Making finger-licking Chicken

This column is entirely about making you a well-rounded being. This means covering your appearance, your accent, stopping you from picking your nose, letting you in on what your workmates/classmates are saying behind your back and also giving you some vital skills. Today, like we’ve done before, we go into furthering your culinary skills. Your […]

How to Be a Good Neighbour

Many times in our adult life, we find ourselves plagued by self-doubt. As children, things like whether our favourite pink shirt matched our favourite purple trousers and mauve shoes didn’t bother us; ok, I stand corrected. It turns out certain people were fashion-enthusiasts even as babies and cried more from mummy forcing them to wear […]

Dealing With Love

This column is all about suggesting, sometimes in strong terms, practical ways of making your life better. And easier. And making you that person that people’s eyes brighten around, not because of the copious amounts of alcohol they’ve been chugging down but because of how people are fascinated by your company. Taxi drivers, the butcher, […]

How To Live Large in 2012

The beautiful New Year is here and the flowers and frowns of 2011 have already been handed out. The beauty about a new year is that we generally start it super-charged, willing the sun to shine brighter, whistling Westlife ballads and holding onto a yellowish, crumpled paper on which we hastily scribbled all our resolutions […]

Christmas: The Real Story Behind It

My Grandma, bless her soul, had a gift for storytelling. Every other Christmas, she’d gather us round and tell us what she said was the true story of Christmas, one stripped of all the glam added to the one we see on TV and read in books. Long time ago, there lived a fairly rotund […]

The life of a mast

Many times in life, you’ll wake up and find masts that don’t belong to you in your backyard or at your radio station. I spent many of my formative years studying physics and agriculture, so I recall that masts grow in moist areas and in areas of good loam soil. Loam soil because it has […]

Things UMEME Has Added To Our Vocabulary

Things UMEME has added to our vocabulary Every other day we come up with a new expletive to use when referring to the entity charged with keeping our homes and work-places lit. Be that as it may, the baby is being thrown out with the bath water. In all this, we never stop to thank […]

Corporate bureaucracy kills the simple things of office life

If you’ve worked for a company for some time, you know that the true beauty of any company is in its bureaucracy. You simply cannot walk up to the locker and pick pens…no. You need to go to Hadijah because she has the pen that signs the permission slip that grants you access to the […]

Who deserves a raise at work

I’ve never been a boss at a work place. The palm reader I went to said I’d be boss in a few years so it won’t be long now; “Boss Peter, coming to a workplace near you”. I imagine it is very hard being a boss. When do you allow employees to go to pee? […]

Coping With Powerlessness

The dark ages are upon us. Run for the hills. That would work if the hills weren’t covered in darkness too. To avoid going home to a dark house and the sounds of mice playing hide and seek in the bathroom, the recent power cuts have us staying at work longer and subsequently watching soaps […]