Springing forward and losing time

Time shifting around

I seem to be better adjusted to the concept and the reality of daylight saving, and while I cannot fully explain the benefits of it, nor do I intend to research it for this blog, the phenomenon has a way of catching up with me.

I have adopted an American aide memoire in understanding how we change our clocks in October and March, usually on the last Sunday of the month. We Spring Forward and Fall Backward. Fall is the American version of our English Autumn.

As most clocks in the home are electronic, especially on computers and watches, whether you gain or lose an hour whilst asleep at 2:00 AM can go without notice, the alarm clock will still go off at the set time.

A wind-up situation

When it comes to clocks on devices and appliances like microwaves or standard ovens, especially if you are a time obsessive, you notice you have lost an hour in the spring or gained one in the autumn.

When I used to have mechanical clocks around the home, I changed the time before I went to bed; it made the change in time more manageable.

For Brian, in the spring we enter a time of just having an hour’s difference between us, rather than two hours. It represents some closeness, but not close enough in distance.

A circadian disruption

In my case, the apparent coping mechanism for British Summer Time has not kicked in; my body clock is yearning for something that suggests an unnatural event has occurred; adjustments governed by the reading of the time are not compensated for in my biorhythms.

My circadian rhythm is out of whack, and that is not helped by my early mornings feeling like a winter that has refused to depart. The sun offers a glowing spectacle during the day, but we cannot expect more than 18° Celsius for the rest of the week.

It is a struggle to keep alert without stimulation of vigorous activity or the exhilaration of caffeine intake. I have, in times past, pinched myself or given my ankle tendon a kick, inflicting just enough pain to jolt myself back to life. Then, maybe it is still the residual side effects of radiotherapy, who really knows?

We break the codes of time for pecuniary advantage, more light in the evening for spring and summer, and the greater benefit for farmers in the autumn and winter. What you cannot fail to notice is that when the sun shines, we make the best of it, getting the warmth and a bit of a tan too, in Manchester, of all places.

Thought Picnic: The stereotype of a hypersexual black man persists

Just trying to help

The first thing that came to mind was whether I had just missed an Emmett Till moment, though the comparison is a bit too severe; England has never been the American South of the 1950s, but some stereotypes are so ingrained that people act on them before reality and modernity can adjust their thinking.

I was walking home when I saw two ladies seemingly in a rush, going in one direction and then the opposite, wondering aloud if they were headed the right way. As I overheard them, and being quite familiar with the area, I thought I could help, so I inquired about which direction they wanted to go.

As I looked back, a man approached me and asked what I was looking at. His aggression was met with equal disdain. "What is your problem?" I retorted. He claimed that I was the problem, to which I suggested he should go home and not look for trouble because I had no time for crazy people.

The stereotypes betraying us

He blurted out, “That’s my wife you are looking at.” A strapping (I guess in the dark, appearances can be deceptive) black man, and I am hardly that, going after and ogling a white woman with rampant sexual desire?

Maybe if I could whistle, but the ladies did not even deserve an anachronistic catcall, but let’s not disparage the innocent. It did look like an Emmett Till moment, as a white man had just suggested I had disrespected his wife by looking lustfully at her.

Where did this kind of thinking emerge from, and how could it even be expressed so strongly in Manchester of 2025? The situation was about to escalate totally out of control if I did not have a response or chose to walk away, which was the wise choice.

Easing the built-up tension

I replied, “I am a gay man, I am not interested in your wife; I was only asking if I could help.” He showed character; immediately he offered a profuse apology, saying he was very sorry for making a wrong assumption. His wife joined him, and they both pleaded for being unnecessarily defensive; they asked for my name and introduced themselves.

We shook hands as they explained they were out looking for their friend, who they thought was lost. They were a bit distressed about it and did not know what to do. I gave them some encouragement and wished them well as we parted ways. I was just a block away from home.

The present is the past

On reflection, I thought about how suspicion and the exchange of coarse words could have led to a fracas and needlessly so. How we are informed by the stereotypes of others until we seek to learn more about their story out of interest and engagement rather than an initial dislike based on falsehoods.

How in the UK, we are fortunate that even the irrational is contained in the exchange of words before it becomes physical, hurtful, and sometimes fatal.

Then, the basic willingness to hear the other out and listen can diffuse the most tense (as I use British rather than American English, "most tense" is the most appropriate superlative for tense, rather than "tensest" in American English) situations; someone had to be ready to play the pipes of peace before we come within the sound of the drums of war.

It was both an unsettling and teachable moment. We might have come a long way, but that basic animal instinct is always ready to impose itself on our unsteady coexistence.

This Humpty Dumpty does get up

Ambitions live on

If ever I needed to be reminded, I was chasing waterfalls when I should have, for now, stuck to the rivers and lakes that have grounded me after that prostate cancer diagnosis in June last year, I faced a brutal reality on Wednesday night.

Inadvertently, I found myself having completed more than 10,000 steps in the previous six days, not out of deliberate effort, but in the drudgery of everyday events. That realisation on Wednesday indicated I needed just over 5,000 steps to make it 7 days in a row, a feat I have not achieved in quite a long time.

Maybe, make it a charted and timed walk, which records pace, heart rate for intensity, cadence and some other interesting, though mundane data along with the time to recovery. I set out on a route I had not plied in over a year, thinking I would catch the breeze on my walk.

Brought to ground suddenly

I was barely over a kilometre into my walk and out of nowhere, I do not think I tripped, my legs and feet seemed to scatter below my frame, and my brain kindly suggested I was going down. I was soon tumbling down, breaking my fall with my left knee and hands that thankfully had leather gloves on.

There was some momentum in the fall, and I rolled into half the outer lane of a dual carriageway that was not well-lit. I was so fortunate that no cars were coming. I picked myself up, took a few strides and rested on a wall as I caught my breath.

Someone waiting at the bus stop opposite must have seen it because he called from across the road to enquire if I was alright. I could only lift my hand in a gesture towards him.

A fresh whitish knee

A few minutes later, the debate was ongoing in my head about whether to continue or return home, my knee seething with the rage of a graze, my determination was to continue, and so I did to complete 13,408 steps for the day.

When I eventually got to look at my knee, I had revealed almost a square inch of flesh, but not much of a bleed compared to how I did not stop bleeding after I went for blood tests on Tuesday, and my shirt was stained.

There is a lot that I want to do, but I am not where I think I am; certain limitations constrain me even as I defy natural laws to do more than my body seems equipped for currently. The recovery process, as I am gently told by both my body and advisors, will take a while, I need to be patient with myself and adjust my goals within the framework of mental and physical abilities.

I have continued to exceed the 10,000-step goal, while my knee is not healing as fast as I had hoped. Meanwhile, Brian suggests I apply a dash of methylated spirit, considering how he’ll bawl at the application of a denatured and non-alcoholic dressing. Two fingers to my eyes and pointing those fingers at him.

Childhood: And we were sent away

Parental Angst Versus Child Welfare

I observed two news stories from afar until I found myself commenting on a Facebook post, to which the author suggested my comment should be an essay.

Previously, I had written about my parents’ decision to send me to secondary boarding school after the cloistered bubble of an international primary school education. I will not dwell on that matter, but there are many facets to not being born and raised within the traditions, culture, and lands of one’s parents’ birth.

Blog - Childhood: When Parents Think They Know Best

For that, there was a term coined: Third-Culture Kids. This comes with many connotations, including the conflicts of environments, the anxiety and angst of our parents, the issues of not finding belonging in any place, and all the attendant psychological challenges that are somewhat ignored because our parents assume time will eventually resolve things and make everything work.

Send Them Home to Learn 

What bothers ethnic minority parents today is what might happen to their kids in the UK, where I am somewhat more familiar with the situation, and in the Americas. The tendency among parents who have the means is to extricate their kids from abroad and place them in the sometimes-harsh environments of their home countries, usually in West Africa, where they hope to address the lapses in discipline, educational attainment, purpose, and character that they have observed in or around their children.

Recently, a child took his parents to court to compel them to return him to the UK after he was apparently deceived into going to Ghana to see a sick relative. We all have variations of the same plot. He lost his case, the judge empathising but ultimately siding with the parents. [BBC News: Son Loses Case Against Parents Over Move to Africa]

Continuing with the narrative, some men have come forward to share their own stories about being sent home and how, in hindsight, it saved them. It probably did save all of us, one way or the other. However, it is never comfortable during that absence from what the kids call home. [BBC News: I Was Duped Into Leaving London for School in Ghana - But It Saved Me]

Before I share my comment, many kids have been brought up in the UK and the US and have thrived; this is great credit to their parents and communities that nurtured them. All these stories need to be told.

My Facebook Comment 

I suppose this is another aspect of split upbringing that is rarely discussed.

We returned to Nigeria when I was hardly six years old; however, because I was with my parents, I had the pleasure of attending primary schools filled with foreign-looking but Nigerian-born schoolmates, while many of us black kids were foreign-born.

It was the secondary boarding experience that was brutal, but I survived, despite the lasting scars of that environment.

You eventually become streetwise without losing the kind of daring that some people regularly said we Ajebotas [Kids who eat bread and butter rather than local fare; a pejorative term for lacking experience in local customs.] have.

The longstanding benefit of my early education and experiences in Nigeria meant building resilience, grit, and, mostly, self-esteem, while retaining the precocity I always had.

Upon my return to the UK, my blackness was always a part of me; no one could racially abuse me and get the upper hand, as I had a better retort, coupled with wit.

Escaping the race and deprivation politics of the inner cities and suburbs, which would have found me in Walsall and Birmingham in the 1970s and well into the 1980s, meant I never had the sometimes-invisible baggage or chip-on-the-shoulder that affected ethnic minority kids who never left.

I left Nigeria with just an OND and built an IT career that was earning top rates by the mid-1990s, before the extraordinary fortune of being invited to pursue a master’s degree after providing a character reference for a friend.

Moreover, unlike the scolding in Nigeria that implied one wouldn’t amount to anything and spurred you on, in England at that time, it was a limit on your horizons, pushing you towards low achievement and menial roles.

My parents left after qualifying in their respective professions; even though my dad placed third overall in his accountancy finals, his colleagues suggested that they never thought he was that bright, instead of congratulating him on his success.

I assume they both decided that the England of Enoch Powell, whom my father once challenged in a pub, was not a suitable place for them or for their boy—and the children that came after me.

Now, each experience is different; I cannot suggest that any of these actions are in the best interests of any child, but having the agency to intervene when you see things going awry is a privilege of opportunity that many do not have.

I even had my own personal intervention; after a relationship breakup in 1999 left me lost and listless, I packed my bags and started anew in the Netherlands, where I remained for almost 13 years.

Our parents mean well; whether they were right is another conversation altogether.

I cannot argue against being immersed in a totally different culture; it presents opportunities that we often fail to fully appreciate until later in life, as the men have suggested in the article.

Coronavirus streets in Manchester - LXXVI

Getting some perspective

You may wonder why I am writing about the Coronavirus, having written the last in my series of Coronavirus streets in Manchester way back in June 2024. Obviously, there was also the minor distraction of dealing with Men’s things, my prostate taking on an unregulated growth spurt that was trammelled with blasts of radiotherapy.

Then you consider I was out grocery shopping today and one of the passengers on a bus I boarded had a facemask on, you do not see that about quite often, though a lady who attends my church whose full face I have never seen dons a facemask almost as a fashion accessory, a shade of brown, but quite distinct from her South Asian skin tone.

Saying his prayers

The bus out of the city centre towards Salford, where I planned to board another to my intended destination, presented nothing of great significance apart from wheezing and many with coughs that might indicate something more serious than portends. On that sampling alone, we are easily a nation of the unfit, the infirm, the unwell, and qualitatively unhealthy.

However, it was the bus ride within Salford towards Cheetham Hill that offered much to amuse or intrigue. It was first an unkempt man sitting on one of the priority seats. In what seemed like a headbanging the bar in front of him, I soon realised it was an unconventional approach to Muslim prayer as he was muttering, clasping hands, and then bowing in obeisance to the Sallah edict.

The bus was driving eastward but I could not suggest his heading was facing Mecca, but who am I to intrude on the religiosity of an adherent faithfully saying his prayers before Goosey Goosey Gander takes umbrage?

The fiery Ijebu wars

At Ade’s Cash & Carry, of the many designations it has, at the checkout till, there were conversations going on in Yoruba, the tiller with facial scarification I would have mistaken for an Ogbomoso indigene, but with the brutal nose strike, so that might default to Ibadan.

Two tubers of water yam, quite different from Puna yam, were being weighed on the tiller scales, but they did not have the hairy fibres one would expect on that species I was accustomed to. As I voiced my misgivings, an engagement began about where I was from.

Answering Ijesha-Ijebu, the man interjected, Ijebu-Ijesha, a different place some 197 kilometres away. That confusion between my village and the other town, in entirely separate states and they do not remotely speak the same dialect. It so happened that the customer being served was also an Ijebu-man, he knew where Ijesha-Ijebu was and began to converse in Ijebu that I have never deigned to master.

My excuse is that I was born abroad, and I pleaded innocence by volunteering. One of my names is Adetokunbo, and the crown was brought from overseas. That was the beginning of our schism, he is from Ilishan-Remo and has been advocating the creation of an Ijebu State with Sagamu as the state capital. Let’s just say as the boundary between the real Ijebu-land headquartered at Ijebu-Ode and Ijebu-Remo, which is a few kilometres west of my village, the idea falls on its face with infeasibility.

It is totally unlikely that the Ijebus aligned to Ijebu-Ode and the expanse of the 16 Agemo masquerades of Ijebu-land would subsume themselves to the leadership of Ijebu-Remo that gained prominence out of the colonial chicanery of divide-and-rule. We would seethe with disdain and disparage any such advocacy to chop Ogun State into hamlet fiefdoms.

While I would rarely feel challenged with Yoruba expression, I was clearly found wanting facing a son of Ijebu soil. Other interesting banter ensued, and we shook hands, and I left.

The Yorubas have occupied

On the bus back to Salford City Centre from Cheetham Hill, I must have been transported to some place in Yorubaland, I half expected the only Caucasian on the bus to burst out in Yoruba song as literally every else on the bus was speaking in Yoruba.

One even had a playback of some Yoruba-speaking event on the speaker of his phone and some of the narrative did cause stifled giggles without anyone wanting to reveal they knew what was going on. I could see from my vantage point that everyone was straining to listen even as one or two mobile phone conversations cared nothing for the public space they were in.

I sometimes forget some parts of north Manchester have been colonised by Yorubas; I could be one of the exceptions that lives in the city centre. Now, that Ade’s Cash & Carry has stiff competition in Salford on range, quality, and price, apart from ready-made stews, it won’t be long before these interesting Yoruba engagements happen closer to home.

The Coronavirus is still out there, and I had my 7^th booster in November before jetting out to Cape Town. Nine vaccinations and boosters altogether mean we all must be careful, five years on.

Thought Picnic: More than hope in living

We are not hopeless

Our Lenten study began with the question, “Can the dead live again?” It centred on the story of Job, his suffering, and a narrative of man's mortality against the nature of trees that spring up from a seeming hopeless death into new life.

In Christian hope we have a place, a destination, and a promise; death is not the end of the story, but eternal life brings the life of God into our existence and present, not in the bye-and-bye, but from the moment we accept Jesus Christ as our personal lord and saviour, here on earth, in the now.

Hope is an anchor

Comparing optimism to hope, optimism is a feeling, and hope is an anchor; I am optimistic about something, but I hope to do, get, achieve, realise, sometime that has focus, borne of my imagination and what my faith can work on. "For faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." [Bible Hub: Hebrews 11:1]

Giving AI a look-in on my blog, this is an overview. “Hope is the belief that you can make things better, while optimism is the belief that things will get better. Hope is an active process that involves setting and working towards goals, while optimism is a passive thought pattern.”

Hope versus Optimism from a Generative AI perspective. (Click to enlarge.)

I can work towards extraordinary goals based on the promises of God from what God has said in His Word, that is why the Bible matters to me and listening to both the Word of God and sermon inspired by the Word of God give me the confidence that life is considerably more than existing like another living thing.

Hope lives for new life

However, as we discussed these topics, I found that certain personal experiences are quite difficult to articulate; with survival or the passage of time, the recounts are raw with deep emotion, that what we left behind still grabs us in ways that memory overwhelms the present as if we are still with that human experience.

Yet, that does not mean optimism is not meaningful, for in all the aspects of adversity I have encountered, I always had one saying in Yoruba that tells me this too will pass, “A ma fi pàtàn ni.” This translates loosely to, “These too will become stories.” I am thankful that my past does not choke me of the gratitude for having some experiences behind me.

Of cancer twice or of deaths of people and close to me, whilst amid the experience, none of it is pleasant, for the hope ahead that these would again become stories to be told in recognition of the amazing human spirit sustained by the mercy, grace, and love of God. We can be full of hope, and I am full of hope. Can the dead live again? Yes!

The Slave Bible - A Closer Look

Another look at the Slave Bible

In my original blog about the Slave Bible yesterday, I expressed muted outrage at the role of the Anglican Bishop of London and his involvement in commissioning the book. Beilby Porteus, the Bishop of London from 1787 to his death in 1809 was a rather different person than I portrayed in my first assessment of the situation.

Blog - The Slave Bible

History would suggest, the bishop was the first in authority to challenge the Anglican Church’s stance on slavery in a concerted campaign that lasted almost three decades. He was an abolitionist who stated his case in sermons and in the House of Lords, long before the cause became popular.

The bishop was an abolitionist

In his advocacy, he was concerned about the plight of about 300 slaves on the Codrington Plantations in Barbados that was bequeathed to the Church of England in the early 18^th Century and was overseen by the Archbishop of Canterbury and a committee of Church of England bishops.

From the time he was Bishop of Chester through when he was translated to the bishopric of London, Bishop Porteus worked with slavery abolitionists, and much was made of the fact that disease and maltreatment led to the death of about 40% of the slaves within three years of their arrival that the slave cohort needed constant replenishment from West Africa.

Besides these myriad issues, the bishop was desirous of proselytising the slaves and this must have informed his decision to commission an abridged bible for the slaves of the British West-Indies, as one of the most passionate advocates for the cause of the slaves, he by default assumed responsibility for their spiritual welfare. I can conclude from this reading of history that Bishop Beilby Porteus was neither malevolent nor evil.

Between the marketing and the product

A careful reading of what pertains to the content of the Slave Bible requires nuance over the sensational reductive view that essential parts of bible history were expunged. We can attribute this view to the publicity machinery of The Museum of the Bible (MOTB), which has had its share of controversy and scandal in terms of the provenance and integrity of exhibit acquired for display at the museum.

An academic assessment of the assertion of the MOTB would suggest a variance from the reality. The writer purports an exaggeration by the MOTB when in fact the book does contain verses of liberation as much as some pertaining to slavery were left out. Though the compendium leaves out the book of Revelation, it is not bereft of eschatological hope expressed in other epistles of Apostle Paul. [The Revealer: The “Slave Bible” is Not What You Think]

It would appear Bishop Porteus is both misrepresented and vilified by the MOTB to whatever ends of widening the participation of visitors to the museum beyond its evangelical roots. As I can only offer commentary on the reported events and observations along with not having access to the said Slave Bible to verify any of the claims, my only shocking discovery is to learn that such a book existed, the circumstances around which the book was published are quite different and open to debate.

Where history leaves us

It is obvious from the onset that the bishop met with both deaf ears and opposition to his abolition quest, as Founder of the Society for the Conversion and Religious Instruction and Education of the Negro Slaves, “envisioned a collection that expanded beyond biblical texts and included liturgy for public worship.” It is questionable whether the result achieved that aim.

However, while certain abridged versions of the bible available today as excerpts of the Psalms, Proverbs, or mainly the New Testament of the Gideon bibles found in the bedroom drawers of international hotel chains have not suffered the manipulation and cannibalisation of the Slave Bible, the motive in its origin seems both honest and malign to our reading today.

What cannot be disputed is the Anglican Church of England was integral, participatory, and a beneficiary of the evils of the slave trade and slavery.