Jessica Moy needs this promotion. What's more, she deserves it. But after a workday from hell, her chance look grim. So, when some joker posing as the lead actor in a hit series on British BAC-TV network slides into her Cupidess dating app DM's, her response pull no punches. She's not looking for romance right now, and certainly not with a liar and fraud. Hopefully, her stern reply would make him quit bugging her. Because no way could he be the man for her, right? Justin Smith is in Lagos searching for his biological father. After a bitter breakup, the last thing he wants, or need is romance. But since he could really use a savvy local to show him the city, he joins the hip, new dating app Cupidess. And bingos, there she is 'Jessica' someone who knows the city like the back of her hand. Jessica is totally not his type. Perfect. All he has to do is convince her he's not a con man. Easy. The hard part Fighting his unexpected attraction to her.

It wouldn't be entirely true to say that I had arrived at this airport by chance. There were many routes that I could have chosen to get home to London from the Far East, stop-overs at Bucharest or Abbu Dhabi, Vienna or Cairo, but I had chosen this obscure little Central European capital because as soon as I had seen its name I had remembered my old friend of University days, Oliver McClure. Oliver had been my favourite teacher, a charming and eccentric Irish ex-priest, not a great deal older than his students, who lectured to the trainee teachers on the esoteric subject of "Philosophy of Education". I had never forgotten his answer to a young girl's question in the very first lecture that he had given to my group: it was an answer that had seized my attention and led me into an obsession with philosophy which came to rule my life. "Will studying philosophy make it any easier for us in the classroom?" she had asked. "Only if I fail," Oliver had answered without an instant's hesitation, "if I succeed it will make it infinitely more difficult." The lesson that Oliver had been trying to impart had been nothing less than the central imperative of Western philosophy since Socrates: Question everything. It doesn't make classroom teaching easier any more than it makes life itself easier, that isn't it's point, it makes both of them infinitely more difficult and infinitely more worthwhile. My detour therefore was to renew my acquaintance with a hero of my late 'teens, the man who had convinced me that the unexamined life is not worth living, the unexamined doctrine unworthy of acceptance. I left the cold grey concourse of the crumbling airport terminal with just a light rucksack slung over my shoulder, having been assured in broken English by the clerk in the transit lounge that my luggage would be transferred to the connecting flight the following afternoon. Outside the terminal a cluster of ugly and functional windowless buildings, clad with corrugated iron and disfigured by rust streaks and the dents and scrapes of decades of tight manoeuvres by clumsy truck drivers, formed a large oblong courtyard in which half-a-dozen State-owned taxis, all painted regulation grey and bearing a motif of the national flag on their front door panels, waited apathetically to carry arriving passengers on their onward journeys. They stood on a yellow taxi rank one behind the other, spaced out with military precision. I went to the one at the head of the line and tapped on the driver's window. He wound it down with that air of grim resignation that state control of industry is so good at producing and waited blankly for me to name a destination. "Can you take me to Grundhof Farm in Latvihasse?" I asked with exaggerated clarity, hoping that he would be able to make sense of my murdering of the place-names. To my relief his whole countenance lit up and he motioned towards the rear doors, plainly inviting me to get in. "You know Grundhof Farm?" I asked, mainly for reassurance, as I tossed my rucksack on to the back seat and made myself comfortable beside it. "I know," he returned in a deep bass as he started the engine. I rolled down my window a fraction to make the odour of stale tobacco-smoke a bit less intense. Although this was notionally the international airport of the capitol city, the road out of the terminal looked entirely rural, twisting its way through dormant ploughed potato fields, the troughs choked with compacted snow, the landscape dotted with the roofless skeletons of primitive farm buildings and the shells of abandoned gutted vehicles, everything falling to ruins and beginning to blend in with the snow amid the random clumps of winter-naked birch trees. "Civil war," the driver explained in his booming voice, adopting the role of tour guide, "many people die, many farms destroyed. Now all owned by Government. Still no good. Still grow no crops." It sounded like dangerous talk. I nodded sagely. Oliver had left his lecturing post at the London University Institute of Education under circumstances that had seemed at the time heartrendingly romantic. He had fallen in love with Eva, a young palely beautiful student from this godforsaken Central European cess-pit who had been admitted to study abroad under some obscure United Nations bursary for gifted scholars from bankrupt and despotic hell-holes. She had been chosen from among more than ten thousand applicants. That was a perfectly realistic measure of how gifted she was. For the first time in his career Oliver had been given the charge of a student every bit his intellectual equal, with the looks of an angel and the sad serious eyes of a motherless fawn. I said that Oliver fell in love with her, in fact every male that she had ever met had fallen in love with her, but in Oliver's case there had been some degree of reciprocation. Then (without meaning to sound melodramatic) came the revolution. The tanks rolled over the fields her father and her father's fathers