Today I tried to sell a second hand oven to a second hand oven salesman. I started at fifty, he said ten. I went down to thirty, he went up to twelve and a half. Then he walked away and I was left standing in the road with an old oven.

'Monsieur,

Due to my indefinite departure from Senegal, I would like to terminate my account with Sonatel. Please sever both my telephone and internet lines with immediate effect.

Yours sincerely,

(Signed)

Rose Skelton'

This at half past seven this morning. Seeing it in words, written in delicate Franco-Senegalese handwriting by the beautiful phone company assistant Safietou, rammed it home with blood-curdling chill that I am, indefinitely, leaving le Senegal.

"Taxi man!" I cried, "follow that bus!"

He drove up alongside the bus which was racketing through the city streets, a disabled man in a wheelchair hanging on to the back for a free ride. The taxi hovered, while I leant out the window to take a photo.

"Got it?" he asked, grinning and pleased.

Got it.

Omar has a new tooth. For a long time it's bothered him that one of the teeth on the bottom row sticks out at a funny angle. Last week he was smiling more than usual, and I eventually asked him what was up.

"I have a new tooth, look!" he said, shining his teeth at me, his mouth wide and smiling.

I asked him whose tooth it was. He looked forlorn.

"Does it belong to someone, then?" he asked.

"I imagine so. Did you ask the dentist?"

Omar said no, looked crestfallen, then slightly repulsed. We moved onto another subject. Later on he told me that his wife had not noticed his new tooth and he was waiting for the right moment to smile at her as he had me. He had been worried the wonky tooth put her off him.

Late night, feeling sad, I bump into a musician friend, one of Dakar's best. He asks me how I am. I tell him I'm fine.

Wire-rimmed glasses, deeps wrinkles across his brow, he peers into my face. He starts fiddling with something already in his hand, the dark smoky room obscuring almost everything.

"Here," he says, and presses something into my hand.

Sleeping bag, mosquito net and a two-day picnic in hand, Hermione and I arrived this morning at Dakar's decrepit train station. We really thought this time that we would be getting on the road, or on the rails, having been told that last wednesday's train was going to leave today, at 13:50. I went up to the ticket booth, a piece of plastic so dirty separating me from the man selling tickets that I could neither see him and, the plastic being so thick, nor hear him either. But I managed to make out the words, "be patient" and "derailment" and I knew we were in for some bad news.

I stepped away from the booth and saw a young security guard in a peaked cap beckoning to me, scratching his balls as he waved his other hand towards me. Eventually I went over.

"Where do you want to go," he asked, towering above me.
"Bamako."
"When do you want to go?"
"Why?"
"The train has derailed."
"I understand that, thankyou." I wanted to get away from him.
"You should take the bus. Why don't you take the bus? You could take the bus."
"Thankyou, bye."
"But you should..."
He disappeared from earshot as I spun on my heels and went back to the obscured ticket office.

The man behind the counter was keen to sell me a ticket, but he was unable to tell me if the train was actually leaving. All around me were Malian women, black skin and billowing cloth and kola nut clumped on mats, surrounded by more people on the floor, and men selling thick wool suits from coathangers, boxes of toothpaste and phone top-up cards. A man in a mustard boubou approached me to tell me there had been a derailment; the man selling tickets told me to tell that man that this was false information, before picking up a heavy orange dial-phone and making a call, somewhere.

"Be patient madam."

I went outside to ring Pape, the man who for the last week has been in daily contact with me about this train. He works at the station but he actually functions as an employee, ringing me when he has information, and ringing when he says he will. After five minutes of ringing around, he rang me back to tell me the news:

"The goods wagon has derailed at Bamako and it's going to take three days to clear the line."

Hermione and I are back home now, an hour after we left on our big trip, and both oddly pleased. We are writing postcards, drinking coffee and both quite happy. Here she is, half of her, at the station with the bags.

On my last day in Morocco, I went to visit a shoe-maker who I had resisted buying a pair of leather slippers from in 2005. I regretted not owning those soft leather shoes, and have thought about them since. When I went back there, to the small hole in the wall of the kasbah, I found the shoe-maker still there, nestled amongst his leather goods, his face wrinkled, a white skull cap on his head.

I showed him my broken handbag, bought in Fes in January. He told me, through a neighbouring shop keeper who spoke French, that he could fix it; leather-work was his speciality.



I told him I had to leave for the airport in a few hours and he promised me he would have it done within the hour. When I went back, the shop was shut up, as the whole row were, and the only sound in the empty street was of the muezzin calling prayer from the ancient mosque tower.

I sat, and waited, and eventually he came back. My bag was waiting patiently for me inside.