Michael Logan

Novelist, Journalist and other things ending in -ist

Things Fall Apart

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I’m shamelessly borrowing the title of Chinua Achebe’s classic novel because it so aptly describes the way I’ve been feeling recently. This isn’t about relationships and your role in the community disintegrating. Rather, it’s about how recently I’ve been very aware of how fragile the human world is.

I’ve just finished The Day of the Triffids, in which nature quickly swallows up mankind’s infrastructure following the blinding of much of the human race. This idea is mirrored on a smaller scale in our flat, which is falling apart. We have leaks, problems with the water mains, power cuts, tiles that keep coming up, cupboard doors that keep falling off, phones that won’t be fixed no matter how much I tinker, toys that break, buttons falling off dresses, alarming gaping holes in the groin area of jeans (mine, so don’t get too excited) and countless other little niggles.

I’ve been spending a lot of my time running around after lots of the little things, but I’ve discovered owning a toolkit doesn’t automatically turn you into a handyman. I’m considering experimenting to see how quickly things would fall apart if I stopped my ham-fisted maintenance attempts. I wonder if Nats will accept me sitting very still on the sofa for a week to see if vines start to grow up my legs. Probably not, since she has roped me into doing this Insanity fitness programme, which has also made me understand how frail the body is. Quite frankly, a daily diet of push-ups, suicide jumps and jacks is making me feel older than my 41 years rather than turning back the clock.

Anyway, the point of this waffle is to share some links to pictures of abandoned cities and urban areas, which I came across while researching my current novel.

Weburbanist has stunning pictures of places such as the Kowloon Walled City outside Hong Kong, Oradour Sur-Glane in France and Kolmanskop in Namibia, where sand has filled up derelict buildings. Some of these towns would make fantastic settings for novels, so I’m bookmarking them all.

The same site also has images of derelict water parks, brain research facilities and psychiatric hospitals.

Derelict London has some great shots, including of Old Ford, which I am using as a location in the book I’m writing now. I need to get there for a visit to see if it is still there next to the high-end flats overlooking the River Lea.

Thanks to Gav and Perry for pointing out Shit London and Abandoned Scotland. The abandoned Arrochar Torpedo Testing Station is ideal for a location in the follow-up to Apocalypse Cow that is currently percolating in my mind.

This essay on ‘ruin porn’ delves into why we find these places so fascinating, and is illustrated with some great examples.

And finally, Abandoned America has more images from Matthew Christopher, who took some of the shots in the article above.

I’ve never placed too much value in objects, instead valuing experiences, and for me these images just reinforce that perception. Everything falls apart in the end.

Pratchett diary

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Just a quick one.

I’m writing a diary for Multi-Story about my experiences on the way to publication after winning the Terry Pratchett First Novel Prize with Apocalypse Cow. Latest entry is up here.

Limitless patience isn’t always a good thing

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If there was an Olympic discipline for waiting patiently, I am absolutely sure a Kenyan would win it, given the amount of training the average citizen has to go through every day.

I am in the process of trying to procure a birth certificate for our son Kristian, who was born on 13 December. On Tuesday, I went down to the city registry to begin the process, which I now realise will take a very, very long time.

The office itself looks like a paper bomb exploded. It is a tiny room in Nairobi City Hall, where every shelf is stuffed with old books piled high on one another. On every table are bundles of certificates, literally thousands of them, in no order whatsoever. The staff members have what can charitably be described as a leisurely approach, which involves drinking tea and eating chapatis while staring balefully at the scrum of people waving notification slips in an attempt to get their attention.

On the first day, I was sent away because the computers were down. On Wednesday, it took them an hour to establish they couldn’t find the certificate. This initial process involved a guy staring at the computer, typing in the notification number, staring at it again, typing the number, etc, until he wandered off to look for it. After leafing aimlessly through some bundles, he sent me off to Nairobi hospital so I could get the delivery note and help them find out who received the certificate.

An hour later, I return. They discover the guy who received the certificates isn’t there, and his phone is turned off (this is after another hour of waiting, and they only called him because I suggested). Off I go for lunch, with the promise they will look. An hour later I am back, only to find they are on a late lunch. They return 40 minutes late. Another woman then leafs through some papers, clearly unhappy at having to do her job.

She then tells me to come back tomorrow, when the guy should be there, and they will look again. At no point did anybody apologize for the loss, and the assumption was it was my issue to sort it out even though it was their mistake. When I explained they were making me run all over town to fix their mistake, I got a blank stare of the “why is this irritating mzungu annoying me” variety.

Throughout this all, there were at least 50 Kenyans going through similar grief. They all stood about, shaking their heads and telling me how bad it was. But not one of them was prepared to complain to the staff about the terrible system and their bad attitude.

Kenyans tell me all the time how pissed off they are that nothing works, but here’s the thing: the reason it doesn’t work is because you let it not work. If everybody in that office kicked up a stink, at the very least the employees would make an effort, if just for a quiet life. Yet it is the foreigners (including a London Somali lady who was having the same problem as me) that are left to complain. We can easily be dismissed as impatient interlopers who don’t understand Kenya, when all we are are people prepared to vocalize what everybody else is feeling.

So, Kenyans: if you want things to change, complain when it matters, instead of telling mzungus how terrible it is than looking faintly embarrassed when we do your complaining for you. If you guys had a bit less patience, the country would run better, and you wouldn’t build up five years of frustration that then suddenly explodes the way it did after the 2007 elections.

Feeling grateful for modern medicine

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It’s easy to take modern medicine for granted. We pop a pill or go under the knife, and just accept this is the way it should be.
I’ve had cause to think about it since Kristian, our four-week-old, was diagnosed with Pyloric Stenosis after three days of vomiting. It’s a condition that stops food passing through to the intestines, so he was becoming increasingly dehydrated and losing weight. Quite simply, without the operation, he would have died.

I am so grateful to the doctors and nurses at Nairobi hospital, although since his insurance hadn’t started yet, it will be my turn to feel ill tomorrow when the bill comes. It got me thinking, though, about how many of my friends and family would be dead if we hadn’t had the medical advances we all now embrace as part of daily life.

Last year, Charlotte, our daughter, contracted pneumonia, and was in hospital for three days getting antibiotics through a drip. Without that, there was a good chance she would have died. Without an inhaler, my wife’s asthma may have done for her. I’m also thinking about all the other people I know who’ve had medical complications – the friends who would have died in childbirth, or from malaria, or meningitis, or any other number of common conditions. I’m sure everybody has a big list of people they know who may have died without medical intervention.

Hell, I’m even thinking of other simple advances, such as spectacles. I’m blind as a bat, and back in prehistoric times no doubt I would have been gobbled up by that sabre-toothed tiger I didn’t notice until it was too late.

We are so fortunate we have managed to bypass the physical elements of natural selection through application of our large brains, allowing the weaklings such as myself to thrive. Here’s to the medical profession!

When a child is born, a bit too quickly

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My wife Nats gave birth to our second child, a son, in the early hours of Tuesday, which was hardly unexpected given all the signs were there that the wee fella was going to come earlier than the date of December 23 we had been given. What we didn’t anticipate was quite how eager he was to come out.

My wife woke up at 1.30am when her water broke. With our first child, Charlotte Elizabeth, we had four hours from this point until birth, plenty of time to drive down to Nairobi hospital, keeping a wary eye for carjackers, who I suspect tend not to moonlight as midwives, so we were a bit casual at first. After 30 minutes, the contractions were coming thick and fast, but we still felt we had time, so I headed round the corner to pick up our friend Zara, who we had woken with a phone call and asked her to come keep an eye on Charlotte.

So far, so good, right? I was gone for exactly 20 minutes, but when I drove into our compound, I heard hoarse, guttural roars from halfway down the car park. Either our noisy neighbour were having another one of their prayer meetings that sound rather more like possession/exorcism than worship, or the labour was progressing rather faster than anticipated. I sprinted up the stairs, and got into the house to find Nats in the guest toilet, announcing rather stridently that “This baby is coming!”

It turns out that while I was gone, Nats had very quickly entered the final phase of labour, and had only Charlotte, who had woken up and was helping her mum, for company. I got to the business end to find out that the baby’s whole head was out, and he was coming whether we liked it or not. There wasn’t even time for hot water and towels, which was probably just as well since I was never sure what they were for.

While Zara sat with Charlotte in her room, Nats gave a final few pushes and I caught the little fella – which was uncharacteristic for me given the one time I played in goals I shipped ten goals. It was 2.40am. He immediately began to cry and was clearly healthy, so I popped him onto Nats’ chest and headed off for blankets and towels. We had to cut the cord, so a pair of kitchen scissors and two clothes pegs were popped in a bucket of boiling water. Charlotte came in for a wee look at her brother before we clamped the cord and cut it. By that point, the placenta had been delivered as well, and was wobbling on the bathroom floor like an evil jellyfish. Nats tells me she poked it a few times out of curiosity before I scooped it up in a plastic bag (which we forgot to clean up before heading the hospital, meaning it sat there stinking out the toilet for a good five hours before I got back to sort it out.)

Zara and Charlotte watched their little brother while Nats showered and got changed, then we headed to the hospital. From then on, it should have been straightforward, but one of Nairobi’s drunk drivers managed to almost hit us when he flew out of a minor road and shot across our path. Then, at the hospital, it took 20 minutes before the midwife managed to get her head around the fact we had arrived with a baby (it was her first home birth) and listen to my requests to perhaps have a look at mother and child to see if they were ok. All was indeed well, and we headed off to our room for everyone to recover, before I went home and began the clean-up operation.

After 36 hours, they were both discharged and are now at home recovering.

Interestingly, we had to put Nairobi Hospital as the place of birth, because if we hadn’t we would have needed to find the chief of the area we live in to certify the birth took place. That was hassle we didn’t need!

Big thanks to Zara for responding to our emergency and being so calm and supportive, to Charlotte for helping her mum and taking it in her stride, and of course to Nats for being absolutely incredible throughout it all.

A lot of friends have talked about how dramatic it all was, and how they didn’t know how we coped, but to be honest it happened so quickly we didn’t have any choice but to deal. Retrospectively, it worked out rather well, as giving birth in this way avoided the arguments we would have had with the nurses about not wanting an episiotomy and wanting them to wait for the cord to stop pulsing before cutting it. The midwives here tend to stick rather slavishly to their routine.

So, all’s well that ends well.

We called our son Kristian Alexander, after our good friend Kristian Kramer, who died in an avalanche in Switzerland almost two years ago. I hope our little fella grows up to be as good, brave and adventurous a man as his namesake was.

I’d like to die please

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I really need to take more pictures around Nairobi.

Yesterday morning I saw a man who apparently wished to give himself a menu of horrible ways to die.

He was at the top of a rickety structure comprised of two metal ladders lashed together to give double height. I would say with twine, but that would be dignifying what looked suspiciously like the string you would use to wrap a Christmas present. This ladder he was wobbling atop, about 20 feet off the ground, was leaning on a very tall, but threadbare hedge. He was on a hill, so the ladder was listing to about 25 degrees. He was using a sharp pair of shears to prune the hedge, which sat right on the edge of very busy road. Three feet away from his head was a transformer, attached to a pole leaning at a similar angle with electrical wires sagging.

So, I figure he could have fallen from the ladder, been electrocuted on the way down while stabbing himself in the neck with the shears, cracked his skull on the ground and then been run over by a lorry. I suspect that would have done the job.

Workmen don’t do health and safety in Nairobi.

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