Bored & Boyfriendless

The old diary I found is so so precious; it captured who I was when I was 22: a skinny young wannabe writer with an exaggerated sense of humour and no boyfriend.

I wrote in the diary when I was bored, when I was happy, when I was frustrated, I just wrote and wrote and wrote.
It wasn’t a proper diary to start with, so dismiss any images of a leather-bound journal and picture this: a faded orange exercise book with “Three Star Big Exercise Book”, “60 Leaves” and “Made in Nigeria by Star Paper Mill” on the cover, with the mandatory metric tables on the outside back cover. Anyone who went to school in Naija knows what I’m talkin’ about!

Did anyone *ever* use those conversion tables printed on the back?? “Linear Measure”, “Mass and Weight Measure” and “Capacity Measure” (Fluid Volume) Thank God those awful school days spent calculating are over.

Anyway that exercise book was my ‘diary’ for the month of July 1997. In it I recorded the details of my first Weight Gain Programme and the day I heard Gianni Versace had been murdered. I was still stuck in the East at my Grandmother’s and since I had no friends I spent a lot of my time writing about all the stuff happening around me.

On July 2nd (which was a Wednesday) my mum sent me and a male cousin of mine (“O”) to a town a couple of hours away, to pick up something she had commissioned a local artist to paint. I wrote:

Went with O to look for the artist mum commissioned. The journey wasn’t too long, along the way I spotted a sign with ‘Alliance Francais French Language and Cultural Centre’ on it and made a mental note to stop by on our way back.

The taxi driver on the last leg of the trip was very kind; (we had to change taxis twice) he drove us straight to the artist’s house at no extra charge. We knocked, no one answered so we sat on the steps and gossiped about Cousin N’s second boyfriend. I’m starting to get very worried about the fact that everyone else seems to leap effortlessly from one relationship to another with minimum recovery time in between, while it takes me forever to even find someone to relate to: where are all the men?? I can count all the relationships I’ve had on two fingers.

Anyway, there we were talking when the door opened and a hostile-looking woman with dried out jerry curls appeared in the doorway. Talk about delayed reaction: we’d knocked nearly fifteen minutes earlier. Anyway she lived up to her appearance and hostilely asked who I was. I told her who we were and what our mission was, dispelling her fears that I was a student who was pregnant for her husband or something.
She let us in, put the fan and radio on and handed us photo albums as a source of entertainment while we waited for her husband, who wasn’t back from work.

“Why do people here always assume visitors want to look through their photos?” I whispered to O. “Eh, that’s what people here like” he replied. I certainly don’t like it but was forced to look through black & white photos dating back to the Sixties so as not to offend our hostess who sat at the dining table, staring at us.
Only one photo interested me: a recent one of a very good looking guy who, from the landmarks in the photo, was in England. After admiring his cute smile for several seconds I remembered my boyfriendless state and quickly became depressed. The artist came home shortly afterwards, apparently he has a day job as a teacher. Though he hadn’t started work designing anything, he had taken the photos he’d need to work with. After talking to him for several minutes, O and I got up to leave but the artist forced us to eat ‘oji’. His wife brought out a saucer of kolanuts and garden eggs (we’re too young for this!) and we rushed through the ceremony. I wasn’t sure whether he was praying over the saucer or whether he was giving blessings so I lowered my eyes just in case, and examined my left big toe. I stubbed it on a stool yesterday and it looked like a blood clot was forming.

On the way back to town we got in a taxi with a girl with a beard. Not a full-grown Barry White-ish sort of beard but just short of a goatee.
I stared in fascination; this brings to about two million, the number of women with hairy chins that I’ve seen here in the past month. Immac sales obviously aren’t sky high here.