Thursday 20th and Friday 21st January 1977

Thursday 20th January 1977

Mummy went to play tennis in the morning. I did some of my model village. We went to the ikoyi club for lunch and a swim.

Friday 21st January 1977

We picked up a friend and went to Lagos. After lunch a lot of us went to the beach. We saw a school of dolphins everybody came out of the sea quick in case it was a sharks.


Clearly the influence of the movie Jaws could not be underestimated.....

Wednesday 19th January 1977

Today’s update from the diary my seven year old self wrote during
the 1977 Festival of Black arts and culture in Lagos, Nigeria.


Wednesday 19th January 1977

On Wednesday we went to my friends swimming pool and we had a nice time. We jumped off the diving board. We had a drink. When we got home Mrs Nolan came from Pakistan. Our plants started to grow.


And for amusement value - here's the swimming....

Tuesday 18th January 1977

Today’s update from the diary my seven year old self wrote during
the 1977 Festival of Black arts and culture in Lagos, Nigeria.

Tuesday 18th January 1977

We had a visitor today called Mrs Power and the electricity went off for six hours. We went to the National Stadium to see dancing from Ghana. I liked it very much. There was an English lady she danced good. When a man danced on the stage his trousers came down. On the way home we nearly hit the Head of States car.


This is probably one of my favourite entries from the diary.
I love the fact that I report everything so matter of factly and events of several different magnitudes are treated equally.... whilst I am sure a man losing his trousers on stage would have been highly amusing, colliding with the presidents car would have been anything but! It also shows one of the ever present realities of our life in Nigeria, frequent power cuts. Fetching the candles and eating strange meals from whatever was defrosting in the freezer were regular occurrences, as was keeping a supply of water on hand for when we lost the water supply as well. Given that my parents had never been further than Yugoslavia and my mother had only been abroad a handful of times I remain amazed and in awe by how well they coped in such an alien environment. No wonder the liquor cabinet was so well stocked!

And so we begin....

As mentioned in my previous post I am blogging my daily diary, If I can call the few short lines I wrote each day that, written by my seven year old self, during the 1977 Festival of Black arts and culture in Lagos, Nigeria... Here are the first two days...

Sunday 16th January 1977

On Sunday we went to the stadium in Tafawa Balewa Square to watch the Afro National Band from Sierra Leone. It was good.

Monday 17th January 1977

On Monday we went to the art shop. The man showed me around the shop. We went to the Old Niger House. There was a good art and craft exhibition. We went to the U.T.C Tea room, we could see Apapa.

Way back when...

One of my new year’s resolutions this year was to resurrect this blog. However given its the 17th January and this is my first post you can see it’s a resolution that’s going about as well as the "eating more healthy" one. However I have a bit of a cheat to get me back into regular blogging over the next month.

Back in January 1977 I was a 7 year old, skinny, straggly haired kid living with my parents and older brother in Lagos, Nigeria. Life was a simple round of school, playing with friends, going to the Ikoyi club and trying to earn badges at Brownies. However in mid January we had, what was for us kids, a welcome break from this routine as we were given a month off school. I have happy memories of me and my brother building cities of cardboard boxes in the garage, trying to learn to sew and going to see all sorts of music and dance performances. Why am I telling you this?

Well at the tail end of last year my parents were searching through boxes in the attic and they found a diary I had written during this month. The month off seemed to be less of a welcome break for the school and our parents and so we were set lots of work to do at home. Seems that the cardboard box city and the sewing were actually homework set by the school as was to write a daily diary of what we were doing.
It’s hardly high class journalism and I only wrote a few lines each day, but I suppose that is only to be expected given my age. That said I found it an astounding insight into the life we were leading back then and the way I viewed it. It re-awakened many old memories and really made me appreciate, once again, the remarkable journey that my parents took us on when they made the decision to move overseas. So I have decided to share that diary with you, day by day,
here on this blog. You too can have a look back at what was on the mind of my seven year old self.....

As a way of introduction I feel I should say that the school, St Saviours, Ikoyi, didn’t just randomly give us a month of school. All the schools in Lagos were closed to celebrate FESTAC 77 – the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture. For a month several venues in Lagos hosted daily performances, there were street festivals, regattas and all manner of celebrations – some of which I mention in my diary. According to various website I have come across there was also a two week scholarly colloquium which had five strands Arts and Pedagogy, Language and Literature, Philosophy and Religion, Historical awareness and Science and Technology... quite the ambitious program.

So if I have captured your attention do move on to the next post were we find the first two days of my diary....

Musical Interlude

Everybody knows the Lambeth walk right? Indeed my solitary claim to fame is that I have performed the Lambeth Walk (incorrectly as it happens) on Mongolian national television....

What is probably less well known however is that the success of the song spawned a whole slew of copycat songs from other areas of London. Looking through the church archives I have found our very own local ditty “The Deptford Dip” written by Eric Cuddon in 1939...

Who can resist such classic lines as “ Deep, deep down in Deptford Creek lies a treasure hard to seek. If you could find the spot, you’d be worth a tidy lot.” Or the masterful (and physically challenging) chorus “Raise your thigh and lower your hip , now have some pluck and try your luck with a dip, dip, Deptford dip.”

Do you think it might catch on?

10 things I have learnt in my next six months as a curate....

1. I no more more like writing essays for post-ordination training than I did writing them at college.
   
2. Dave Walker cartoons are actually quite mild compared to real life but Rev comes close.
   
3. What a difference a year can make - the changes that God has wrought in me in the last twelve months are extraordinary.
   
4. You can drink almost any liquuid called tea and smile through it in the name of pastoral visiting.
   
5. I really should have known better then to introduce my father to the Bishop. The embarrasment of dad asking if I "was behaving myself" was out of the ball park.
   
6. Stewart Henderson says it better than I ever could.
   
7. People are very forgiving of mistakes - besides committing a body to be created rather than cremated has some theological justification surely?
   
8. The Church of England should consider ordaining octopi for the task of performing baptisms- one hand for holding the service book, one hand to hold down the squirming toddler being done, one hand to stop said toddler knocking the free standing font flying, one hand to show the Godparents were we are up to in the promises, one hand to indicate to the congregation this is the bit you say......Well you get the point.
   
9. It can be hard to switch off – all too often you find yourself listening to your friends in pubs and without realising it slipping into pastoral mode with the head tilt, the nodding and the periodic uhmmms and “where do you think God may be in this?”
   
10. I never realised that it was possible to feel so totally complete and content as a person.