puella

blah.

noooo! this place is scary! so many rooms don’t have lighting, and you need nerves of steel to edge into a row of dark bookshelves looking for a huge tome with the classmark 666…

is unbelievable. And the ‘Princess Diana Alabaster Factory’ was hilarious :) I got a beautiful alabaster chess set…

I want to live here. Doesn’t everybody? :)

I can’t explain. The biscuits here are LECKER!
And I love all the water…but not the mosquitoes…
Anne Frank wanted to be a writer, and didn’t understand that she already was one. The Anne Frank house, where AF and her family and another Jewish family hid out during WWII, that house made everyone who was in the group I visited it with very, very sad – the kind of sad that’s like black glue because there was no hope of rising out of it – as we were leaving, amongst the pictures on the wall was one of a black cast iron Anne Frank statue in Berlin, a replica of a little girl with her arms by her sides and a bow in her hair. The picture showed that someone had spray-painted a red swastika on the statue.

Toronto is the place where you get into a cab and you discover that your cab driver is ‘mr geography’, a man with a suitcase mind packed full of facts about different countries and their landmass and languages spoken and all that stuff. He’s famous! He’s been on Oprah! :) I would have gotten a free cab ride from him if I’d been able to name the capitals of three countries surrounding Nigeria! Argh. I loved Toronto and the way it’s laid out like a comic book city.

I stayed for a month in an apartment a minute away from the Palazzo Pitti (the medicis, and particularly the women, started getting all up in my dreams) and I went all over the palazzo and walked the terrifyingly extensive gardens, which were more like a park – complete with a lake, marble busts, little maze hedges and dark spots for spying from…I avoided the Uffizi without regret and spent a lot of time just bowling around, people-watching from cafes (Gilli became a little bit of a haunt because of the circus-style performers in the square outside that reminded me of covent garden – also Gilli ice cream and chocolate and club sandwiches and, well, everything, was very yay). I made some lovely friends who lived in architecturally astonishing houses, tried unsuccessfully to learn italian beyond the word ‘prego’, drank fragolino in enotecas and was completely in love with the laid back atmosphere. Men on scooters parked and stripped their leathers to reveal burnt orange coloured sweaters over black slacks, and the friend I was staying with, perhaps feeling some pressure on his masculinity, bought a burnt orange coloured sweater in the absence of a scooter…

stick out from the beautiful jumble of churches and shops and food and coliseum-trevi-fountain stuff because I was scared and dread sensitizes you to your surroundings or something. Rome is of course old, it’s grave, and strong, and weathered, like bone. I like it there but it makes you believe in ghosts more than usual.

Wintertime Champs D’Elysees. My jaw dropped. It was as expected yet unbearably elegant.
Now at the end of every year I’ve decided I have to be in Paris if I can do it, just to clear the crap from other seasons out of my mind. For this year’s trip I leave tomorrow.

I was born in Nigeria in ‘84, emigrated with my parents at four and was brought up in London, yet Nigeria haunts me completely – soaked into my marrow. I smell camphor and click, Nigeria switches on. I hear/read/watch interpretations of Greek and Roman myths and I substitute names for the names of the orishas, the pantheon of Yoruba gods that travelled out with the slaves to Cuba, Brazil, Jamaica, Haiti. The culture,literature and art of diasporic Africa, whether francophone or anglophone, seems to hint again and again that West Africa in particular is a difficult place to shake loose. the artist Chris Ofili, a second generation Nigerian, has never been to Nigeria, but all his paintings are about this place. Because physically Nigeria is wonderful, too – sun, sandy edged roads, sky so blue, night so black, stars and black beans roasting in palm oil…