NEVER HAD TO LOOK FOR LOVE

I have been reading a lot about girl-boy relationships lately, even written a couple of posts on the subject myself. The material on this topic will never run out and I will never get tired of reading about relationships, and issues concerning it nor writing about it. Now I don’t want to get too personal and write about my issues here but I would like to say a few things concerning a few things.

I do not think there is anything wrong with a woman going after a man. Notice I did not use the word ‘chasing’. If a man has indicated that he is not interested in you, as a grown- ass woman you swallow the rejection and move on. The way I see it, it’s like being turned down after a job interview. As a matter of fact, I intensely admire women who go after the man of their dreams- it shows great organizational skills and burning ambition to know what you want, identify it amidst a sea of prospects and pursue it. Yes, we all 'know'(read: have been told) that all men like the thrill of the chase but I don’t think any man would disqualify a woman as a potential simply because she called him first or responded to his text within 30 seconds. The key is subtlety.

Now I’m no relationship expert, neither do I have any qualifications in psychology or what not, but I am a woman and you don’t get to my age without learning a thing or two about boys, girls and chemistry. As far as I am concerned, we usually know within 5 minutes of close contact with another person whether they are someone who we can ever see ourselves being with or admit to being in a relationship with. Yes, just five minutes. For some people it’s the voice- a person’s voice speaks volumes about them. Some people claim that a deep, booming voice in a man indicates that he’s a natural leader and able to influence people and wield a position of authority. Hence any squeaky-voiced contenders may as well fall back.

I was reading a recent post by my good friend at http://thirdworldprofashional.blogspot.com, which sort of inspired my current post. She was talking about men who string you along but do not want to marry you; I had so much to comment on that I decided to simply consolidate all my comments here because a lot of it is not directly related.
A friend of mine was telling me about this amazing man who she ‘dated’ for 7 months but never introduced to any one as her boyfriend. The reason being that he did not embody those values which she believed her significant other should possess as standard. This had nothing to do with religion, ethnicity, looks or even financial standing. It had a lot to do with the fact that, she came from a family of strong, commanding men and this guy, ‘M’ was the complete opposite of these things. He was a bit too sensitive, obedient and forthcoming. A little bit too adoring, reverential and had a bit too much time for her. She was used to the man wearing the trousers in the relationship and the woman having to seek the man’s face and beg for his time. It wasn’t that M did not have a job, quite the contrary he was a manager in his workplace and oversaw 12 staff- why did he have to time to spend 4 hours of his working day speaking to her on the telephone?

Another friend of mine told me how she met this gorgeous tottie at a house party and decided that he was exactly her type. He had the rugged good looks, the quirky individual style that involved the wearing of a lot of peg-leg trousers and bowler hats as well as being a music producer of techno and electro in his spare time. Let no one ever call him the typical Nigerian boy. She set about trying to present herself in the most girl friend-ly way possible- no foul language in his presence, cooking 5-course meals, confiding her deepest darkest secrets to make him do the same. This guy being the non-typical Nigerian boy, told her straight up that he had decided within 5 minutes of meeting her that she was not girlfriend material. Ouch, some of you may say, but this isn’t the most tragic thing on earth. It just confirms my theory that if a guy wants to ’wife’ you or ‘girlfriend’ you, even an infinite number of burnt meals prepared for him, him being 22 years old and unemployed or how many small, petite and light skinned girls he’s dated in the past even though you are a tall Amazon goddess with hips to rival Oprah Winfrey will not change his mind( and vice versa).I do not know the rhyme or reason for this.

Seeing is believing they say and I had to move back to Nigeria for two and a half years to confirm for myself the heights which to which some women will go in order to secure a band around their finger. This particular point is inspired by a post on a blog I just recently started following- http://www.miafarradaily.blogspot.com/- where the author was ranting about thirsty women and market spoilers, laugh out loud funny but it did get me thinking. Thinking about women who simply do not want to be alone, the thought of singledom is as severe as a sentence of life imprisonment with hard labour. Now I am not here to preach all that nonsense about being secure in your own company and enjoying being single as I believe everybody has their own threshold for loneliness . Some people rely on affection and attention and would simply expire if they didn’t have a steady stream of pingers on their case( where did I read that men don’t bother to actually call women nowadays except you’re their girlfriend) whilst others are happy to chat with men one at a time until they make that connection. I won’t tell you which category I fall into!

The first category of women are those that always have a pot boiling on the back burner so they never run out of samples to pick from if push comes to shove. The second category of women are more laid back leaving everything to fate knowing that the more you look the less you see and sometimes you cannot really engineer these things. I do know one thing for sure and it is that our resumes cannot be carbon copies of each other’s. Different men are attracted to different things and it is not necessarily the fact that you don’t wear short and tight dresses and have never stepped into a nightclub in your life nor that you are an almost-Michelin-starred chef and can whip up a three course meal with a blindfold on and one hand in your pocket that will make a man take you seriously. Sometimes these things are just your luck(destiny/fate/God's will/karma- delete according to your faith).
PS: I’m no saint but I’ve never had to look for love.

10 years older

I remember when my mum was 45 and I said to her 'mum wow you look so good even though you're almost 50', meaning this as a compliment.She turned to me with a look of steel and said 'even 49 is very far from 50'.And today,12 years later I myself have come to realise that this is the gospel. Last September I returned to the UK to start my masters programme in International law. For some reason, I imagined that I was going to have an identical experience to my crazy 3 years as an undergraduate in London.Nothing could be further from the truth!
Back in those days, I was known as a party-rider, and this was before the expression was patented by 9ce in his song. I was partying 2 weeks before my exams,the night before a 9am shift at work. My middle initial was S for spontaneous. I had no idea what the notion of planning entailed.Schedules were a foreign word, I never experienced tiredness and if anyone's swagger needed to be gingered, I was the go-to person. The library was a social spot for us in our first and second years, in fact it was so bad that my friend Adanna used to wear a disguise in the library just so I could not find her and come and distract her.
Fast forward to 3 years after my graduation from university, and 18 months after I wrote my last examination at the Nigerian law school.I am a post graduate student and even 24 year olds are positively new borns as far as I'm concerned.I'm consumed with a burning ambition like I have never had in my life. I curse my laid back attitude whilst I was at uni and I really wish I'd done better in my 1st and 2nd years.
If only I could get into a time machine, I would go back to my summers of lounging at home, channel surfing and party hopping and do an internship. I would have devoted more time to developing my writing, penning that novel that I've dreamt about authoring since I was 10 years old.I would have sought out and read all the literary classics from Jane Eyre to Things Fall Apart to Wuthering Heights.I would have done more travelling and explored this big wide world around me which I only started doing in 2007.I'm proud to say I now have 7 countries under my belt!
My little cousin who's 17, started university in Ghana last September and the last time I went out clubbing with my flatmate in Nottingham, I was easily 8 years older than everybody on the dance floor. I could not get myself to move my body, it was a parody. Whenever someone calls me to go out, I look first at my warm bed and then at my delicious half-read novel and I answer negative. I have outgrown those days of grooving left right and centre. I am a job-seeker,I am one-half of an adult relationship, I am an invitee to the 10 year reunion at my High school and I am currently receiving queries from my grandparents about whether they will be alive when I walk down the aisle.
I think it's important to recognize that life comes in stages though. I enjoyed my youth, I tried everything at least once, I discovered myself, I changed my ideology oh at least 5 times, I made some friends, fought some and lost some. I lived on my own, then moved in with my parents. I lived abroad then lived in Nigeria, made my own money and then taxed my parents. I met the wrong boy and then met the right man.Life is a metamorphosis, we just have to embrace the next stage.

Love is all around us...or not?

Nobody has ever successfully defined love to the satisfaction and agreement of the world at large. Someone once said it is a feeling that you feel that you've never felt before. That could be any number of other emotions though...even hate.

People 'fall out of' love too. This, I've never particularly understood. If love is the emotion felt by a mother towards her child then love is unconditional and pure, right? There isn't any one thing the child does to earn the love. A child can earn his mother's trust or respect by conducting himself in a certain way but apparently you do not get to experience what a mother's love feels like until you become a mother yourself.I guess this automatically expels all the men in the world from experiencing this particular brand of love. And all the women who never have children.

The other kind of love that I am aware of is between a man and a woman. The one between Leonardo Di Caprio and Kate Winslet in Titanic that made him risk his life in the face of certain death by drowning to go and rescue her from her flooded cabin. Or was it the other way around? This kind of love is fierce( I've been told), it literally burns a hole through your soul and has a lot to do with the physical too. How then can we tell the difference between love and lust? Is lust a certain kind of love?

Then there's this other theory about 'love grows'. Back in the days, our grandparents and some people's parents said to them, there was nothing like dating or getting to know someone. It was really about finding a suitable man or woman and getting married. The love was sure to follow if the woman cooked the food in the right way and gave him kids of the right sex. Conversely if the man had a sustainable source of income and paid the brideprice upfront (no credit), all the boxes were ticked.The rationale behind this was that you do not stay with a person for 10, 20 years and not find something to love about them. We modern people today call this convenience. The last resort for the people who get to a certain age and think: 'that's it, the search is over'. See 'tick tock , now is the time' post.

Is love an emotional or a physical feeling? We're all familiar with pain but that too, it seems, is psychological. If you stick a pair of scissors into the leg of a paralysed person 5 times they do not feel it. Is there still pain but they don't feel it? Or is there actually no pain at all? I wonder if love is a bit like that, you close your eyes, put up a wall, disqualify the person but it's still there...only that you can't feel it.

No but yeah but no but yeah.

There are two kinds of people in this world. Those people who say yes and mean yes and those who say yes and mean no or maybe. How can you tell them apart? You can't.

Just how honest is too honest? As a straight shooter, tell-it-like-it-is advocate I am constantly under fire to watch my mouth and be more diplomatic in expressing my thoughts and feelings. As a rule, I do not volunteer my opinion on sensitive issues or to sensitive people unless asked. Questions such as 'how do I look?', 'Am I fat?' are best directed at other people unless you really do want to know the answer. I don't see the point of lying unless I am going to get into trouble for telling the truth and so the only two people I tell fibs to are the traffic police and my mother.

Is it true that sometimes people ask you an apparently straightforward question but don't really want you to be honest with them? This concept really baffles me. If someone asks me whether they look fat and they look like a right hippo, they can rest assured that all their doubts on the issue will be allayed and what they will come to possess is the total knowledge that they are fat.

I have a friend who is a self-confessed two face and she is proud of it. In order to avoid hurting your feelings she will tell you the very thing you want to hear and then tell her friends the truth when your back is turned. I never ask her opinion on anything.

I have another friend who finds it extremely difficult to say no. This would be a wonderful personality trait if she actually intended to do the thing she has promised you. If I cannot do something I usually say no upfront because I'd rather do that than have to avoid phone calls and make up excuses and generally be a dodgy fellow.

I understand that you should sugar coat things sometimes,I'm not completely tactless. You should refuse the impossible nicely. An acquaintance asked me once to bring back an overweight suitcase for them because they already had two bags and I had just one. Plus they were leaving that night and I was leaving in a couple of days. Alarm bells immediately started going off in my head and I could all but taste prison food in my mouth as I was having flash forwards of the people at customs finding pure cocaine in the lining of the bag.I told him N to the O plus I do not know you from Adam. Okay not in those words, but I did make sure he knew why I refused to do it. I could not vouch for what the bag contained and I was not prepared find out.

I told this story to a friend and she said I should have said yes at first and proceeded to screen all my calls till the appointed time of departure. This appears to be expected behaviour.Another time my colleague asked me to take some money to her sister in the UK because she wanted to save money on the bank transfer charges. Once again I had flash forwards of forgetting the money in Abuja or leaving my hand bag on the plane and having to explain how I came to no longer be in possession of the cash. I could not do it. I did not think I knew her well enough for her not to think I was a liar and a thief and every other name in her language she would certainly call me if I told her I had lost the 2000 pounds. Of course I politely declined outlining the above explanation and what do you know this woman starts arguing with me talking about how rude it is to say no pointblank, how can I say we do not know each other that well and all sorts of Christian Religious Studies.

I am now confused,should I reverse and rewrite 20 something odd years of honest intentions and forthright behaviour just to please the faint hearted or are there many more people like me who just wanna hear to truth and have a place to turn for a good dose of it?


image:toddlaurensinclair.wordpress.com

Can't groom? Won't groom!

When I was younger, I was the ugly duckling; my sister and brothers were relatively alright so beautiful, spectacle-free and didn't look like oil had been withheld from their diets. And I knew it. I really don't know which is worse, being an unattractive kid and not knowing it( a bit like those people on American idol who claim everybody in their community thinks they have the voice of an angel and Simon Cowell just goes ' that was the worst rendition of Celine Dion I ever heard and I'm just pressing O on my speed dial for my Otologist)or being an unattractive kid and there being no doubt about it, being reminded of it by the whispered comments around me and being confronted by it in the mirror on a daily basis.To compound matters I was an NSK you know, a non-smiling kid who was nicknamed 'serious baby'- the prefix has been dropped and I now go by the name Baby within my family- because I never laughed. According to my mother there was nothing anyone could do that could evoke the sound of laughter from my throat, all I did was read and not eat.
Don't worry this was 15 years ago.

As a result of getting my fair wear of the invisibility cloak quite early, I was forced to develop other traits to get noticed or seem interesting.I never made too much of an effort with my appearance because I didn't think you could hide the obvious. My now-legendary sarcastic tongue developed to keep critics of my lanky frame at bay. My quick tongue also ensured that before you asked me whether I could count how many fingers you had up with my four-eyes I already had you in stitches of laughter and gasping for breath. Ask my sister, I'm the funniest one. I did not pluck, tweeze, shave or do anthing to tame the forest I had above my eyes until my first year at university when one of my good friends referred to in my 'friends stop you from making friends..' post positively manhandled me onto her bed and deployed her arsenal of eyebrow care products to give me the natural arch that I currently sport.

I bought my first compact powder in 2005, not because I did not know what it was or where to get it but because I will just never be that girl who wears a full face of make-up, day in, day out and whips out a mirror to double-check that the war paint is still on at the traffic lights, during lectures and even in the darkened cinema with their camera flash as light.My friends say to me: E, you look the same wearing make-up as you do not wearing make up and I choose to take it as a compliment even though I know that what they mean is a bit more blush and lipgloss would make you look better!I will just never be that girl who spends hours and hours curling her hair before she goes to bed or hundreds of thousands of naira buying Brazillian or Italian hair or hundreds of pounds waxing my whole body or sheds buckets of tears whilst affixing fake eyelashes or hours and hours in the shower doing God-knows-what-and-can-someone-please-tell-me-what-girls-do-in-the-shower-for-upwards-of-10-minutes?!My make-up regime during the day is simple: no make up and brush my eyebrows. Especially under the unforgiving Nigerian sun and since I can never really locate my oil-blotting sheets for my face so its easier to just run my palm over my make up free nose when it gets oily.
Guys say they like the au naturel look but we all know men lie and are secretely intimidated by the high-maintenance chic. Yes?No?

I do admire my friends when they spend hours doing their hair and make up and come out looking a million bucks for their effort and the Brazillian hair sways to the beat of the music when they dance and their skin glows under the flash of a 10 mega pixel camera and I do wish I could be bothered to get nail extensions because they look so good on my cousin but I have come to accept that sadly, that will never be me. I have always been the quickest to get ready on any night out with my friends and almost always end up waiting at least 30 minutes for the next person to be even remotely close to being ready but that only means they can pass the curling irons or MAC eyeshadow to the next person on the queue and the wait begins all over. I just really tend to think it's not that serious and besides I'd rather know that on my off days when I'm just popping out to visit a friend or to get take away chicken and chips I dont look like an extra from Animal farm and I can sleep and wake up next to 'The One' without my make up bag under my pillow.

Friends stop you from making friends.....ponder that!

I have never been the most friendly of people. Synonyms used to describe me include 'stand-offish', 'snobbish', 'rude' so it kind of comes as a shock to me to realise I have quite a healthy number of friends. At every stage in my life and at work or school I always seem to make friends who , when they get close enough, end up thinking that I actually am the sh*t, the urine ...ah you get the drift. More recently though, to be specific, in my first year at university I made more friends within the months of September and October than probably in all my life.
It all started in my first week.



On my first day at Queen Mary, University of London I met someone on the train to my 'get acquainted with the library' event who revealed quite earnestly to me that it had been/was her first day at Imperial College to which I replied enthusiastically: "me too!" cue nervous first meeting, shared experience laughter. She was the first person I met in the university network and the dominoes just kept falling.


In quick succession I met 5 girls at Queen Mary who ended up being my best friends for the entire 3 years at university second to none and who in no particular order I proceeded to get not-the-best first year grades with, get banned from the library and get embroiled in quick fire correspondence with the head of the law library with, run down the clubhouse formerly known as Establishment with (everytime missing the one o' clock free entry curfew and having to pay £15 each) with, drink all night with and turn up at my part time job drunk(alone).....ah fun times. In the midst of all of this I was so cocooned by this close knit blanket that I hardly ever had a solo moment. Even going to the bathroom we would be 3 or 4 at the same time in our loud Nigerian accents causing a stir and generally being very intimidating to would-be joiners to the crew.Ahhh, fun times.



Fast-forward 5 years and I'm back in the university system trying to get an LLM in far away Nottingham. Okay it's less than 2 hours away from London but the life I'm living couldn't be more different from what I remember of my heady 'uni' days or even my days at law school where 3 of my above mentioned besties came with me to wreak an even higher degree of havoc on Bwari society. Yes, I am now one of those people who turns up at the supermarket alone and buys one apple, one banana and 6 eggs -yes, one of those people who I used to look upon with pity and wonder how they could carry on with life without even a shadow. But the plus side is I actually have time to prepare for seminars and (gasp) contribute to every single class without a friend of mine sniggering in the background saying under their breath 'allow it, and allow those who have sense to talk' or passing me notes for the duration of the lecture and thus ensuring that I stay distracted enough not to gain one.single.thing.
I am actually able to look upon my neighbours in the cafe or in class and because I have no one with me actually notice things about them- a bag Ive seen in the shops, a book they have which Ive read that prompts me to smile and say "Hi, my name is Erenma you're in my Human Rights class, right...." even though they aren't a friend of a friend and no, certainly not from Nigeria.

Tick tock: now. is. the. time

Hey guys, yes for the first time I am actually addressing my audience directly. This is because I am actually about to seek people's opinions on a matter of extreme importance. This matter of which I am about to blog is a brand new phenomenon that has reared it's head out of nowhere and is so intense in its heat that everyone my age now has to sleep with the window open- the roof is most definitely on fire.
If you have not guessed by now, I am talking about the ubiquitous subject of marriage.

Since when did I become a person of marriageable age? Honestly I can tell you that for the longest time I kidded myself, or perhaps I genuinely didnt think I was qualified, that marriage was a far-off notion that I did not have to worry about. At least not just yet. Oh yes, I had friends who were single, some had boyfriends but you know the sort of thing where you are friends with the boyfriend, you go out as a group but I had not been to a wedding in over 5 years! All the weddings I had previously attended were amongst people in the older generation: you know, like my aunties and uncles or my older cousins who made me prefix their names with the word 'aunty' because they were that much older than me.....
Things are not the same. All of a sudden now, it's like I've just received an avalanche of overdue memos- when are you going to settle down? How come you are still single? You know you should be more focused and Why aren't you giving any thought to marriage? The most shocking thing is that I have been to more weddngs in the last two years than in my whole lifetime combined! And even more shocking is the fact that these brides and bridegrooms are like, my age.
Stay so cool. So every other day I have conversations with my girlfriends about themselves or about their friends dreading their next birthday because they are turning 28 on their next birthday. I think 28 is the unwritten point of no return where every girl who is not plannng a wedding or engaged to be married will officially get suicidal.


Since when did not having marriage on your mind make you an unserious person? Don't get me wrong I would love to get married asap but not at all costs. I have often fantasised about meeting that special man who sweeps me off my feet and then the surprise engagement and then the wedding. But these are all step by step right? I mean how okay is it for a girl(or a guy) to proclaim that s/he is looking for a partner. I mean, shouldn't it just happen? When you force it, is there not a possibility that you might overlook essential things like compatibility and how you get along simply because you have found 'a man who wants to get married and has a good job'? Doesn't it potentially put off a guy who may otherwise be your ideal guy if every second you remind him that if he is not ready for marrriage you aren't interested.
It makes marriage seem a bit like an ambition and a competition, the fastest to the aisle....forgetting that life carries on after the wedding day, yes the ring is on your fourth finger and your 28th birthday is in two weeks but does the man have a face, and a heart and a soul?

so I fell in love

Love is not something I would recommend to anybody to do, be in or feel.Why? Because there is absolutely nothing to be gained from it. When its going well you end up acting stupid and out of character, ditching all your best friends and totally making another human the centre of your universe. When you fall out of it, it gets worse- you hate yourself, you hate the person and you fall into this deep black hole. You think you have recovered, you meet someone else but then ironically they remind you of the one you lost.

Love- I've never really believed in 'the one'. I believe there can be several 'ones' for everybody. As a matter of fact I have 3 , 4 or even 5 soulmates. The problem is that people tend to irritate me, or bore me or annoy me thus the minute I find someone who I can remotely go for 24 hours without wanting to punch the lights out of them, I feel like Christopher Columbus when he discovered America. The thing is though, I do not do commitment which is sort of a hinderance to the longevity of any budding feelings that may rear their heads between me and an intended. There's always something that holds me back. Once it was the age- he was 3 years younger. The other time it was his complexion- much too Igbo-coloured. More recently it is his location- miles and miles away from me. Are these genuine reasons why I havent settled down? Or just flimsy excuses to hide behind whilst I carry on with my bohemian, lone existence?

Love- people always ask other people whether they have been in love before but I always retort with 'what's love?' But now I know that when you are in love, you just know. Everything is perfect, I have less fights with my mother, I start to believe more in myself, I plan for my future and include him in it only to be brought crashing back to earth, fall through and land in hell. And I'm still mourning.

Love.

Determination

She had an insolent pout and was unapologetic about it.
The tilt of her head showed pride and a hint of aggression.
She was a go getter, proactive to the core, She was not going to let anything stand in her way.
This was me....this used to be me

They say he that is down need fear no fall.
But I feel lower than low
My heart is in my foot
My head is filled with vacuum
I am numb, all I perceive is nothingness
It is his fault, he did this to me
All by being himself , it is his way
consigned me to these frenzied feelings of self-doubt, self-loathing, self-induced torture
And I feel this way every month

Abuja, Abuja youre boring me to tears

So I packed my bags and left London on the 11th of June 2008 where Id lived since early 2003, so almost my entire adult life.I had mostly lived on my own in a rented flat, I had a job the whole time i was there. I loved shopping, I loved dressing up, i hated studying. But the fact was that i had studied law, my options were limited and my degree results were not out; I could not possibly predict my grades because it could have gone any way.

So my mother persuades me to move back to Nigeria and enrol at the Nigerian law School in Abuja.i was apprehensive at first, wasn't sure what to expect but i was also looking forward to a new life. Thus began a new era of my existence in Abuja. Ive been waiting for Abuja to sweep me into its bosom but so far its only succeeded in making me a recluse. There aren't enough hang out spots to make it worth my while to actually dress up, put some make up on and head out into the night- or the day, if necessary.

I wish we had more shopping malls.Ive been known to snap out of the deepest depths of depression on entering Topshop. Just looking at the clothes and feeling the potential of the night used to be enough. Id look forward to going shopping from school, from work, from a hangover...it cured everything.

Silverbird looks promising.They have a Mango franchise whose doors are still shut and it says opening soon after at least two months that Ive known about its existence.Okay, what about bars at least, if only I had the capital Id open up a proper swanky bar where you can go and dress up and have a drink without feeling like you are in a night club or on the other hand like you're in an isi ewu joint. Abuja needs an in-between venue like this......

I will be patient, maybe it will occur to someone, because formerly Abuja was the choice city for top politicians and civil servants.However, now, their children have come over. We 20- somethings need an avenue to relax without feeling like were amongst okada riders or without having to go to a hotel where we feel like shalams or without having to go to a nightclub and have our parents tut- tut when we stumble in the next morning hungover and smelling of smoke.

Dream big

Ive often wondered if its really true what they say about "if you think it, you can do it" Is is determination that pays you off with achievement or success? Or is it pure luck? Or is it destiny? I started off thinking that destiny controlled everything e.g if you were born to be poor you would be and that some others were destined to be kings and so they were.

Somewhere along the line Ive switched gears and Im now thinking that if you put your mind to something, to a dream, hard enough you can actually achieve it.The most vivid example is with my graduating grades which were starkly different from the grades I started off with in my 1st year. Now, i dont want to go into detail about exact figures but somewhere in the middle of my final year i decided to start looking for jobs. I was shocked that majority of the big shot jobs wanted 2.1 or higher! At this stage, I decided to double my efforts and it paid off big time.
Another casestudy is Barrack Obama, who would have dared to believe that a black man, a person of Afro-American extraction could actually be the first citizen of the USA.It would have been unthinkable even 10 years ago.

Now I have a new dream, after much consideration and three weeks in the business i have decided to pursue a career as a trainee solicitor in England.Now if I could go back to 4 years ago, Id go back and join as many extra curricular/charity/ voluntary work as I could. I would also have worked harder in my 1st and 2nd years so that my grades would be a bit more consistent. However, I will not cry over spilt milk, I can only hope and pray that my determination alone will see me through.