Back in the day, I had some crazy friends. Great fun, but out there! They either had me in fits or shocked into silence; but sainthood wasn’t exactly my forte, sooo...

One rainy weekend, we eschewed London, cooked up a storm, drank copious amounts of alcohol, and had a very deep discussion (with how-tos!) about life and how to survive our teens and twenties. I guess we unconsciously looked into the future, and prepared ourselves for the abyss.

Who remembers their student days?! When you'd just thrown the ultimate party, seen the last guests off, and settled down on the sofa to reminisce with your housemates... Only to hear a thunderous snore, and in-between snorts, discover the class bore behind it - spluttering the kind of stuff you'd hesitate to say in a confessional box.

Rumour has it that some die-hard atheists think the Bible is quite a good yarn: highly unlikely of course, but not a bad read all in all! Well, they're right about one thing - it is a collation of many good stories. About real people, places, and events. And the Book of Esther, the eponymous tale of a young Jewish orphan made queen by the Persian monarch Xerses when he rejects his wife Vashti, is emblematic of all three.

The awesome thing

About a crisis

Is that it highlights

One's capabilities.

Some sink.

But others

Thrash about

Swallow murky water

Then rise triumphantly

To the surface

And swim like their lives

Depend on it.

I must have been about thirteen when a member of our church was killed by a soldier. I'd been living in Nigeria for a few years by then, and was no stranger to death. Or violence, poverty, and the sheer recklessness that comes with knowing there might not be a tomorrow.

A relatively young man, he'd studied in that other pseudo land-of-promise, once heralded as God's own country, but now mired in controversies so deep and dark, it couldn't smell the nard for the manure.

Mission Impossible was a 60s phenomenon. A well-crafted and suspenseful series about covert government operatives, each episode left me more and more fascinated by the curious and continued threat of their being "disavowed". How could you be "authorised" to do something one minute and a fugitive the next for doing the very thing you were instructed to do? It didn’t make sense then, and to an even greater extent, it still doesn’t now.