I spent the entire Christmas break in door. It wasn’t what I wanted. But it was what I got. I started noticing something wrong on Thursday. My throat was itchy.

A very moving Christmas story came my way via WhatsApp this week. It was the story of an old man who couldn’t find a reason to celebrate Christmas since his wife died. He didn’t hate Christmas. Just was indifferent. In his mind, Christmas is supposed to be celebrated with loved ones and since his loved one had died, that was it. So as usual, this Christmas eve found him in his small office at his gas station.

Being in the air can be ethereal. There is this incomparable feeling of peace and well-being as the plane glides almost imperceptibly between clouds. It is also the closest to nature one can possibly ever get—whether the plane is passing over the vastness of the oceans, deserts, mountains or just clouds— with the fading sun gliding along side the plane like a compass, a lodestar.

The visas to Australia came on the day we were originally billed to travel and two days after we had cancelled our tickets to avoid ‘losing everything.’ It was the culmination of three months of anxiety, of supplying information after information, of taking a fresh polio injection at my age and in desperation, of enlisting the help of my younger colleagues to find out what had gone wrong.

This is not about the politics of the South-East. Or why its leaders were almost united in rejecting the nomination of Peter Obi as Atiku’s vice president. The leaders must have their reasons for rejecting the nomination of the ex-Anambra State Governor so spontaneously and so vociferously. They are yet to let us into those reasons though.