The shrill alarm reverberated around the room piercing the silence. It was 5 a.m and the noise that emanated from the alarm set on the mobile phone could wake any living organism that lay around. A motionless figure lay on the bed; it was either the person was dead or asleep.
So, rather than obey the alarm, I did what any sane, lazy individual would do, I pushed the snooze button to buy me some extra hours of sleep I richly deserved. Five more minutes of sleep could potentially be a life-saver. My cheating tactics didn’t last though, another alarm alas; a winged one with its cronies hell-bent on making love to my flesh and buzz around my ears singing lullabies even the St Dominic’s Catholic Choir at Yaba couldn’t rival. After enduring these mosquitoes for what seemed like an eon, I grudgingly stood up; barely seconds before my mother screamed my name from the living-room.
Stumbling around the dark room, I groped for my Nokia phone which doubled as a flashlight. The poor electricity in the country mandated that every individual possessed one. In that split second, my over-imaginative brain visualized the Nokia CEO grinning, telling his Nokia cohorts to continue shipping flashlight phones to destination Computer Village, Nigeria. Their profit margin must be astronomical.
I still felt very drowsy but my immediate task was to gear up for the morning devotion my family had converged for. This particular devotion was sure to last longer than usual as I was catching a flight to the United Kingdom in little less than four hours. Conversely, the longer the devotion lasts, the more nap-time I was going to get. I had this unique auto-snooze mode during prayers, which was the habit of sleeping at the beginning and waking up just as we were reciting “The Grace” at the end. My younger sister was equally a veteran; she had even upgraded her prayer snooze software by chipping in with the occasional “Amen” whilst sleeping.
However, every invention had glitches; ours was the Snooze Police a.k.a our mum who interrupted with timely pinches to momentarily awake us from our unholy sleep…well only for some seconds before we usually relapsed. I can literally feel the devil’s pitchfork on my eyelids whenever I sleep during devotions, fellowships and church services. So notorious I was that even church ushers always looked out for me. I was the Osama of slumbering during prayers. May God help me and of course you the reader; that’s if you are also a culprit.
Less I digress, today was the day I travelled to the United Kingdom for my Master’s degree. After months of processing, nail-biting and expending millions of nairas, it was finally time to leave the shores of my beloved country for the first time. My still-fuzzy brain hadn’t yet processed the information. It was still clogged with the wine from the night before courtesy of my friends who organized a send-forth for me. My mum’s fussy nature was infectious though; she had this mental check-list of the things I would need from the needful to the absolute ridiculous. The night before, she had loaded my bag with Garri, Elubo, Panla (stock fish), Aboniki, Ogun Jedi-Jedi and plenty more stuffs I wouldn’t discover till I got to the other point of my destination. With everything all crammed into my bag, I needed extra help from my dad to load it into the trunk of the car secretly hoping I wouldn’t be charged for additional luggage beyond the minimum weight on arrival at the airport.
Almost three decades ago, Nizzle was born in Nigeria…although he’d have preferred the sunny climes of California.
Against all odds, Nizzle miraculously went to school despite being an air-head. He studied Mass Communication at the University of Lagos and a Master’s in Multimedia Journalism at Bournemouth University, United Kingdom.
Nizzle loves Arsenal and Guinness brands and making money without expending energy.
Nizzle hopes you’ll like his book, still untitled. Buy it to make him richer; always remember he likes to make money without expending energy. If there’s any motivation behind his upcoming book, it’s his laziness. He’ll like to buy a new Buggati too. e-mail: akinyems@yahoo.com
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