I recently heard a European lady describe Lagos – whether it was with true admiration or with the usual patronising,  I’ll never know – as the city where nothing works yet everything happens.

She then went on,  in her speech at the opening of a photography exhibition in Ikoyi, to compare Lagos to New York. You have to be a Lagosian – born and bred or adopted – to appreciate the latter comment. Later, as we mingled among the artists, some diplomats and the Lagos art buffs, I commented to her that I loved her NYC parallel. The truth is, I said, if you can make it in Lagos, you’ll make it anywhere. She laughed and asked to borrow my comment for her press release for the exhibition.

There is much that the west does not tell of the tale of Lagos. We all know about the slums, congestion and pollution of so many of the worlds largest cities and in this regard, Lagos is no exception. But the countless photographs and accounts of poverty and lack, once the domain of the western perspective, have crept into the psyche of a new generation of Nigerian photographers and writers, and seemingly established themselves as a yardstick for what good craft should look and read like.

I have chosen, rather than look down on our society or down at the unfortunates, to look up. Not every Nigerian is poor. Not every well-to-do Nigerian is corrupt. Indeed, not every not-so-wealthy Nigerian is poor and not every poor Nigerian is wretched.  My own friends come from all walks of life and while I am not an elitist, I make no apology for being born into the class I was born into. Does anyone anywhere else in the world do so?

I went to a fabulous Lagos do yesterday. Not everybody at the party, which was held in Ago-Ajo just west of Lagos, owned a boat, and yet we all made it there by way of  a boat ride that  is nothing short of picturesque and certainly befitting of a destination named the Garden of Angels.

Skimming over the glassy waters of the creeks, past reassuring mangrove and alluring coconut palms, you share your world with herons foraging on the shores, kites nesting in the treetops and flocks of white egrets coming in for winter, flying low, close to the water surface.

We sped past fishing villages and slowed down every so often to avoid sinking the heavily-laden, low-lying boats of sand quarriers, with the waves from our wake. The scenery is stunning, the serenity intoxicating,  invoking a communion with God deep within, and the  contrast to the hustle and bustle of the heaving conurbation that is called Lagos, where we sweat to earn our daily bread, could not possibly be starker.

Once at our destination, we sat under marquees, eating an array of Nigerian dishes – jollof rice, moi-moi, efo and fufu, small chops – and the music played and the champagne flowed all day long. The sun kissed us and the breeze caressed us. Butterflies fluttered past dreamily and grasshoppers sprang about delightedly.

It was a picnic out in the bush, a place best accessed by water, to mark the 80th birthday of a friend’s father. Nothing large-scale, just a gathering of family and friends dressed comfortably and having a jolly good time on a Thursday afternoon. No pretentious posing or posturing, just a bunch of beautiful, happy people having fun like they know how to. We did a bit of jet-skiing and a lot of laughing, and then we all piled back into the boats for the hour-long boat-ride back to Lagos Motor Boat Club before the 6pm navy curfew.

At the LMBC, as the sun set, we said our goodbyes over more champagne, the romping children still pictures of good behaviour, and then finally dispersed to return to our grindstones next day -  to the toil that pays for all the fun.

Except for the beauty of Lagos’ creeks, it could have been any other city in the world, and I am stopping for this moment to celebrate not just the hard work and dynamism of the Lagos upper middle class, but the sheer spirit of fun. It is true that many aspects of Lagos do not work, but here we always make things happen anyway.

Long may the good Lagos life continue.