" ?No cold drink for me, thank you,? he said. ?Just give me a glass of lemonade served at room temperature.?"

" ?No,? he replied. ?It?s just that I don?t want to be reminded of what a cold drink tastes like.?"

"?I have not had a cold drink at home for three months. I have had a miserable time adjusting to the taste of warm lemonade and, more often, tepid water.  Now that I have got used to it I don?t want to re-acquire a taste for anything that is deliciously cold.?"

"?Well, we haven?t had electricity there for nearly four months. Before then, we had power supply only intermittently - say for two or three hours every other day. Sometimes we go for three or four days without electricity. And when we do have it, the voltage fluctuates so badly that we have to stop switching on our electrical appliances or risk having them seriously damaged.?"

"?It affects the water supply too,? he went on. ?For some weeks now I have been taking plastic jerry cans to my office and having them filled with water. It is this water that I take home for our household use. As you can imagine, washdays are driving my wife crazy.?"

" ?With no electricity,? I asked, ?how do you get the clothes ironed after they have been washed??"

"?I stuff them into a shopping bag and take them with me to the office. There is an enterprising man who has rented a small cubicle in the basement of the building, and who is doing good business pressing clothes for business executives who live in neighborhoods that are prone to protracted power outages. Sensibly he doesn?t use an electric iron, but one that is heated with charcoal.?"

" I gave my friend his lemonade, served at 32 degrees centigrade, and poured some for myself. What I really needed was a cold beer, but I didn?t have the heart to drink it while my guest was doing penance with warm lemonade."

"?After dark,? he said after a sip, ?my wife and I switch on torches to see our way around the house. Each one of us has a torch, and between us we have a drawer full of dry cell batteries.?"

" ?We thought of it, but gave up the idea when the new exploding kerosene came into the market. We even spent a fortune buying one of those portable fluorescent lamps with rechargeable batteries. They are handy to have around, but you need electricity to recharge the batteries."

"For a while I took the lamp with me to the office to recharge the battery, but that meant that much of the available space in our car was taken up by lamps, bundles of rumpled clothes, jerry cans, and other bits and pieces. We stopped taking things to the office when, one morning we were stopped at a checkpoint and asked that unsettling question: Weting you carry??"

"?If I had told the police sergeant that the lamp was stolen, and that the rumpled shirts and blouses in the plastic bags were secondhand clothes being smuggled into the country, and further, that I planned to use the three 50-litre jerry cans to smuggle petrol across the border, he would have believed me, and we could have ?settled? the matter without much ado. But I made the mistake of telling him the truth - which was that I was taking the clothes to my office to be ironed, that I planned to recharge the lamp?s battery at the same office, and that the jerry cans were for water which I would take home at the close of work. Of course he didn?t believe a single word of it. Who would believe such an unlikely story??"

"?Not many checkpoint policemen,? I agreed. ?What do you do about grinding pepper, onions and tomatoes?"

" I expected him to say that his wife took them to her office building where an enterprising woman operated a blender, but he said: ?We manage with a small mechanical grinder. It doesn?t grind as finely as an electric blender, but we get by.?"

" I tried to think of something positive to say about his situation, and could only come up with: ?Dining under candle light must be quite romantic.""

"?It was, in the first two days, but after that I would have given anything to have a good look at what I was eating.?"

" Poor fellow, I thought. And then, noticing that he had managed to finish his drink, so I said: ?Another glass of lemonade??"

"  ?No, thanks,? he said, shaking his head.  ?The good thing about warm lemonade is that it is drunk in moderation.?"

" On a Saturday morning, a motorist making his way through a part of Ikeja to which he is a first time visitor enters a road that he believes will take him to the street he is looking for, and finds his way blocked by a massive gate. The gate is not only locked, it is also not manned."

" Through a gap between gate and wall he can
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