It was my birthday a couple of days ago. The normally pragmatic and unsentimental Keita did something quite out of character and really quite inspired: he asked for a table and two chairs to be placed in the middle of the sunset bar, and our dinner to be served up there, in the light of candles. We sat under the stars, gazing down at the garden where my Woolworth's Charlie Dimmock solar lanterns (see entries 23 July and 6 Oct) glimmered all around, echoing the stars above. Keita giggled, saying: this is just too Toubab...but even he seemed to enjoy it . We talked of how much has happened in much less than a year and how amazing it is that we are sitting in the middle of all this.
This romantic idyll didn' t last of course.
Very soon Abdraman, a friend of Keita's, arrived. When he saw the two of us sitting high above, alone in the candlelight , he ordered a chair to be brought up and placed next to us. He had nothing in particular to communicate, but instead he inexplicably chose this moment to bring out his mobile phone and start to erase old messages, thereby making a horrible sound and illuminating himself in the light of the mobile phone. I was dumbfounded by this gross lack of understanding and tact, but Keita thought it was perfectly normal behaviour. Here the idea of privacy and romantic dinners does't exist.