EPISODE 3: The Quest for Money + News Roundup

One of the first tips I picked up when I got to the UK is that your pocket is your very best friend. Firstly, to combat and beat nature, you need to always put your hands in your pocket. Even if you are wearing gloves, it gets so cold that hell fire actually begins to look like a good holiday resort. You actually start to fantasize about using a long fork to eat noodles with Satan and his minions if you are trapped out on a cold night. Simple things you take for granted suddenly become extremely difficult. For example, you can’t pick up a call, you can’t tie your shoe laces, write, type, button your shirt, remove money from your wallet and I actually dare you to send a text message! I have a lot of missed calls on my phone primarily because my hands were just too frozen stiff to press the green call button. Very frustrating I must confess.

Another reason why your pocket is your best friend is simply because your wallet resides in it. Over here in the UK, you have the most polite group of individuals ever, who would hold the door open for you, family who would stuff you with food, you have friends who are willing to help out but one thing I must point out is that it all ends when it is time to pay the bills, when it is time to show the money. When it comes to this, you are on your own!

It was when I got here that the cliché ‘It’s not easy’ or in Yoruba dialect ‘Ko easy’ started to make a whole lot of sense. It is easy for you to imagine when you are in Nigeria and hear that someone earns 10 pounds per hour. Dreamily, you convert it into naira and you suddenly start to dream that all you have to do is get to Britain and before long you would be building a house in Nigeria that could feature in an episode of Cribs. However, the harsh reality is that for every pound you make, the more bills you pay and less I forget, the Queen a.k.a Iya Charlie would also demand her ‘royal share’ to buy Prince Harry another Rolls Royce(Oops! Did I just speak against the crown? Strike that out, I don’t want to be deported). Even the air you breathe here feels taxed!!!

With this in mind, it beats me why folks back home could sell their right testicle; go through all means, steal, and cheat to come over here thinking all they have to do is turn up here and pick pound sterling on the streets or pluck it on trees. Think again.

 Well, putting my sermon aside and back to my sojourns, I managed to twist some arms and made false promises to get my plane ticket to Nigeria but then I faced another dilemma, a huge one. I felt very cornered. 

I couldn’t go home empty-handed; I had to show that I have been blessed by Iya Charlie. Even though it showed physically as I was looking tremendously hot and handsome with pink lips and all, I had to back it up with gifts, spray some cash around and pretend like I was P.Diddy. I envisaged a tough task convincing folks back home that I wasn’t picking pound notes on the streets. In fact I could already hear them saying miser and sniggering behind my back. With few weeks left before my trip, a friend alerted me about a job opportunity in London where I could make some few bucks. With pound notes obstructing my psyche, I boarded Britain’s version of Ekene Dilichukwu bus called National Express and made my three hour trip to London.

Remember in previous episodes when I felt like Rosa Park in the bus because I was almost the only black in Bournemouth? Well, the reverse is the case in London. London especially the eastern part is more like a Nigerian island in Europe. I think a white guy would feel odd being amongst so many blacks, so many Nigerians. In buses here, I basically feel like Kunta Kite in the slave ship. All around me, I would hear Yoruba, Ibo, and Pidgin English all spoken. It was a bitter-sweet feeling though. Anytime any phone rings, the ringtone would be a D’Banj, Terry G or P-Square song and to tell you the truth, most Nigerians are lousy when speaking on the phone. All their life details would be in your palm within minutes and the noise they make is worse than Answani Market on a busy Tuesday.

Walking down East London were Nigerian barbing saloons, shops, I actually saw a woman wheeling down semo and pounded yam in a cart down the road albeit in a classy manner. Anyways, I got to my friend’s house and prepared to work, to earn a quick buck or so I thought...

                              MEMOIRS NEWS ROUNDUP

With news that has been filtering since the arrival of our president from Saudi-Arabia, one begins to wonder what condition he is actually in. Since nobody has actually been able to see him to ascertain his health, it is not too hard to imagine that even the late Michael Jackson was in far better health than our president before his death. Compare this to this story in Daily Mail that thoroughly analysed the health of President Obama.

If Obama’s health is a cause for concern, then that of our president is a disaster. The fallout continues. The video below by a Nigerian senator(after the very lenghty presenter's cue) fully epitomises the confusion the country is in. His vocabulary is unrivalled and words that have not been invented and never will were freely used. Get your dictionaries out people to search for words that never were

Beats me how the guy got elected. Nonetheless i admire his cojones to make a mockery of himself on national television.

Moving on, the story I am going to talk about could possibly tempt you to out of school and become a cleaner or start gambling big-time. It is about a British couple who incidentally are Britain’s highest lottery winners after winning £56 million and gave their cleaner a £400,000 house. Read more on the story here. It just makes you want to drop your pen, ignore your assignments and go to a casino to either gamble or post your CV for a cleaning job for the rich and famous.

Well, this concludes this week’s edition. Many thanks to you all for reading about my not- so -glamorous life and experiences even though I wonder why you all do.

Till next week...Cheers.