I got stuck in Eket once with my Julius Berger Cessna 441 after I had jumped ship to work for zee Chermans, when my rotary-wing former colleagues kindly offered me their hospitality for the night, starting with that foul-mouthed parrot and carrying on with the bar, "Thermy," Peter Dove, and the rest of the gang .... It was, umm, interesting! Was Stacey there too then, or did I just imagine him?
At one point one of the local Lagos girlfriends used one of those state-of-the-art sewing machines that could reproduce designs, to make a clock face with " hell" in the same type-face and yellow color as "Shell." I didn't have the guts to put it in the bar in Isolo, but the guys in PH were happy to have it in House One.
That's where the two ex-pats were both bragging about their clever girlfriends, so clever that they were studying computer programming (with the usual funding from their boyfriends). It turned out to be the same girl collecting funding from two different boyfriends who were on back-to-back!
Another time, one ex-pat told another, "I really like the way you fixed up your basement." Yes, it turned out that he was keeping steady company with the other one's wife, since they were also on opposite rotations!
Then there was the pilot whose wife ran off with his accountant. Nothing daunted, he later proposed to his much younger girlfriend. She turned him down so that he ended up marrying her mother instead. PTSD, or just the dumb-ass? Who knows, and who cares?
We got all the characters passing through Lagos on transit. One afternoon "Mr Sport-f*cking" was there in the lounge, sprawled out asleep in a chair across from me as I read the Daily Telegraph from first page to last, both of us waiting for the magic hour of 18 when the bar opened. I glanced across then to see that his goolies were hanging out the bottom of his ragged shorts, when I began to think deeply about all the wrong choices that had set me upon my life's path ....