Someone stole Aso Rock this morning.
Driving past Garki market this morning the ever present green loaf had simply disappeared. The once blue sky had turned grey, as if the wispy little cloud that sometimes hangs over the rock had taken its chance while no one was looking and crept down to cover the whole of the sky.
The harmattan is here. Attahiru said it was coming. He'd been in Kaduna the day before and the air had closed in.
In the last few days of the long long rainy season the lights outside the office attracted a huge swarm of insects. Brightly jewelled beetle-flies, opalescent conical biting gnats, muscular crickets, huge grasshoppers by the hundred, mosquitoes by the billion. The insects in their turn attracted bats and geckos. The bats swooped down on the lights, grabbing juicy grasshoppers with a snap. I saw a gecko get greedy and go for something that was too big for him, the added weight pulled him off the wall.
I sat and watched it, mesmerised.