Blog visitors from 45 countries! 20 02 12 (8) 25 2 13


Yeah, 45, a few more and a quarter of the world's countries will be represented among the people who have hit my blog this past 6 or 7 years ago since I switched my location from several sites on MySpace before they pulled the plug on bloggers 2013 6 13...

The other countries having visited this last week are Canada, the 1st, Ireland, the 38th, Netherlands 18th, United Arab Emirates, 9th, and Ukraine, 15th, since I started logging which countries were represented a couple of years ago.

Well I have met a few Nigerians and would guess the person who visited was maybe a lady Nigerian, and so with our younger son home we got to discuss what we knew of the country and its people, and it transpired he had more experience than I because in the meat company in UK where he works, for a time they used a cleaning company which employed a Nigerian manager. My own personal experience included a Nigerian lady I once met at a Scottish hostel in Glasgow when we exchanged a few recipes, whilst sharing the hostel's kitchen to prepare our respective dinners.

We also discussed some of the other countries represented and the person from the UAE, for example, I told him had visited on Sunday last at 13:00 hrs precisely, just as I had got through to a nephew on Skype, in nearby Oman: was this a coincidence or what? Whatever the event P, my son, volunteered the information that its ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, who is the Emirates' VP and PM of Dubai, and was known to him through his interest in race horses and the fact that the sheikh owns a mansion in the town where our son lives, a property valued at £50 million and which he inherited 7 years ago. I told P about the sheikh's middle daughter of 3 called Latifa who had escaped her father's palace with a view to moving to India, when the yacht she was sailing on was intercepted just off the Indian coast at her father’s behest, when she and her two travelling companions: a Finnish lady and a French skipper were returned to the UAE, but who, when a video she had also made about her plight went viral, the two people were released... a not altogether complimentary video about the sheikh!

When I mentioned the Netherlands to P I said this hit may have been made by another lady I had met in Scotland: last summer who was staying at the same hostel with her husband, and who had taken a few pics of me climbing the same hill as they were, and how in a thank you email upon receipt of the pics I had given her the key to my BlogSpot account here…

With P we also talked about Ireland and a recent business visit he had made just up the road from Clonas where one of my father’s two Irish grand-fathers hailed from, the other from Dublin. When he mentioned this to his business associate, the associate the next day told P that he had located the family of man and wife with the same surname, and so perhaps was able to establish a better association than otherwise?

Concerning the two remaining countries to visit this past week Canada is known to me through three business visits I made there: to Bridgeford close by Toronto, and later two to Montreal; and although I haven’t so far visited Ukraine when I was first a manager in industry I did hire a couple of guys in Messrs Gbur and Mazur from that fine country, and through my wife during vacation in Greece, I got to read her books by Mikhail Sholokhov, “Quietly Flows the Don” amongst others on the same theme…

Have a good day everyone no matter where you hail from!

A blog for someone in Nigeria my 45th country of visitors..? 20 02 12

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