The room was dark; matching his mood. But the grey light that filtered in through the slits between the heavy drapes showed dawn had finally broken.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote an article captioned ‘This beauty that makes me sad’. It was centred around my experience on a cruise where I touched on the beauty of nature and our inability as a country to harness and use nature for the common good. It was an article that led to comments on twits, blogs and emails. A friend and reader described it as ‘your soliloquy on the sea’. It was an apt description; why didn’t I think of it?

I received a very good news a couple of weeks ago.A childhood friend’s child had just been given a new life; literally.

My interview with Dr Ukpabi Asika, the late administrator of the then South Eastern State, must be one of my memorable ones if not one of my best. (His interview was one of the few I did in two parts).

One, two, three crashes in a week! It seems the aviation industry has never had it so bad in recent times. It didn’t help that I was thousands of miles away from home that week. It didn’t help that I had four flights to connect from two airlines a few days later.