Last Night in Africa in All Good Things

It's my last night in Nigeria.

Tomorrow night this time we'll be embroiled in the hell that I have been assured is Lagos airport on a Friday night... I could tell many stories about the dramas and chaos involved in the planning for our exit from this country, but I'm too tired after living through it. I still don't know what's going to happen. Jerome is trying to upgrade us to business class to join the rest of the lawyers, because apparently that makes things at the airport slightly better; if not, Adolf our head security agent has promised not to leave our side while we brave the cauldron of economy check-in. The main problem is that we won't finish the arbitration until at least 6pm, and although you'd think we'd be fine being booked on the 11pm flight to England....apparently it'll take us well over an hour to get to the airport in the first place from where we are on the coast, and the check-in closes at 8pm. Check-in for the entire airport. Wtf???

Oh God, I don't even want to think about it.

This whole week has been hell. I've taken to charging around the parking lot twice a day in an attempt to get a smidgeon of exercise on either side of our 14-hour work days, and all the soldiers (with their enormous guns) know me by now. During our (very) short breaks in the day, I nip straight outside to sit in a corner in the sun beside the frangipani trees, much to the bemusement of all the Africans who think the sun is something to be avoided if at all possible. But the room we're incarcerated in is air-conditioned icy cold, and the blazing African sun is wonderful therapy for stress as well as for cold fingers. I'm averaging maybe 15 minutes a day in the sun, all put together, and my arms are already turning brown after a week. That's how strong it is. I love it. I've missed it.

The work has been seriously bad, although never again quite as bad as it was last Saturday. I've already broken the news to the office that I'll be taking the majority of the next two months off, since my wrist is in such pain, although they've already asked me if I'll do short jobs in Brussels, Munich and Barcelona in the first half of November. We'll see. Perhaps. It depends if Will can get my hands back into working order.

I have no idea how I'm going to get through tomorrow. I can hardly type. My arms feel like blocks of concrete rather than living flesh, and it's only thanks to the sun that I can feel anything at all. Heat therapy is truly miraculous.

Talking of Will, he told me during a WhatsApp conversation last night that he's considering returning to security work. He'd stopped it because being in that world, thinking that way, interfered with his art, but it's been hard for him this year with me gallivanting all over the world and him stuck in art school in England going nowhere. And then I think my coming to Africa with my own personal security team has also been a problem for him. It's usually him going to the dangerous places, AS the personal security... He says he thinks he can combine the two now. I hope so, for his sake.

His main former client has been trying constantly to woo him back. I keep finding postcards from her coming through the letterbox, dispatched from farflung places around the globe, as if rubbing his face in all the places he could have gone to. I hate her for many reasons, and this is just another. Still, as I keep reminding myself, I'M the one he married, the one who 'got' him, which she, with all her blonde perfection and millions in the bank, couldn't manage. She's the one who told him that she'd taken him out of her will for marrying me. (Personally, I think there's something very wrong with putting your bodyguard in your will to begin with, since if you're dead and he's still alive, the last thing you should be doing is rewarding him!)

I understand that he's restless, though, and to be honest, if he resumes that global life then it'll be easier for me to do all the travelling I want to do in the next year. I am very fixated on South America at the moment...the one continent left I haven't been to (well, along with Antarctica, which is close by).

But at the moment it's my last night in Africa. The half moon is gliding up through the palm trees outside my window, the airconditioner is clunking away in the corner as usual, and I'm about to put my room service tray outside the door and then enjoy my fabulous shower for the last time.

It feels like this has been my life forever. I was joking to Will last night that the Southern Sun feels like the Hotel California, since we can never, ever leave.....except by this time tomorrow we'll be gone.

I'm going to miss this place. I never dreamed that I'd have one of my 'homes' in Lagos, Nigeria, but it really has become home in the past two weeks. Time passes differently here. Two weeks counts for a lot more than it does in London - or Hong Kong or Dubai or Istanbul or Sydney or any of the other cities I've lived in this year.

Africa IS special.

I'm still happy to be going home, though....