Lighters. In Nigeria. They don’t last.

In the three years that I have been here, I probably went through 150 lighters. 50 for each year. Over here they don’t last untill they are empty. They get to around the halfway mark. Then they’re gone. Either someone nicks it, you forget it somewhere or it gets taken from you when going through customs. On a return flight from France I got clever. I took one through cutoms disguised as a pen. Well, it actually was a pen with a little Eiffel Tower emblem on the side that lights up as you light your smoke. That one they didn’t take. The gas and the ink eventually ran out but then again it was a lighter from France and not Nigeria.

Sometimes the Nigerian lighters tend to blow up when dropped. I once threw one at someone in a swimming pool. The dude ducked, the lighter hit the edge of the pool, ended up in the water and proceeded to blow up like a ladmine. In the fucking water! Dangerous things these. About a year ago on a trip to London my friend did manage to sneak a lighter through customs. We went to Heathrow’s smoking section and lit up our smokes. Now another thing theses Nigerian lighters tend to do is gooi one moerse uncontrollable flame. It is impossible to put it out because you have to put out your eyebrows first. In the process you tend to drop the lighter and the lighter tends te explode. This is not such a cool thing to happen in the smoking section at Heathrow Airport a couple of days after the bombings. We just pretended to be as freaked out as the other people.

However, the Nigerian lighter’s most common trick is to just plain fuck out after a couple of uses. First that little silver thingie at the top goes and rougly a day or so later hate flint decides to move over to the old-age home. The lighter of course, will always still be 90% full. So you trow it away. You buy a new one and the vicious circle starts afresh.

Today, for the first time in three years, I managed to use my little orange lighter that I bought two weeks ago to the bitter end. Sure, the little silver thingie tuned me “fuck you” the first day but the flint and the gas decided to stick it out with me untill the bitter end.

Tomorrow I have to buy a new one. I’ll go with orange, thank you very much.