Cloudy and wet, with occasional flooding

I woke up Sunday morning … with no particular Blues song in mind. But the rain was chucking down and it was grey and gloomy. Does that count? 

Cars swimmimg past 69B Admiralty Way

Back to the studio, this time to shoot the Hause version of the ad we did yesterday. Most of the roads on Victoria Island were flooded axle-deep, but we had no idea of what was to come.

Hause isn’t that annoying repetitive lab rat music that you need handfuls of Ecstasy to tolerate; It’s that annoyingly repetitive desert rat music from North Nigeria that you need a steady supply of energy drinks to endure. Actually, Hause (rhymes with Yowzer) is the language spoken widely in the northern half of the country. The northerners are predominantly Muslim and are ostensibly far more conservative than their westernized counterparts, so instead of the buff Brothers P, we used a different guy in a variety of traditional outfits and the PSquare hip hop music was replaced with the vaguely Indian/Arabic music popular in them parts. I must confess, I began by quite liking it. Well, for the first few dozen times at least. The best part was watching the actor being taught to dance (it turns out he didn’t know how to). No Nureyev he, but we watched incredulously as he hopped around gamely and tried to cop bangra moves straight outta Bollywood from his long-suffering instructor, a short rather overweight middle aged guy in a white vest and tracksuit pants.

We broke for lunch, fried plantain (see blog of 22 May), rice and chicken cooked in a piquant red blister beetle sauce. At least, I think that’s what it was. One bite in and my tastebuds were too ravaged, my tongue too swollen and my lips too burnt to discern any flavour whatsoever. My eyes glazed over, welling with tears and I felt my cheeks glowing fiery red. Myself and Roddy were the only ones thus afflicted however, everyone else wolfed it down happily. Incredibly, the chicken itself was still tough – I was amazed that it hadn’t dissolved, smoking, into the sauce.

[Note to self/general warning: ALWAYS taste a soupcon first; Nigerian cooking uses chilli and curry the way we use salt and pepper]     

The earlier delay waiting for our leading man to learn to dance now became aggravated by the rain that had been increasing steadily in intensity and volume all morning. The noise on the tin roof of the studio was such that we couldn’t record live audio. We had to wait and hope for a lull in the storm, hopefully thunder-free, to grab the sound bites delivered to camera at the end of each successfully executed dance manoeuvre.  The lulls were about as infrequent as the successful dance steps. At 8.30pm, starving and exhausted, we gratefully piled into Halim’s waiting 4X4 to go home. We didn’t realize that major flooding had taken place all over Lagos, including Vic Island towards which we were headed.  

Vic Island under water as high as the door

SUV parking FAIL

The traffic was a disaster. Everywhere you looked was gridlock, with cars abandoned on all sides. People desperately roped in gangs of drenched passers-by to push their stricken vehicles through the water and out of the way. The trip from the studio to the Firehouse usually takes 40 minutes; this time it took us almost 4 hours. At one stage, the water was sloshing against the side of the car door that, luckily, proved to be watertight. We passed an expensive SUV hunkered down in the water at a crazy 45 degrees – the front had obviously gone into the open drain running down the length of the centre island. We inched homewards through the water, Roddy and I both blissfully ignorant that this was not, in fact, typical Lagos wet weather. It would be a few days before we realised that Halim was stoically navigating through the worst flooding they've had in a decade.