Scandal horror shock!

By the way, I know this guy, who's currently at the heart of a big scandal in London which might threaten the Olympic bid, or cause serious damage to Ken Livingstone's political career.

The fact that he's in the midst of this story makes me oddly happy because Ollie was the only person on my journalism course who really had the guts to stand up to people and tell them what he thought of them; as a result, our course director couldn't stand him and did her best to make life very difficult for him. Anyway, Oliver Finegold, I salute you...

Click go the shears

Yesterday I had a haircut. The heat was driving me absolutely crazy and it suddenly occurred to me that I was walking around with the equivalent of a slab of roofing felt on my head. Kate was reading a book so at first I started hacking away at my mop on my own, with a pair of nail scissors.

Taking alarm at my state, Kate comes over and starts doing all the proper hairdresser things - pinning my hair up on top of my head, cutting by layers, etc etc, and has in fact managed to give me an excellent trim. And now, bliss, my body temperature has gone down dramatically thanks to the removal of said roofing felt, and all is joy (pretty much).

Accra is also wonderful - full of breezes, which is a relief after weeks on coastal sandbars where the heat sits over the towns like a bad mood; leafy and friendly, and strangely reminiscent of home. We arrived in town on Valentine's Day, which is a VERY big deal amongst romantic Ghanaians - the following day, half the restaurants were sold out of drinks because of all the wining and dining that had been done the previous night, and a music venue just a short walk from our hotel was hosting a One Night Only special performance by sometime R'n'B-you-could-introduce-to-your-mum purveyor's Boyz II Men, which was beseiged by courting couples. We even planned to head to Accra's main cinema for a film, but in practice there were two problems: (1) it wasn't quite the multiplex we had wistfully imagined, and didn't seem to have aircon on a hot night (2) the only film, in keeping with the day, was a Denise Richards vehicle called Valentine (?), and we didn't really feel like it.

Anyway, today I'm going off to buy some clothes. We're thinking of trying to re-engage ourselves in the volunteering thing here, but we're still a bit embarrassed about going to the organisers. Accra's a lovely city though, so it's tempting.

By the way, in case any of you have been cross-referencing blogs, we're no longer in Togo - although we did get there a couple of days after a military coup and left the day before the protests turned nasty and demonstrators started getting shot.

There's now talk of Nigeria and even Ghana invading Togo to restore the rightful government, which I'm hoping is fanciful because the situation there's bad enough as it is. Having said that, our two days in a coup-torn country weren't quite what I was expecting: from all those breathless news reports I've read, I had imagined the whole place would be under a pall of anxiety and tension.

In practice, we didn't even realise what had happened till we checked out the Internet. Lome, the capital, was in the grip of a general strike but to our naive eyes it just seemed more-than-usually sleepy for a West African city: people sat around in the streets, there was a big crowd watching a game of a local variant of backgammon, the stall-holders were still selling water and deep-fried yam because they needed the money, and even a decent number of the restaurants were open. People were friendly and we wandered around the streets almost oblivious to what was afoot.

In the evening, we wandered back to our hotel and watched the requisite speech by president Faure Gnassingbe, the son of the dead former dictator who had been appointed a few days before by the army in defiance of the constitution; he looked like a silver-spoon kid in a suit too big for him, stumbling over his speech and eyes darting nervously about as he mumbled away in front of a limp Togolais flag. I'd like to tell you that a silence descended over the city as we watched, gripped, but in practice we had to head up to our room because a couple of local kids had spotted us and were advancing, singing the "Yovo" song (see previous posts). The childish fun was drowning out the noise of President Gnassingbe talking into his tie, so we headed off to let the hotel staff watch in peace.

Pineapples are not the only fruit

Well Kate's telling you all about what we're actually up to at aulacode.blogspot.com, so for want of anything more interesting to tell you about, here's a quick guide to West African food.

ORANGES: Nothing like the sweet succulent things you're used to back home, these little buggers are apparently the result of cross-breeding with gravel. But as with manioc (which is poisonous raw), immense ingenuity has been brought to bear to render them edible. First you zest off all the skin with a razor blade; then you pile them up on metal candelabra things on your stall, so they look all pretty; then, when a customer buys some, you lop off the top. Customer then squeezes the contents into their mouth through the hole and drops the spent skin by the road, where they gather in the dust like bust tennis balls.
Don't try this at home with a real orange. Given that the technique can turn a stringy, dry, potatoeish orange into something to which the man from Del Monte would say yes, if you did it to the real succulent McCoy the shockwaves would probably be felt in Minsk.

PINEAPPLES: Inexplicably, if you buy a pineapple from a street stall they go to a great deal of effort to cut it into little blocks; but if you go to a vaguely upmarket restaurant they do what we do at home, ie cut it in four and slice out the succulent bit. In Francophone countries this is given the unduly flash name of "Ananas en pirogue", which means "pineapple in a canoe" and I guess sounds sort of picturesque which must be why you pay four times as much. I'm not moaning about the price, which is a pittance either way - I'm just blanching at the premium.

COFFEE: Yesterday Kate and I, in that desperate manner common among people who've spent about a month along way from home, made a list of all the foodie delights we wanted when we got home. Amongst the usual Western-style dishes, the odd one out was West African cafe au lait, from which we're in withdrawal because they only do it the good way in Francophone countries and we've been in Ghana all of, ooh, four days.
The good way involves taking a metal bowl and putting it on a plate; filling the bottom with tooth-looseningly sweet condensed milk and sprinkling said with instant Nescaf (forget "proper" coffee); and pouring hot water on to that. Really, try it. It's much nicer than an ordinary cuppa. But it has to be in a metal bowl.

STAPLES: Last night I had what had been billed to me as the worst food you can eat in Africa, and quite liked it. It's called banku, and it's basically a lump of fermented maize meal dough. You break off a bit with your right hand and dip it in sauce, and finish when you've consumed about a quarter of it because it does the sort of things to your insides that you'd expect from a wallpaper paste enema. The banku was fine, although the tilapia fish I ate it with has the most intense smell of any fish I've come across, which is still with me after washing my hands I don't know half a dozen times at least. Other than that, it's been rice and spaghetti all the way.

The hell of Frqncophone keyboqrds

Thereùs q clever little trick thqt you ,ight zqnt to knoz zhen trqvelling in Frqncophone countries; zhich is thqt Qlt+shift converts the zeird French keyboqrd lqyout to so,ething thqt is ql,ost co,prehensible: Ql,ost: Unfortunqtely; tonight ,y co,puter is too old qnd clqpped out for this to zork:

Key: q=a, ,=m, z=w, ;=, ,=m, :=.

Anyway, the name of this blog is now redundant as, fingers crossed, we should be making it to Ghana soonish. The Ghanaian Embassy in Benin hadn't been informed that we were dissidents bent on overthrow etc - for which read "journos" - and so, unlike their London counterparts, decided to let us in. So my exile comes to an end pretty shortly, including its particular torture, viz the hell of Frqncophone keyboqrds. Because Ghana is an English-speaking country, which will mean that my increasingly haphazard attempts to improve my French will be mercifully curtailed before I embarrass myself and confuse locals any more. The only shame of this is that I'll have to find a new rhyme to replace the kid-chant you get everywhere in Benin, which goes a bit like this:

Yovo, yovo, bonsoir,
Ca va bien merci... (repeat all day)

"Yovo" is the word for "white person" in Fon, the local language. It gets a bit like a game: walking down the street, you hear toddlers saying "yovo" in a sort of "coo-ee" tone, as if to say "don't think you can sneak past so easily ... now I'm going to sing The Song"...They're li'l darlings really. What is more worrying about this rhyme is that "bonsoir / ca va / ca va bien merci" is a pretty good summation of my communication skills. Mind you, at least when I'm talking my spelling doesn't go hqyzire.