Wrapping up presents alone in my hot and dusty apartment has made me feel homesick, especially when listening to the BBC at the same time and hearing tales of snow and advent calendars and carol concerts. I'm going to London tonight, but still, I feel particularly non-festive, even if I have got the obligatory Christmas cold.

All of this has made me feel pretty emotional. Someone who I thought was a good friend to me failed to perform the most basic of friend favours this week, while someone I hardly know rang me when he woke up this morning to see if my cold was any better. A beggar in the street wished me good morning, while people I have known for years have forgotten to ring me to wish me a good trip away. I am confused about my position here, I feel so foreign in a place I regarded as my home. It has thrown me topsy-turvy.

I have had a gas leak in my kitchen since Sunday when I broke the gas head which plugs into the cooker. There are no hardware shops in town, only handbag shops, so I can look nice but I can't fix a gas leak. In desperation, Omar the tailor took me to a place he knew, not allowing me to go alone because it being the day before the big muslim festival of tabaski, the whole world is out in the street buying last minute things, and everyone is desperate for cash. It's not safe for me, he said.

In one shop, the man said he didn't have what we were looking for. Then he turned to me, gave a great big fake smile, and said in wolof, "hello you. How are you?" as if he were talking to a child. I replied hello and Omar pulled me out of the shop.

"Senegalese are not normal to treat a foreigner like that," he said. I was glad he had seen what idiots people can turn into when they see a white person. I have many friends who tell me I am exaggerating when I say people act differently to me than to other Senegalese. No one wants to think that their countrymen are capable of being effected by the colour of someone's skin (I can't use the 'R' word here). But it's a fact I deal with every day. Toubabs are like something you might find in the circus. We are a constant source of amusement. And Omar, I am pleased to see, thinks it uncivilised.

I am happy to say though that some things are sacred. Now is going to get up at 3am to accompany me to the airport.

On Wednesday night, Tiken Jah Fakoly, Africa’s most famous reggae singer, did a concert in Dakar. Like his music or not, he is the most influential musician on the continent today, driving fear into the politicians he denounces in his songs, and stirring up the crowds of dissatisfied youth who, living under often-oppressive political regimes, have little other believable leadership to listen to.

His big hit at the moment in Senegal is a song called ‘Open the borders,’ and asks why ‘they’ should be able to apply for a visa to an African country and travel the very same day when ‘we’, Africans, are unlikely to ever get visas to visit Europe. ‘We only want to travel, and also work,’ Tiken sings in his raspy reggae voice, ‘but we didn't refuse you your visas.’

On Wednesday night we had sat through a handful of hip-hop performances, waiting for Tiken to come on. One of my favourite artists, Xuman, did his piece and finished it off with a quick verbal attack on the government, at which point the organisers cut his microphone and he was ushered off the stage. When Tiken Jah did finally arrive, late and clearly tired, the momentum was a little lost. Still, he pounded out the old classics, including one of my favourites, 'Quitte le pouvoir' (leave the power), in which he changed the words of one chorus to (translation from French), 'if you love Senegal, get out of power'.

The next afternoon, a colleague called me to see if I had heard the news. The Interior Minister had banned Tiken Jah from the country. His criticisms during the concert had not escaped the president's notice and from now on, he would be persona no grata, unable to come back to the country where he is a living legend. Considering riots rocked Dakar just a month ago, with young people making it clear they are no longer going to put up with the unjustified spending of public cash while the average Jo fights to even earn enough to feed themselves, it seemed a brave decision. The days of freedom of speech in Senegal might be well and truly over.

*****

Last night, with a plane to catch at 6am, my visiting friend showed enthusiasm for one last night out in Dakar. I wasn't sure what was on and at midnight, we were still sitting at home contemplating the outing over G and Ts. I couldn't for the life of me think of anywhere new and different to go to, since we have been to at least one concert a night for the last 8 days. It suddenly came to me: an old dark bar I used to go to when I first lived here, when I had a boyfriend who played in a band. Jo and I got our best Saturday-night-in-Dakar outfits on and set off for Keur Adriene in some dark corner of the city.

At the door we were met by a dreadlocked singer, who insisted on telling us he was from Paris, and then showed us to some seats inside the long, dark room. A fish tank had been added to the rear wall since my last visit almost three years ago, and some flashing lights had been strung up along the side wall, presumably with Christmas in mind. But other than that, it was all the same, a few hookers at the bar, rows of low tables and plastic chairs set on a cracked concrete floor, and men drinking cheap beer and looking bored. It felt good to be back.

The band, who had the unfortunate luck of being positioned in a corner of the room infront of a huge screen playing silent Lucky Dube music clips, were warming up with some elevator-music standards. "It's not terrible," said Jo, optimistically. We decided to stay.

The waiter came along, a fat man in a baseball shirt and cap, and asked gruffly what we wanted to drink. Jo said she wanted water. He looked annoyed and said there wasn't any. "What, none at all?" she asked. "No," he said.

"Well, I'll share her drink then," she said. Gin in this country comes in triple measures and one is enough for a small army.

"You have to have your own," he said, really pissed off.

"Even if you don't have what I want? Ok, I'l have a Coke."

The waiter brought our drinks, and when he came back with the change, he screwed the note up in his hand and threw it at me.

"He's not a natural," Jo said.

Next, a young guy came up to me and whispered in my ear, "They don't have that in France!" nodding to the band who had started some quick-fire sabar drum playing.

"Well, quite possibly not, but then I'm not from France," I replied, not hiding the fact that I hate being confused for a French person.

"Do you have an email address?" he asked.

"No."

"All French people have an email address," he said, unwittingly spitting on me, before storming off.

Luckily the singer, whose name I didn't catch even when I went up to him afterwards and tried to find out who they were, was fantastic. As much energy as a young Youssou, two sabar drummers who looked like they had been dragged out of bed by their older brother to play for him but were in fact the best drummers I have seen in a long time, and a tama player in Malcolm X glasses who danced with his little talking drum tucked under his arm and set the entire place on fire. It was arse-shaking silly dancing all round, sexy women with tiny tops billowing up to the tama-player and shaking their buttocks until he could drum no more and men in flat caps losing themselves in this incredibly loud, fast rhythm, blissfully unaware of how silly, to foreign eyes, it could all look. It was one of those moments where I thought, if I had to capture 'Dakar' in one real scene, this would be it, and how lucky I was to be there.

I had a visitor this week. His name is Guillame. He is 2 weeks old, smells like new babies should, and in 3 months, when Mary Helene gets back from her maternity leave, he's going to be sleeping in a bucket in my flat, while his mother works, every Tuesday and Friday. I can't wait.

I wrote a little about the forced removal of the lepers in my street some weeks back, and the 'walking markets', guys who sell stuff informally in the road. Except it's not so informal; it's the mainstay of Senegalese commerce. People are frustrated; there were some violent riots while I was in Ghana, so bad they made it onto the pages of the Guardian.

What is so shocking to everyone about this is that Senegal is, and has always been, the cheri of the west's eyes. While the rest of the region is either mid-conflict, post-conflict or in the hands of drug barons, Senegal remains relatively peaceful and 'democratic'. It suits everyone's agenda for it to remain, and remain looking, that way. So the attacks on uncomfortably vocal activists, journalists and musicians, the student riots, the underhand treatment of the ex-Prime Minister who was fired for calling the President's son to the national Assembly to explain spending on the infrastructure for the 2-day Islamic Conference next year (somewhere in the region of £90 million for useless road projects alone), have been glossed over by all except the frustrated few in the country. Except now those frustrated people are becoming a big beast that, by the look of the riots two weeks ago,is growing in numbers and force. People have started to sit up, notice, and take action.

This week is my 7 year anniversary of my relationship with Senegal. I have been thinking about the changes which have gone on during my time here and I was left feeling really sad. The gap between rich and poor is excessive, and not just that the rich are getting massively richer but the poor are getting massively poorer. I find it hard to find a budget that I can survive on, and I am part of the rich. The cost of living is unlivable, and the President continues to make rash decisions that anger the growing numbers of unemployed, dissatisfied people who are no longer happy to say, 'ca va aller' and reach for the prayer beds. There is a real feeling in the air of violent frustration that is, sooner, rather than later, going to turn nasty.

But I thought I was just being dramatic, so kept my thoughts to myself. After all, can an intuition about a socio-political situation really be right?

This afternoon I met a friend at the supermarket (I must be rich), who is heavily involved in the music industry. We talked about the number of musicians who are starting to get vocal again, which is usually a good barometer for how the rest of the population are feeling. She said that in the next six months, she expects there will be a serious backlash against the government. Later, I was talking to a representative of a UN mission here, who told me that by next spring, a serious violent confrontation will have occurred, and he didn't mean another riot of shop-keepers throwing stones. He was talking about something much more serious. And I feel it too.

It is exciting, in a way, because what is bubbling under the surface will finally come to a head and maybe it will produce better results. Maybe, like happened in Guinea this year, people will be able to show that they have a voice and with it can make positive changes. But it also saddens me. Senegal has, in the words of every newspaper article about the place, been the bastion of peace and democracy in west Africa. But if you ask me, it's a false image that is just waiting to shatter.

I have friends coming this week from England, so I didn't want to write about the wildlife issues I am having at home, incase it put them off. But they are now far too busy to read blogs, as I have sent them off with shopping lists including things like cheddar, and conditioner that doesn't contain parabens, so I can tell all.

Last week I was going into the living room, also my bedroom, to have lunch when I noticed something that looked like a large stick on the floor. On closer inspection, and when the stick ran under my bed, I realised it was in fact a large lizard, and not a gecko, but a big scary black lizard which was sticking its tongue out and everything.

I screamed, shut the door, and ran downstairs to get my guardian, who I usually try not to have much to do with because of the way he stares at me in an inappropriate fashion, but he was the only person I know who's nearby who could help me. I told him the problem, that there was a lizard under my bed, and he started saying annoying things until he realised I was near-hysterical and better come upstairs quick.

On entering the bedroom, and realising that I was going to do nothing much more than stand at the door with it open a couple of centimetres and call instructions, he asked for a broom and proceeded to search under the bed for the offending creature. When he pulled the bed out from the wall, we found the ugly thing lurking in a corner. I screamed and locked myself in the kitchen. There was a lot of banging, then Cisse asked for a floor cloth, and a little while later he appeared holding the lizard in the cloth, white belly in full view, and proceeded to move towards me with the thing, which I estimate to be 20 cm long, until I got actually hysterical and locked myself on the balcony, which was as far away from it and him as I could get.

I have not slept well since. I live on the third floor; how did it get in? Is there a nest? Was it just the baby and is daddy still under there?

The wildlife issue did not stop there. This morning I was making coffee in the kitchen. I noticed that the little speckled eggs which I had seen last week but decided they were nothing dangerous, are still stuck to the kitchen door. They are now much bigger. They are perfectly round, speckled like quails' eggs, and stuck to the door. Anyway, I noticed that they were moving, and when I got down on the floor I saw that they were in fact hatching, and out were crawling little hairy millipede-type creatures, lots of them. They were small, compared to the lizard, so I didn't scream but I did douse them with insecticide and then squash them with the handy fly-swatter that my sister sent me and which has been the most useful thing I have ever had. At least they died at the hands of a Hawaiian flip-flop, a trendy way to go.

Where are these creatures coming from, and why?