with our irresponsible youth behind us 
and

our irresponsible old age ahead of us,

loved ones who helped you to enjoy those halcyon Warri days, and

 whom you helped to enjoy those same days. 

while we remember and pray for those loved ones … (30 secs) …

as I know they themselves would wish,

	let us now raise our glasses to them and
	invite them to raise their glasses to us.

 Chris Allum, Chairperson of the organizing committee, who secured the venue and made all the logistical arrangements for tonight, and kept the rest of the Committee under ruthless control;  

Eileen Russell, who handled all the individual bookings, contacts and correspondence – messages in their thousands – yes, thousands;

Norman Holden, keeper of the purse, though it’s been like pulling teeth to get us all to pay up, renowned thespian and purveyor of  Nigerian ditties; 

“that’s not how I remember it”, or

“why doesn’t he mention so-and-so”, or

“what of that time we did such-and-such …”

running seismic, drilling wells, building roads, constructing pumping stations, laying pipelines. 

 banking, insurance, retailing, shipping, doctoring, logistics, booze and what have you. 

There was the Warri Club with its amateur dramatic productions – 

	who can forget the mighty Peter  Atkinson from Cameron as the  sugar-plum fairy prancing on the  stage in his tutu ?
	or raucous renderings of “Bloody  Warri” with Graham Sanger at the  ivories ?
	or indeed cinema nights enlivened by  pints of gin-and-tonic ?

There was the Bush Hut, 

	not just an automatic magnet for an  open-air liquid lunch after work on  Saturday,
	but the natural venue of annual events  commemorating Robbie Burns, St  George, St Patrick, Queen Juliana,  Indonesia, and any excuse we  could think of.    (I heard people even got  married there 30 years ago  next month …)

There was the Warri Rugby Club, nick-named the Midwest Flower-Power Children’s Team because each shirt had a different flower on the back instead of a number.  We regularly got thrashed by Yakubu Gowan’s Pretorian Guard, the holy Catholic priests (noted for ear-biting and eye-gouging), Guinness’s brewery, in fact pretty much anyone who deigned to play us.  But by God, we could out-drink them all afterwards. 

There was the Swamp Road Golf Club, notable for its friendly caddies with those prehensile toes that ensured your ball was not only never lost, but always ended up on the fairway, never the rough.  No wonder caddies were obliged to wear shoes on competition day, even though footwear made them fall over. 

The “Green Virgin”, noted for its pepper chicken and high life music;

The “River Valley” with its gauntlet of nightfighters that we, ahem, gentlemen had to negotiate as we exited late at night;

The MidWest Inn bar whose descent each evening into chaos was paralleled by the descent of those bottles of Star and Gulder;

And on a more respectable note, the “Diplomat” restaurant and disco in the Mosheshe flats compound, run by William Matta who sadly was shot when he went home to Beirut on holiday at the beginning of the civil war there.

 While for those of us who couldn’t wait for night-time, or even for lunch-time, an array of obliging contractors ran open bars every workday morning between about nine and noon; I’m sure their shareholders were as delighted as their clients were bleary-eyed as they drove home for lunch. 

Up the creek to Burutu to play cricket and dance/drink the night away, with wobbly pushbikes the only way to get home on the island. 

The silent splendour of Umutu with that small, ice-cold river flowing past the end of the garden, and its three-hole golf course. 

 Abraka, set in the forest but on the banks of the delightful Ethiope River with water so crystalline you could clearly see the fish swimming at five metres depth as you floated downriver in an inflated inner tube. 

 Outside the Standard Bank on the high street, “Don't Piss Here”.

 On Swamp Road on the way to the Shell camp. “Ju-Ju Doctor - have your belly rubbed here to avoid all sorts venereal diseases”.

 Outside another doctor’s surgery, “Specialist In Women And Other Sicknesses”

 “Customers Who Find Our Waitresses Rude Ought To See The Manager”

 “Special Cocktails For The Ladies - With Nuts”

 Outside a dentist, “Teeth Extracted By The Latest Methodists”

 “Please check the cabin is present before entering the lift”

 At the Nigeria Airways office : “We Take Your Bags And Send Them In All Directions.”

 And the ubiquitous “Best goat pepper soup”

The egusi soup,

the do-do, 

the goat pepper,

the roasted rats,

the deep-fried flying ants,

the toasted grasshopper legs,

the jungle snails the size of dogs ?

“Prostitutes Appeal to Pope”,

 “Plane Too Close to Ground, Crash Probe Told”,

 “High Winds Rip Through Cemetery; Hundreds Dead”,

 “New Study of Obesity Looks for Larger Test Group”

 Should we do it again, in say a couple of years time, or five years time ?

 I propose we keep it running, if only as a permanent repository of contact details that can be added to and modified over time ?

In which case, photographs of tonight will be added over the next days and weeks as they become available.  Any that you want to share, just send them to me. 

 Always remember that good judgment comes from bad experience, which in turn usually comes from bad judgment. 

A woman is like a tea bag – you don't know how strong she is until you put her in hot water. 

Men, on the other hand, are like floor tiles – lay them right the first time and you can walk over them for years.   

If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.

If you think there is good in everybody, you haven't met everybody.

And finally, here’s a little tale about that great Nigerian statesman, Mohandas Gandhi