Christmas Day

Awake at 4am, like most of the kids in the UK, I guess! I think my body clock is programmed to wake me up early on Christmas Day, after 58 years of practice - or maybe it was the pack of dogs howling in the distance, or the Imam in the mosque callling the faithful to prayer, or it could have been the chill of the night, enhanced by the wceiling fan whirling like the blades of a hovercraft above my head, combined with the fact that Caroilne had acquired all the bed linen and left me exposed to the elements

The early mornings are pleasantly cool at this time of year - about16 degrees I would guess. For us this is definitely T-shirt weather, but the locals muffle up and use face masks to avoid breathing in the early morning fog - probably quite wisely as, from its tang, it probably contains carcinogens from  the burning last night of plastic bags full of rubbish. It is a smell that lingers in the air, tainting your clothes and embedding itself into your nostrils or relevant receptors of the brain - probably one of the mental scarrings that I will remember Nigeria by till my dying day..

We stayed in till lunchtime and enjoyed skyping our friends and family back home -did us a lot of good and restored our spirits - as did the bottle of Merlot that Lillian kindly left for us. My chicken dinner brought back culinary memories of the fantastic kind - and there's still enough left for chicken butties well into the New Year. Hurrah!