Author Archives: Lionel Stanbrook

Ahem My last few days of the year at work saw a definite improvement in my social life. This had absolutely nothing to do with getting a negative result for my first ever (to my knowledge) HIV test, offered to all the Bank’s employees every year. My hearing was also examined and found normal, much […]

Ahem The rainy season here in the Cote d’Ivoire should have finished in October at the latest, but there were still regular thunderstorms throughout the month during which rain would hammer down for hours at a time, turning unmade roads into massive mudslides and making gurgling rivers of roadsides, culverts, and storm drains. On the […]

Ahem Some weeks ago while in France, I was dragging an old double mattress out to the car, carelessly using the fingertips of my hands to pull it along the ground since it had no handles, when I suddenly lost all feeling in the top third of my left index finger, which promptly and rather […]

Ahem Sailing and I have never been close. My brother was the sailor of the family, while I stuck to cross channel ferries and the odd canoe. But the faint call of the marine had been more recently amplified by a friend’s tales of calm transparent lagoons, wide vistas and sunsets with lighthouses, welcoming bays […]

Ahem I have been to the Royaume Congo, a famous nightclub close to where I first lived in Abidjan. After warming my hands by a fire of cartons, pallets and other street rubbish outside on the corner, I listened to some energetic Congolese Rumba with some Ghanaian friends. I enjoyed the music although the place […]

Ahem, A calmer period followed the frenetic, cloud-bursting month of June, and the weather was more temperate as I again spent large amounts of time in my apartment with the windows open and the air conditioning off, being entertained by Netflix material and live streaming from ITV and BBC, to which I am indebted for […]

Ahem I’ve been busy. My mother occasionally used to say that there was “no rest for the wicked” and that “the devil makes work for idle hands”. She would also sometimes tell me to “have some gumption”. I recalled these expressions on the 17th anniversary of her death, when I was particularly busy and stretched […]

Ahem While I have been very comfortable over the last five months in my tiny studio with its view of the Plateau and under the daily flightpath of ten million bats, it was doing me no good to spend so much time in such a restricted space. Shortly before my long business visit to India […]

Ahem, With all the excitement of Alli’s visit at the end of last month, which we both treated more as a holiday than as spousal site inspection, the beginning of the month of April had a bereft look. I forced myself back into a solitary life, a compulsory choice as the work was unremitting and […]