Harmattan Haze

Ok, so back in Abuja now and new year’s resolutions not going too well so far; I stayed up far too late last night (whoever invented FB Messenger needs a serious talking to). So I’m trying atone for that with  a focus on the resolution involving frequent and short blog postings...

For once, I have a tiny bit of spare time on my hands today as the guest we were expecting to arrive from the UK at 6am this morning failed to appear as planned. It transpired that the overnight BA flight she was on had been diverted to GHANA because the harmattan dust currently engulfing Abuja meant that the visibility around the airport was too limited for the plane to land safely. She is now in Lagos (seemingly along with half of the High Commission, who were also on the flight) and the hope is that the haze will have cleared enough by tomorrow morning for the plane to fly on to Abuja. The harmattan is particularly severe at the moment, bringing with it a fairly substantial drop in temperature (a chilly 18'C this morning, which had Abuja residents reaching for their thermals and hot water bottles) and the whole city is coated with a fine, reddish film of dust. It's hard to see further than a few hundred metres, which gives the place a slightly crepuscular sci-fi feel. This photo taken from the roof of our office this afternoon; the sky is normally a cornflower blue at that time of day:

  

One other piece of very sad news: Delilah, our tortoise, has died. The guards told us when we arrived home on Sunday that she took a turn for the worse after we left on holiday, just after the fumigators had been to spray the garden. Poor thing - what an awful way to go. I feel terrible about it, particularly as I've asked the evil fumigators on several occasions whether there was any risk to her and I usually move her right to the middle of the garden when they come to call, but wasn't home to do so on that occasion. We haven't told the children yet. I'm slightly tempted to just not mention it and see how long it takes them to notice. And, if I'm honest, I'm feeling slightly aggrieved because the whole point of having a tortoise for a pet is that tortoises are supposed to live forever. Or at least until the children have grown up. I mean, I imagine with a gerbil or a goldfish you pretty much start practising the pet-has-gone-to-heaven story the moment you bring it home, but with a tortoise we thought we were pretty safe on that front. Poor, poor Delilah. RIP.