It took a few months, during which I could not publish photos of the project in progress because it was a surprise for my friends who were getting married, but my second bedspread is finished and here's a picture to prove it.



The trouble is, it's so much nicer than my own. But Sim and Vicky are the nicest couple around so it's fitting. I only hope they don't like it so I can keep it for myself.

I'm back in Dakar now, and strangely, happy to be home. My last trip to London made me realise that for better or for worse, Dakar is my home now and I feel better about it for having faced up to the fact. It's been raining and at three this morning I lay in bed watching a storm through the balcony doors. My baobab tree, which for one year has looked like it's had a bad case of syphilis, now has three new branches after I went at it with a scalpel. It has more leaves now than it ever did and I hope one day it will flower again.

Talking of trees, the frangipani tree is now too heavy to stand up under its own weight.



I guess that's why they're always bent over.

While I was away, some idiot came along and dumped a truck full of sand on our garden.



I doubt the plants will survive living under 6 feet of sand for the next month, and I further doubt, as Now optimistically believes will happen, that anyone will come along and move it.

To quote my friend, "Everyone talks about solidarity, but there's no consideration".

It's Ramadan here so I went along at 7pm to break the fast with Now. I'm obviously not fasting, but celebrated with him anyway. It was lovely to be in the damp heat, sitting on the shop floor, talking about the neighbours and laughing about how I will never get used to the amount of times I must hear "You've got fat Rose!" when I come back from England. I know I've got fat you lot, but shut it anyway.

And as if that wasn't a nice enough home-coming, the embassy has just rung to tell me my passport has arrived.

An excellent part of the summer. Interviewing Toumast at Womad. Nice times.

The ferry ride from Oban to the Isle of Mull is one of my favourite journeys on earth. The boat pulls out of the small port and makes its way past green islets and lighthouses on rocky outcrops, and then out into the open sea. From there you are really in the western isles, an isolated and at times desolate place where the fog can be both dark and beautiful, sometimes obscuring what's infront of you, sometimes parting to let you in.

The Caledonian McBrayne ferry is the only way to get there. It's a boat that everyone complains about, and it's one of my earliest memories.

"It always smells like chicken curry on that boat," said the jolly fiddle player of Lau, a band I went to see perform on the Uxbridge Road this week. He had just come off stage having played a gorgeous ode to that ferry journey, chicken curry and all.

"But you can get a bacon butty any time of day," I said, remembering fondly my brother taking me down to the ship's cafeteria to buy the greasy buns that my mother would never have let us have at any other time.

Lau is a group of three guys from England and Scotland. Their concert was every bit as wonderful as their album. I wondered if they would be able to replicate the dramatically changing rhythms and melodies on stage, and they did, with humour and energy.

You can listen to one of their tracks here.

I feel as foreign now in the neighbourhood I grew up in than I do in downtown Dakar. Yesterday I went shopping on the Northcote Road, felt sheepish as I bought just a hundred grams of expensive cheese while the mothers beside me bought huge chunks and roasted garlic cloves in oil as well. Felt pushed out of a cafe when young boys in mullets soon to go back to school jostled for the free polos at the counter and nagged at their older, tired-looking mothers. Young teenage girls with messy hair-dos who do lunch; don't get me started on the push chairs.

Where do these people come from, and where are the people like me?