While I was in South Africa I received an excited email from my friend Idi in Dakar.

"We have some big news," he told me, but didn't tell me any more.

The next day I received an email from Now.

"Madam, I have something exciting to tell you," he said. I couldn't resist, so I called him up to ask what the news was.

"The tree has some flowers!" he said. And here they are. The frangipani tree which we planted to long ago in Mamelle, long before I moved, has at last produced some beautiful, sweet-smelling flowers.



I thought that was all the news I was going to get. But when I went to visit, Now told me his other piece of news. He's opened a new shop, in the depths of Ouakham, a neighbourhod not far from the original shop in Mamelle. It's a small place, a hole-in-the-wall kind of joint, but, he tells me, it's working really well. Single cloves of garlic and little sachets of black pepper are the big sellers, as people in this neighbourhood (euphamistically known as a 'quartier populair') don't tend to stock up on things like other people do. Why buy a whole head of garlic when you can just buy what you need?



So as Idi and Awa run one shop, Now's friend Samba runs the other. And Now runs between the two all day long.



While I was taking photos, a guy selling shoes came along and asked me to photograph him. Then he told me I couldn't take the photo to France and make money from it, which just about ruined my plans.



So nice to be back with my friends. I always forget when I'm away, how much my Mamelle crew mean to me. Then when I come off the plane at 2 in the morning and see Now standing there fighting off the taxi touts and the money changers, I know that as much as I miss 'home' (I don't even know where that is anymore), I like Dakar too.

Actually, when Now came to pick me up from the airport last week, I decided, for the first time, to change some money while I was there. I had some Euros, and no CFA, so I asked the guy if I could change 40 Euros. Sure, he said, just give me 25,000 francs. I did. Then he said I had to give him one Euro commission. When I said that I didn't have to at all, he let me go. Then came running back and told Now that he wanted to un-do the transaction. Apparently, having failed to find a way to trick, lie, cheat or beg some money out of me, he decided he would be much better off changing money with some other toubab.

Saying goodbye to an old friend

For much of my childhood and most of my adult life, there's been an old friend in it. I'm not a dog person but I grew up with Pippa, and she was, for a dog, amusing and friendly. She died early this year and the powers that be waited until I was back in England before we scattered her (small) remains somewhere peaceful.



This was her favourite beach.

While we were in the neighbourhood, we took a visit to a place where we used to go as kids, Dungeoness. Such a gloomy name and with a dis-used nuclear power station hovering over the pebbly beach, almost a gloomy place. But not quite. We had fish and chips in the Railway Cafe, which is, thankfully, just as it used to be (except with the addition of plastic flowers on the plastic table cloths), and we ventured, in true British form, to the beach for just long enough to know that it was way too cold too hang around.