back to upper class and stretch out on my fully reclining seat while all of you sit in economy and roast. Of course, no-one wanted to switch seats to let the children be re-united with their nanny. I don't know how that matter ended because I started eavesdropping on the phone conversation taking place next to me.

The woman had just 'flown in and flown out.' It was a 'quick one.' Just 'a few days.' You know how we big girls do. In fact, she wanted to go upper class but the plane was full so she had to settle for an economy ticket because she needed to get back to work. You know how we big girls do. If that's all that happened on the flight, it would have been enough gist for me. A little lighthearted showing off from my fellow Nigerians is always of interest. I settled down in my seat, hoping the six hours would go quickly. I was on my first movie when a woman in the row behind me, tapped my neighbour and said,

"Excuse me. Please move your seat forward. It's disturbing me."

My neighbour replied, "No sorry I cannot. The person in front of me has reclined their chair so I must recline mine."

I thought the matter had ended. I returned to my movie. Next thing, the woman punched my neighbour's chair until it was in an upright position. What followed was the most bizarre sequence of events. My neighbour would recline her chair fully. The woman would punch it upright. Recline. Punch. Recline. Punch. During this sequence phrases like,

"You're making me uncomfortable."

"It is my constitutional right to recline my chair."

"You cannot inconvenience me."

"I should have travelled upper class."

were thrown around. Eventually, air hostesses had to be called in.The uncomfortable lady could not see her screen, her knees were cramped.

"Then recline your own chair madam," one of the hostesses said reasonably.

"I do not want to recline my chair."

And that was the end of that line of persuasion. Another hostess tried a different tack.

"Madam, why don't you swap seats with your husband if you're so uncomfortable."

"I do not want my husband being inconvenienced by this woman."

At this point, my fellow Nigerians began to join the fray.

"Madam raise your chair small."

"No, she is not the one that should raise her chair. It is this woman that should push back her own."

"Why must we Nigerians always embarrass ourselves outside."

My people I laughed ehn. At first, I tried to hide it by covering my mouth but as the confra grew noisier my laughter increased in volume. Eventually a compromise was reached. My neighbour reclined her chair half way and the matter was closed. I returned to my movie with tears still in my eyes.

About an hour later, the inconvenienced passenger's husband decided to try his own luck. He too felt that the lady in front of him (also on my row) had reclined her chair too far back. He had also seen how successful his wife had been. So he tapped the lady and said, "Excuse me, your seat is too far back."

Her response was classic.

"Don't even start that nonsense."

And that ladies and gentlemen is how you shut up the passenger behind you when he/she tries to impinge on your constitutional right to fully recline your plane seat.

Why I'm Not Afraid of Flying Anymore

When I was younger, I loved flying. In fact, I loved the journey more than the destination. Neither London now could live up to the joys I experienced getting there. I am perhaps the only person I know, who loved the steamed mushiness of plane food, the dry air, the glamorous hostesses. Once, we got a surprise up grade to business class on the Belgian airline Sabena. It was perhaps one of the most beautiful memories of my childhood. Then, individual television screens had not reached economy, so to have a personal entertainment system, where you could rewind, pause, and fast forward at will, with a choice of over 50 films, with seats that reclined almost horizontally, with air hostesses offering you extra without you having to ask! It was the life.

As time progressed, flying began to lose its lustre for me. It must have been a gradual deglamorisation but looking back, the change seems stark. One flight, I was wishing England was more than a paltry six hours away, the next, I was counting down the seconds to landing. One flight, the air hostesses were the most sophisticated men and women who had ever been born, the next I was noticing varicose veins and the layers of make up that cracked in the dry air of the plane. Yet, the most pointed marker that my attitude towards flying had changed was that I began to take note of this thing called turbulence.

Thinking logically, there must have been turbulence when I flew as a child. It cannot be that the air has suddenly gotten rougher in the past six years or so. However, I have no recollection of any plane I entered before c 17 shuddering in the air. Then suddenly, one day, I was sitting in my seat, the plane gave a small heave to the left and my heart was beating at a frequency that was abnormal. Half an hour later, the plane dipped a little and again my heart was beating wildly. I was afraid. In a plane, one of my favourite places to be, I was afraid.

Why this sudden change? The truth is simple. I, Imachibundu Onuzo had discovered that I was going to die. You might say that it took me a rather long time to come to this conclusion so let me explain myself before your jump to derision. At about 5 or 6, I found out that everybody was going to die. This did not concern me to much. At about 10/11, I realised that my parents were going to die. Death had become a little more personal. The thought filled me with terror. I calculated how many years my parents could possibly live. I generously gave them I think 90 years but still that meant I would only be about 50 when they left. My mother came home one day to find me sitting on a bed, very still.

"What's the matter?" she asked.

"You're going to die," I said, bursting into tears.

"But I'm not ill," she said, perhaps a little alarmed.

"Not now. But you're going to die one day."

She started laughing. "Is that why you're crying? Everyone is going to die one day."

Everyone is going to die one day, the universal truth I had known since I was six but now at c. 11, it was hitting home that everyone included my parents, daddy, mummy. Then finally the penny dropped. Everyone included me. True, it took about six years for this final penny to drop. In the interim, I got pimples, lost some, made friends, lost some, made more, did my first weavon and then suddenly one day, I realised that I, Chibundu Onuzo was going to die. The thought terrified me and it made things that had hitherto been easy, very difficult. I was afraid of entering the tube because I was scared I would be in the same carriage as a terrorist and he would blow himself up and I would die. I was scared of passing between two buses because the driver of one might not see me and he would crush me and I would die. And of course, I was scared of flying because the pilot might fall asleep, the wind might break the plane, the plane engine might explode, so many things could go wrong, then the plane would crash and I would die.

I was a Christian when I was having these crippling fears and after they had eaten up all of my mental peace and quiet, I prayed. Very simply, I wanted to stop being afraid of death. God answered. Very simply I had to start believing in eternal life. Not in the half hearted, lip service, there's a heaven way, but in a very real, practical, heaven is where God is. If you believe the claims of Jesus and follow His teachings, then you have a taste of heaven inside you. When you die, you get the full experience. Shikenna.

Sometime c 18/19 years of age, I started believing this completely again. It's made life a lot easier. I can get on the tube without having palpitations. I can enter a plane. I can eat spicy food. The way I see it, when death comes, however it comes, my spirit will be unzipped from its body suit and fly back to God.

P.S

I went to Houston and Atlanta while I was in America. Now I am back in the motherland. More on that later.