Cycling to Peckham this evening, I noticed that little has changed since I lived nearby. 'Your Time Clock Shop', antiques and new time pieces, is still open, and the large billboards advertising miracle healing and faith ministries still litter brick walls and train bridge underpasses. Paul's Olive Shop in Camberwell, where the one-eyed Greek-Cypriot owner who used to bring me kilos of Cypriot apricots every summer to make jam, sells olives and stuffed breads, is still there, smoking his brown-tipped fags from a chair outside, his large wife beavering away behind the till. The shop selling Persian foods and artifacts is still there, a sign in the window saying,

'You smile
I smile, they smile, we all smile
Please smile more.'

In Peckham, Nigerian suya grilled meat shops line the high street, and a crowd of Africans had gathered around in the road where a number 35 had run someone down. A stoned man on the other side of the road watched as another bus coming in the opposite direction ran his bike down, which he had left inexplicably in the road. The Peckham Pulse has been re-named but is still an incongruous modern-design swimming pool, and the Member's Club which is no doubt a brothel on Camberwell Church Street is still up and running, a neon light flashing outside. My old street is smarter, window boxes proliferate, and posh blocks of flats have shot up, nearly outnumbering the not-so-posh estates and crack houses on the other side of the road. The Zest of India Indian take-away is still running at Loughborough Junction, and they gave me a discount for being a customer from the very beginning, when they were a restaurant in Camberwell.

While I was waiting for my take-away, I sat flicking through my photos from my last weeks in Senegal. A beautiful little girl came in with her mother, and while she, her enormously fat mother, ordered food and took no notice of her daughter, the girl came to look at my photos. She loved the snaps of the pineapples in Benin, and the market women in Lagos. She told me about her Nigerian neighbour who wears wax print cloth, but said she didn't like living where she lives because they have mice.

When I showed her pictures of wall paintings in Senegal warning people not to take pirogues across the ocean to Spain, the girl told me that when she was on holiday in Spain, she was on the beach when a big boat came along and there were lots of African people inside, many of them dead. The mother turned and said, yes, all these Africans washed up on the beach, but the police took them away. She said she had lived in the Canary Islands many years ago and Africans, dead and alive, turning up on beaches was always a problem.