ISAIAH 43:17 ELECTRICAL

Ghanaian businesses love to brand themselves with inspirational messages. A walk round the commercial district of a Ghanaian town is like wandering around a theme park for self-help aphorisms, of the sort you might find in those counter-purchase books with names like The Little Book of Mawkishness.

Taxis and trotros (taxi-vans) have them decal-ed onto the rear windscreen in a weird font which looks like either brushstrokes or knobbly branches. You'll pull up behind one in traffic and read it saying something like

BE SERIOUS

Occasionally, this is a bit like reading tea-leaves, in that they seem to carry messages to you about your situation. In the middle of a mechanical and nervous breakdown, stranded with an overcrowded and three-hours-late bus by the side of a major highway in Accra, worrying about the chaos and the passing of time, two trotros went past. The first one said

IM SORRY

The next one was more admonitory:

D0NT HURRY

There's often a religious slant to these signs. In the Accra suburb of Adabraka there's a shop called

JESUS FINGER FURNITURE

I can't work out if this refers to a type of furniture - a tiny chair for your index, a chaise longue for the thumb - or some devotional style of furniture. And who knows what to make of

DR JESUS HAIR

? Sometimes their religious fatalism makes you doubt how much the business owners are in control of their affairs:

TRUST IN THE LORD BUSINESS CENTRE

for instance. Still others are just inexplicable. Why do lots of trotros have decals on their back windows saying

THEY ACT AS LOVERS

? And what sort of meal can you expect at a cheap restaurant called

OBSERVERS ARE WORRIED CHOP BAR

? Answers on a decal, please.