It was Saturday night, we were standing outside Youssou N'Dour's club Thiossane, leaning on someone's car. It was 4 in the morning, it was cold, and I wanted to go home.
"I'm going to take you to a place you've never in your life seen before in Dakar," said my friend Aziz, a Senegalese who does indeed seem to have a store of good places up his sleeve. Mostly, post-club hangouts in Dakar are Dibis, meat-roasting shops where you order roasted mutton and raw onions by the kilo. I wasn't in the mood for that and the thought of driving all the way into town and then getting a taxi all the way out to my house at Mamelles felt like too much effort. I made sounds about getting a taxi but my friends were insistent: "You have to experience this once in your life."
Soon enough, the backdoor of Thiossane opened and Habib, Youssou's bass player came out and we all got in his car (the one we had been leaning on). Aziz is his manager and he and I have talked music quite a bit, which is why we are now friends. He is one of the nicest people ever, modest, polite and a damn good bass player, so it's always a treat to hang out with him.
We rolled down the empty streets, around the roundabout where I once nearly lost Naomi from a taxi with unsafe door catches, and up a street I know well by day time, which was now, in the dead of night, deserted. A lone beggar stood outside a door, a few cardboard boxes beside him, and rubbish in the gutter. But there seemed to be a odd amount of cars parked around, and the sound of laughter coming from inside the door.
The four of us went through the doorway, a hole in the wall that I'm not sure even had a door on it, and into the dark crumbling guts of a concrete building, perhaps once derelict, but now a hub of activity. The walls were blackened above an open fire and all around precariously-balanced crates and planks were men eating delicious-smelling meat skewers and fresh baguettes. A single blue bulb lit up the faces of these well-dressed people, as well as the people wrapped in sheets sleeping wherever they could get themselves horizontal.
We sat down, Habib (who is no small man) and I on one bench which was more like a see-saw when he then went to get up, the others infront of the drinks boy. I opted out of skewers but said I'd like some coffee. Aziz and the drinks boy at this point got into a long discussion. There was a lot of pointing going on at a collection of glasses which had been washed but were perhaps not what you would call clean, and then the boy got out his knife and starting plunging it into the top of a tin can that had once held condensed milk.
"C'est pas sure," said Aziz, indicating the glasses. "It's better if he makes you a cup."
And so, this is how I am now the proud owner of my favourite cup, handmade especially for me, in a hole in the wall filled with happy laughing people in the dead of night. The handle, the lid of the can, is wrapped in recycled computer print-outs, so as not to lose a finger.
There's something magical about being looked after so well. I feel in the constant protection of someone, strangers or friends, almost all the time. I am never allowed to walk anywhere alone, and apparently not even allowed to drink out of potentially unclean cups. It's something the Senegalese do really well.
In other news, the patchwork is finished. Yesterday, Now and I put the deep blue border on the gigantic beast and now 'all' that waits is the quilting.
