Accra on an off-day

Today I can report doing absolutely zip. Truly sod all. Yesterday was Independence Day, which was a bit free of fun festivities - unless your idea of a day out is hanging out in a big concrete square listening to improving speeches from the President. Yesterday being a Sunday, that means that today is a public holiday and there's nothing, but nothing open. Except for those wonderful Internet people.

Casting my mind back a few days... a deeply uncomfortable bus journey. Sadly I haven't grown up yet, and the idea of sitting at the back of a bus gets me all excited on some deep level, because you're furthest from teacher etc.

I'm now old enough to know that back of bus =/= larks, pranks, and the possibility of schoolboy social advancement; back of bus = extreme bodily pain, especially after four hours of bouncing along Ghana's "work in progress" road network.

Occasionally I'd glance out the window (which happened to be level with my arse), through the cloud of dust being thrown up from the rutted streambed of the road surface. A few yards away, like the glittering visions that torment people dying of thirst in a desert, I could glimpse a blissful, smooth surface of black asphalt. Moving slowly across it was a steamroller, with a man at the controls who to my battered braincase seemed to be smiling back at my jumping form, smugly.