on marriage family and compromise

On marriage, family and compromise

The word on everyone's lips in London this week is marriage. The

Conservatives are going to change the tax system in order to give

every married couple with children what amounts to twenty pounds a

week in order to encourage people to get married and stay married.

They are incensed that the current system seems to privilege single

parents over married couples. Listening to the debate swirling- and

Gordon Brown made quite a good fist of it, using the examples of

widows or women abandoned by their husbands as examples; I wondered

why it had to be one or the other. Can we not just work to ensure that

every child in the UK gets the support they need from the state

whether they come from single, double, triple, quadruple or zero

parent families? I suppose that's me seeking the middle ground

again....

On the subject of compromise, I've often wondered if Hillary and Obama

could run on the same ticket- that would surely be an unbeatable

combination and ensure a Democrat in the White House in 2008....is it

too far fetched a proposition?

Still on the subject of the middle ground, Nigerians had brash, vulgar

Obasanjo as President for 8 years and we all vilified him for his

bull-in-a china shop, talk before you think ways; now we seem to have

a more thoughtful, measured president in Yar'adua and we are already

dubbing him GO SLOW UMORU...a beg my brothers and sisters, can we hold

fire a while? I hope I do not eventually have to eat my words...

It's summer and the avalanche of friends and relatives from Nigeria

and the US begins- my phone is constantly ringing- an aunt there, an

old classmate here, some cousins elsewhere. I can see that the next

few weeks will be very busy- what with picking people from Heathrow

and trying to follow badly given directions all over in London in the

spirit of family and friendship....

On the subject of family, I had a call from a friend in Nigeria last

week. I'd heard that his father had died a few week before but had

struggled with whether to call or not knowing that their relationship

was virtually non-existent- him having more or less abandoned my

friend, his siblings and their mother many many years ago. When my

friend called last week, he was indignant " You no hear say my Papa

die? Na wa for you O! Which kind friend you be?" I apologized and

promised to send a little something to help with the funeral expenses

as I was obviously not going to be able to attend the funeral.

Apparently the siblings are all rallying round to give him a

"befitting" burial. I bit my tongue to stop myself from asking my

friend why he was putting himself to all that trouble after everything

the man had put them through. But I refrained. I guess the Nigerian

position is that your father is your father but I'm afraid I struggled

in this case....

I'm reading Welcome to Everytown: A Journey into the English Mind,

which is philosopher Julian Baggini's attempt to identify a national

English philosophy. He does this by going to live in Rotherham,

identified by a market survey company as most typical of the national

population profile. I'm enjoying it even if I quibble with some of his

conclusions....

On Sunday I was able to pick up Helen Oyeyemi's The Opposite House and

a signed copy of Biyi Bandele's Burma Boy at the South Bank Centre

even though I missed the reading proper- but that's a whole other

story. I loved Biyi's The Street which captured the sights and sounds

(apologies to CNN) of Brixton and am looking forward to getting my

teeth into his fictionalized account of a Nigerian soldier serving in

Burma...

Finally, it was good to see Monica Arac de Nyeko win the Caine Prize.

I met her briefly once a few years ago and there was something about

her quietly unpretentious, sedate but mischievious ways that I liked.

The humour in her "brave" story The Jambula Tree about the

relationship between two young girls in Uganda underlines that. That