Barbing

One of the delights of Nigeria is the wonderful names that a lot of businesses have.  There's "De Final Home" for a road side coffin maker and plenty of "Barbing" shops where you can have your hair cut.  Before we came here I hung up the hairclippers I used to used on Fraser and James, greatly relieved to no longer have the responsibilty of making them look respectable.  We thought it would be a good way to get to know people if the two of them went to a Nigerian barber.  Howver, a Nigerian himself advised them not to. The custom here is for men to have scalpshort haircuts and the equipment is not always cleaned as well as it could be so it's safer and more hygenic to have your own set of clippers.  A friend asked a barber to get some and last night I tried them out on Fraser.

Have you ever been in the situation where you wish you hadn't started something but the only way is onwards?  The first cut, even with the single attachment fixed, was more like a shave than a haircut.  I tried to confine it to a very short back and sides but once Fraser saw it he decided the only way was to cut the whole lot that length.  After screwing up my courage I obliged, with James extremely thankful that I hadn't tried out the cutters on him first.  I won't put up a photo (some things are best left to the imagination) but now it's like living with a convict and James begged me to take them to school today. 

Apart from hair clippers I thought you might be interested in a few of the little frustrations of life in Nigeria.  One of the biggest is matches.  We have a gas cooker.  I've never used fewer than three and often many more matches to light it.  Some break before they light, some flare then immediately die, some just don't light at all and all the stuff at the tip scrapes off.  I am so thankful for my Swedish army firesteel.  Not only is it far more efficient, it's much more exciting to light the gas with a shower of sparks.

A few days ago I made some tomato soup on the gas with my trusty pressure cooker.  All went well until it was time to use the hand blender.  No electricity.  Good job I'd already bought a potato masher.  Life in Nigeria is a matter of thinking ahead and not taking little things such as consistent mains power for granted like we can in the UK but I love it here.