Enkay Spills!

I’m really doing my best to keep up with blogville these days o! Of course my blog rounds are becoming much more regular and it’s gradually becoming a full-time job! Not that I’m complaining…. :)

I deliberately left my 2 truths and 1 lie meme unanswered till now ‘cause answering them meant expatiating - (I always thought the word was spelt ‘expantiate’. Isn’t that how it’s normally pronounced?) - On each of them. I guess I’m ready now so here goes!

I’ll start by congratulating the two people who got it right!

• Olufunke and
• Adaeze

You guys have done well! And I should congratulate myself on successfully throwing the rest of you off! Lol!

You guys thought #1 was the lie

• Stand Tall – The activist
• Poeticallytinted
• Afrobabe
• Asangansi UE
• Miz-cynic
  

And you guys thought #3 was the lie

• Afronuts
• Scarlet
• Saved girl
• Geebee
  

Olamild only said something about climbing the tank but she didn’t say if that was the lie or not!

# 2 (I have read more than 900 books from my adolescent days up till now) is the lie. Truth is, it’s not so far from the truth either! If I added all the books I read before my adolescent days, I’ll be counting in my thousands!

By the time I was 9, I had read every single book in my father’s library, including encyclopedias and business books! I read every single thing in sight. It’s not like I have counted every book I’ve read since I turned 12 but I have a calculated estimate of about 750. I read all the Enid Blyton series available at the time – Famous Five, Secret Seven, Malory Towers, Saint Clare’s, the Faraway Tree Collection etc and then I graduated to the Agatha Christie books before moving on to the famous Mills and Boons, Temptations, Harlequin….. I read these ones till SS1. No book ever crossed my path that I didn’t read and I never stood in line to read a book.

My typical snatching style upon sighting a book with some one -

Me: “Who is reading after you?”

Book holder: “Cynthia. And Katherine is reading after her and…”

Me: (I cut in) “when are you giving it to Cynthia?”

Book holder: “Afternoon prep tomorrow”

Me: See eh, (I lower my voice to make it sound like I’m about to share a secret) “just give it to me before prep and I’ll return it just before dinner I promise.”

Book holder: (rolls her eyes, while she pretends to think about it) Ok, I’ll give it to you but I will collect it outside the dining hall whether or not you’ve finished reading it o!

Me: No problem.

The deal was sealed.

There were barely 3 hours between afternoon prep and dinner yet as sure as my promise was, the book was completed and returned right on time. That was how my reputation grew. No one argued with me once I asked to read a book, ‘cause they knew I’d return it in a few hours!

I think my book reading peak was in secondary school. You never saw me without a book in any one day. Never. I found I could read a book and do other things at the same time. For instance, I could be reading and copying the notes being dictated by the class prefect (I wouldn’t dare do that with a teacher! The books were never mine so I wouldn’t run the risk of having it seized!) Or I could be in the dinning hall eating and reading at the same time!

In SS2, I got saved and one of the ‘signs’ of being saved was doing away with the Mills and Boons, Temptations and Harlequins. I had bought some for my self and I clearly remember that day - I solemnly carried my ‘precious’ books and dumped them in the ‘sulo’ pit. I couldn’t bear to watch them burn so I promptly turned around and walked away from them.

My love for books dwindled after that period because most of the books in circulation in school then were books I could no longer read. This didn’t last for long though, I left school and discovered a whole new world of books. There were more Christian fiction books than I’d earlier imagined and even more secular thrillers! My book feast began again although I was no longer as voracious as I once was!

#1 (I had my first real kiss when I was 25) is true!

Someone asked what my definition of a real kiss was – well anything that is more than a peck on the lips or cheeks or forehead is a real kiss in my book! lol! And I didn’t get this till I was 25!

Nope, I didn’t grow up a loner or a boy-hater and I wasn’t priggish or prudish either! Even though I went to an only-girls’ school, I was in no way hampered in my relationship with guys. Somehow though, my relationship with them never really progressed beyond mere friendship even though I did get my fair share of pecks! As a matter of fact, I feel a bit more comfortable around guys than girls. I was the only girl in a class of about 80 boys in the university and my line of work is dominated by guys!

I got into my first real relationship in my 3^rd year at the university and it was as ‘holy’ as it gets! And then he kissed me for the first time 4years after! It’s only in hindsight now I see that I’d mostly lived a sheltered life. Not that there weren’t opportunities to mess around (I’m not saying being kissed is equivalent to messing around o!) but I was surrounded by friends and family who helped me maintain my balance.

As a matter of fact that first kiss left a bitter taste in my mouth. There are only 2 periods in my life that I consider as being dark. I’ve done a post on one of them here and here. The period after that first kiss was the second one. Maybe I’ll do a post on it sometime but suffice it to say that the guy swept me off my feet with that first kiss and promptly hung me out by my ears to dry!

#3 (I once climbed to the top of a building in order to reach an overhead tank and steal water from It.) is true too!

Yes I did! It was no mean feat either! lol! I was in JS 2 at the time and there was severe water scarcity in the school and surrounding villages. A tanker brought water every morning but I never got there early enough to get water. Besides, one tanker of water was hardly enough for all the students and most of it ended up on the ground from all the pushing and shoving that accompanied the exercise.

Everyday, I’d go around with my bucket begging for “one sponge-case of water please…just one…okay half….please give me half and I’ll be ok…”

I did this every morning just to scrape together less than a quarter of a bucket of water to bathe with. At least I was a little bit better than those who got by with the ‘rub-and-shine’ technique! (Not that I wasn’t forced to do that too from time to time!)

One evening, one of my naughty friends came to tell me that she saw some senior girls carrying buckets of water and that they were coming from the general direction of the old home economics lab. Guess why she came to me? Because I was the only one ‘crazy’ enough to ‘investigate’ this new development! And investigate we did. We went with two buckets each. What? Who wanted to take the chance of wasting precious time, returning to take buckets when we weren’t even sure how much water there was if there was any at all?

We waited till it was very dark and snuck out of our night prep class. We got to the lab but it was locked. Duh! So where was the water? Behind the lab, there was this abandoned overhead tank – so we thought. The thing had been dry for like forever but as we approached it and flashed our plastic torches on the ground around it, we found there were tiny puddles of water. Yippee! Question number two – how do we get to the water in the tank that towered several feet above the building?

The tank sat atop a scaffold-like structure so it wasn’t too difficult getting to the top. The challenge was reaching into the tank to get the water and then passing the bucket of water down to my friend.

To cut the long story short, we accomplished our purpose that night but we also lost our well kept secret too! By the next day, it became common knowledge that there was water in the tank at the old economics lab and the ‘fittest’ students did justice to it. The tank was emptied the next day!