Watching the mucky urchins on the beach playing in the sand, F. said that when he was growing up he was jealous of the boys playing in their pants while he had to stay home with his middle-classed parents and pursue middle-classed activities. All he wanted to do was play on the beach.

Yesterday I went to Yarakh, a poor fishing neighbourhood on the outskirts of Dakar to photograph boats. I dislike taking photos in Dakar; the Senegalese love to make a song and a dance about anything, especially taking photos, even if of inanimate objects that have no connection to themselves. But in Yarakh, far enough away from the city to feel like a village, people were jolly and welcoming and were happy to let me photograph their nets and boats. Driving back through ramshackle neighbourhoods where men sat on wobbly benches and chatted in the late afternoon sun, I had the strange and fleeting thought that foreign visitors with no idea what's going on seem to have, that people seemed to be happy and poor.

The sky was almost unnaturally blue today. After a long, draining week, I wasn't looking forward to going out to the suburbs, through the traffic which clogs Dakar's only artery, to talk with some rappers. But when I got there I was rewarded with a huge plate of rice and meat, eaten- just how I like it- from a dish on the floor surrounded by rowdy chatty men, and hard-working, efficient musicians who had done the work I asked them to. Sometimes, things are easier than you think they're going to be, and that feels good.

N. is a young waitress at a restaurant I often go to, either to eat their good food or to hang out at the bar and chat with the staff. I hadn't seen N. in a while, and when she came over to serve me, she chattily enquired after my 'cheri'. When I told her I didn't have one, she nearly dropped the plates, but when I offered that men were sometimes as complicated as women, she said,

"Rose, haven't you seen how thin I've got?"

I looked at her; she was a bit slimmer, it was true.

"I was married in November," she went on in explanation, "and I'm really happy, but men are really capricious, they just worry about their own heads and we have to worry about them too."

Her husband lives in France, but comes every three months or so to see her. Isn't it hard, I asked, him being so far away?

"No," she said emphatically. "Don't get me wrong, I'm very happy with him, but I prefer it like that."

M. asked me to come to the office. We would go together to a wrestling school to see more sparring and bulging masculinity. When I got there, the head of the wrestling school, one of the country's one-time biggest sporting stars, rang to say that they were putting up a tent for the election campaign in the school and there wouldn't be any training to watch today. Could he come to us?

As evening fell, he turned up with a shy 20 stone wrestler in tow. Modou, a hulking fella with cheeks bulging over his small eyes, is going to be one of the country's biggest sporting stars, get an interview with him while you can. I asked him about how he became a wrestler, but he didn't speak any French. He's earning 2000 pounds a match, but only gets to do about three a year. It's a tough business.

When the interview was finished, along with a wrestling demonstration from the old man who grappled at the legs of the younger star and threw him to the marble office floor, M. asked us to wait. The women in the cultural centre next door were taking a cooking class, and would we stay to taste the food, then give it marks out of ten. I was hungry, so I was pleased to assist. The wrestlers, probably always hungry (by the looks of them) agreed as well; we sat down to wait.

I huge girl, larger than the wrestler, came in bearing a shiny piece of fabric and a plastic rose, both of which she lay ceremoniously on the table. Next, the woman teaching the class came in and lay two plates of salad and breaded chicken on the table. Would we give marks for presentation and taste? No problem.

It is useful to know that Senegalese cooking, the non-rice kind, is basically formed of a few ingredients:

Onions, raw or half-cooked
Mustard
Maggi cube
Oil
Cold chips
Fish or chicken

Ten plates of burnt fish, cold chips and raw onion sauce swimming in oil passed beneath my nose. I tried all of them, and hope I was enthusiastic enough with my scoring. After all, it's not the students' fault that Senegalese cuisine is so desperately monotonous and uncreative. The wrestlers smacked their lips and dug in and I gave extra marks for one of the women who tried out using lemon in the salad dressing, an innovation in these parts.

As we ended the meal, and I gasped for fresh air to dilute the nauseous effects of oil in my stomach, M. offered the enormous girl to the wrestler as a wife. "She'll crush me," he said, "no thanks."

C. and I have been doing an article on Senegalese wrestling, which is the national pride and joy, and very beautiful to watch.

"To see two well-formed, well-trained men sparring, that's really something wonderful," said Pape, the wrestler who I followed through his training one day.

One hundred men gather each night on a sandy plot of land, wrap themselves in tight lycra pants and loin cloths, and work on their muscles. After group running and air-punching, they get into pairs and lock themselves together like sparring rams in spring. It is frightening: some of these guys weigh 20 stone (125 kilos) and they think nothing of knocking the other in the face if it means he will go down faster. But at the same time it is tender, they wrap themselves together as if they are cuddling. Afterwards, they sit curled up together on the sand watching the other sparring matches, and laugh.

One of my favourite organisations at the moment is The Author's Licensing and Collecting Society who once a year pay me relatively large sums of cash for having published my work in various magazines. It's a complete mystery to me how it works, since it doesn't include newspaper or inflight magazines, leaving very little else. I always forget about it until each March when an amount of money appears in my bank account and I move around with a spring in my step for a day knowing that I have just received a royalty cheque.

I read on their website today that they have £18 million collected for journals, books, articles and they can't find the writers. All you have to do is sign up and see what you are owed. There's no catch!

In 2006 I took part in the 5.6km swim to Goree Island, the first athletic achievement of my adult life. I didn't know her then but Penelope, who has become a good friend since, took these photos. That's roughly beginning, middle, and happy end. I'm the one in the silver swimming cap, slicing through the water like a bullet...

(I'm also the white one)

Utterly tangled by thoughts and ideas I left my hellish workspace and went to Goree Island. My mind was still in unproductive knots when a man approached me at the ferry terminal to tell me that the next boat wasn't for half an hour. It was Mamadou, the man who had been our most excellent guide last year when I led the Songlines tour, and who I needed to do some work for me this week. It was a stroke of luck, and a great pleasure to see a friendly face, someone I can be myself with and chat about interesting subjects.

Mamadou invited me to his house to drink the Senegalese tea that I dread. It is strong and vile, but it passes the time. His two rooms are in an old colonial house, the kitchen painted dusky blue, the living room a calming green. The sunlight, so strong on this sandy island, poured in through the door as Mamadou boiled and poured the mixture at a hypnotic pace.

Mamadou is a nervous man, shy perhaps, and reserved. He asks few personal questions but is pleasingly relaxed and forgoes the interminable inanities which can dominate polite conversation, and which with some people you never break through. He told me how he had met an African-American in 1994 who had paid for him to learn English at the American Culture Centre in Dakar. He went there twice a week for three years, hence his excellent English, and now he scrapes by working as a guide.

"Some people in this world are very kind," he said and showed me the letter from his friend typed on headed paper, along with a copy of the cheque which had been sent to the centre to pay for his lessons.

I met a friend for lunch yesterday.

"You are a very surprising woman," he said.

I like this friend a lot, but we are not close enough that he really knows the ins and outs of my life. I certainly put on my best face for the brief lunches we sneak on the odd week-day afternoon.

"I wonder where you will be in five years' time," he went on. "I wouldn't be surprised to hear you were married with two children, nor to hear that you were still a bachelor and traveling around Africa. In fact, I'm surprised you always look so well," he said. "If I lived your life, I would cry a lot."

It's funny what we allow our friends and acquaintances to see of ourselves and our lives. What you see is almost never what's underneath.

Sweltering heat, Saturday afternoon. We invite ourselves over to Y's house and while she goes out, we feed and water ourselves from her generous kitchen, and then we swim all afternoon. Late in the afternoon, the sun dips and B. dips her feet into the pool water, while I admire her Josephine Baker plaits.



Two days later, the same group of friends are helping me to celebrate my birthday, champagne and live music and wild Nigerian dancing. A hulk of a man enters the room where we are all partying, wide and tall, with a young, quivering face and teary eyes.

"Eh! What happened to you?" someone asks?

"I lost my wife and son," he replies, and explains that they were driving home from church when a Lebanese man in a four-wheel drive smashed into the side of their car. His wife died instantly, another boy who was also in the car soon after and his son an hour later. His face is so tender that I can hardly bear to look at him.

The rest of the people in the room start to interrogate him, presumably it will help him to vent his pain. "What were her injuries?" "Was she driving fast?" "Where is the Lebanese man?" To their horror, he answers that the police came for the man, but that later he asked for them to let him go.

"It will not bring her back," he says, though the room protests, saying it is not up to him to decide justice.

On my last day in Kano, with an hour to go before the cloth market opened, Abdsallaam took me to the zoo. He had only been once before, years ago when he was 'trying to waste some time'. "Funny," he said, "because that is what we are doing now, wasting the time."

The only other people at the zoo, a desolate dustbowl containing ten different kinds of hyena, a lion with a purple and green lizard sunning itself on its back and a baby giraffe, were a hijab-wearing woman studiously writing down the name of every animal she saw in a notebook, and a group of child-disciples to a religious teacher. The children were bare-footed, wore rags and had scabs on their shaved heads. They stared at me as much as they stared at the animals, peering vacantly into the python's pen, periodically sneaking looks around to see what I was doing.

"Ah-ah!" cried Abdsallaam when we came across a pen of goats. "They even put goats in the zoo. People are very stupid."

As we strolled around the grounds of the zoo, I found myself enjoying the spectacle of going to a Nigerian zoo much more than I did the animals. Abdsallaam, on the other hand, complained wittily throughout; there were too many hyenas, the lions were too thin, and there were too many empty pens. The hippo was too ugly, the warthog looked like it was dead. (Being poorly-sighted, he had to take my word for it that I could see the warthog blinking its long eyelashes from time to time.) Abdsallaam seemed to be having a really terrible time.

I asked, at the end, if he had not enjoyed the zoo.

"Ah," he reflected as we walked past a dog-faced baboon with one of its arms missing ("done on capture"), "I can not say that I have suffered myself."

When we finally came to the market, Abdsallaam went off in search of a green shiny fabric that his daughter needed for her school uniform hijab. While he was searching for the exact colour match, this cloth trader, no more than a teenager, caught my eye.

It came as a complete surprise to me that Lagos, above, is a city with a plan; streets in grids, concentric curves and avenues all fitting together to form a whole. I saw it through the smog from a plane, a ceaseless patchwork of tin roofs and suburban red gables, unbroken beneath the haze. When you're inside Lagos, it's hard to imagine that there's anything at all outside of it, or that anything was thought through before it was laid down. It is stifling, tense, everything crammed in as if the heavy gray skies are the thing keeping everyone inside.



Landing in the north, in Kano above, I felt calmed by seeing flat roofs and square compounds, Arabic Africa, the Africa I know and feel comfortable in, love. The hot, dry air burning my eyes and nose only further reminded me of 'home'.

Leaving the airport, we passed a long queue of men hunched over wheeled barrows, each stacked with black jerry cans. "Kano no water," said my taxi driver. The water is collected by these sweating men, wheeled back to town and sold for 40 naira a can; a backbreaking way of earning a living. Kano is dusty and dry, with an intense heat that cools the minute you step out of the sun. It is desert air that at night becomes chilly, and after the sweltering heat of Lagos, it is delicious.