My driver, Abdsallaam, is viciously funny about Nigerians and Nigeria. He does not respect royalty, finds the whole complicated protocol of getting into the Emir's palace laughable, and does not have time for it. Despite this, we decided that we would try to get inside, for no other reason than it's something to do on a scorching hot afternoon in Kano.

After much trailing about, from the Emir's secretary to the Emir's palace and back, we were told to go and inform the Ministry of Tourism of my intentions to visit the palace. On entering the Ministry, we found a youngish man flaked out on a thickly puffed sofa, flies landing on his still face, his face shining in the light which seeped in through moulded curtains. Abdsallaam gently shook his knee, and explained the situation. We were lead to the Head of Marketing, a man in a small room who smiled sweetly and told me that it was lucky I had come to register my intentions to be a tourist in Kano, I could have been in terrible trouble if I had not declared myself.

2,000 Naira facilitated my application, which was photocopied at great length and given back to me to take to the palace.

This morning we went back to the palace. By this time I had lost all interest in seeing the Emir's residence but had paid my money and was going to get the goods. We were sent back and forth, asked to wait, and were finally shown into a courtyard within the outer reaches of the palace. Hundreds of men in giant robes and long turbans of silver, gold and red gathered waiting for ther Emir. When he arrived, in an open-top Mercedes to great fanfare, the men gathered their robes and rushed forward, each a defiant fist held high in the air.

"To tell you the truth," said Abdsallaam, "they are all corrupt. These traditional chiefs are not a business, they produce nothing and are of no use to anyone. They just come here to ask for money. I don't know what they are doing with their lives."

Later on he laughed as we crossed the hectic road between the Palace and the Emir's secretary. "If a man steals a yam from the market place, the people will gather to beat him. If a man steals 5 billion Naira from the treasury, the people will respect him. Later, I will explain why," but, as I write, the answer is as yet unrevealed.

I have sustained three strange injuries this week, but none are as painful to bear as the heat. Passing a flashing thermometer sign on Victoria Island yesterday I saw that it is 35 degrees. I'm not the only one suffering in the heat, F. said this morning that he was amazed we hadn't all beaten ourselves to death, and he is Nigerian. Last night I stayed with a friend who has air-conditioning. I've always been against the stuff- it just makes life harder once you inevitably go out into the heat and is a massive power-guzzler, but I slept for 9 solid hours last night and awoke freezing cold: it was wonderful.

My injuries include 'water yam rash', (the liquid that comes off a raw water yam causes this nasty itchy rash if you get it on your body) and swallowing a piece of glass. The glass, I am told by my doctor friend, will be dissolved by the acid in my stomach.

This week I went to meet a friend-of-a-friend in Ajegunle, 'the largest slum in Nigeria', and probably the whole of Africa. It comprises various neighbourhoods and covers a huge area of the city, and was founded by people coming from the Delta regions of Nigeria, where the oil now causes so much wahala (trouble). The children of Ajegunle are all sympathetic to the Delta struggle, the armed warfare that goes on between the Delta militants and the government and anyone on their side.

"They don't care what colour you are; if you're not black, they'll kidnap you" is the gist of one song by the dramatically-tall twin rappers who go by the name of LongJohn. They were invited by the rebels to go and do a concert in the Delta, a moral-boosting gig in one of the rebels' camps, a village deep in the jungle. They had to take a boat for six hours through the mangroves to get there. LongJohn, like most rappers who emerge from west African ghettos, are god-fearing, respectful and neat.

Ajegunle looked to me very unlike a 'slum'. It was not unlike the worst bits of Dakar- low-rise buildings, open sewers, rattling structures in which millet is ground and peanut-oil sold. I wasn't scared, as many said I should be. No self-respecting Nigerian would go to Ajegunle, and when I came back, my Nigerian friends asked to see photos; they were all surprised to see paved roads.

It does have a bad reputation though. My friend, K. led me to a clearing behind a decrepit building where Alsations were kept in cages and Doberman puppies yapped in a pen. "This is where the robbers plan their jobs", he said, pointing to a neat space beneath a palm tree. Later, as we sat in the street sipping cold Pepsi ("You ever had Pepsi as cold as this in Nigeria? The neighbourhood people bribe the electricity office to bring them light.") K. pointed to a young guy who roared up on a flash motorbike. "This guy uses a skeleton key, a spike filed really really sharp, to break into cars."

He also taught me some hand signals that he would use as we walked through the neighbourhood. "If I point at someone with my left hand, it means they're a scammer. If I point with my right, it means they're a robber. If I wave my arm round and round and round, it means they're all into everything." Pretty much everyone I met though, including my friend who is studying for an MA on conflict resolution in the Delta region, was polite and intelligent. I suppose you have to be intelligent to scam million of pounds out of greedy English people who fall for the 419 scams.

"People feel like white people came and took us people for slaves. Now we're taking their money back, it's only fair. But what I don't get," said K. "is how people can be so stupid as to fall for it!" That is what everyone, scammers and non, think about the 419 trick. The bad light is thrown not on the fraudsters, but on the idiots who fall for it.

The house awoke to a lighter mood this morning; the air was cooler.

In the evening, as engineers tried to fix the enormous satellite dish in the garden from which F. runs his internet business, a sharp wind poured down the drive leading from the street to the house, bringing with it black, swollen clouds. When I went into the street, pandemonium had broken out, with okadas (motorcycle taxis) racing faster than usual and danfo buses screeching the horn and the breaks alternately, racing to race the rain.

At Happy Barbing Salon (Grace Makes the Journey Great), the barber shop on the corner which also sells CDs, Happy's apprentice barber, China, asked that I snap him. No doubt in an act of bravado inspired by the bosses absence, he picked up his mobile phone, took a stance at the shop front as if he was the owner of the place and pretended to take a call; the Big Man.

Back at home, Mama Daniel stood beside me defiantly as I made a curry. "I want to learn," she said. I showed her how to cut onions, fry them in oil and add spices. Tomorrow, she said, she will write it all down. Mama Daniel can not cook; she is heavy handed and 'not known for her lightening speed' at noticing things like ripening plantain. But really she is just bored and never been shown how to do things.

This evening, as I write this, we enjoy silent electricity from the grid, for the first time since I have been here.

It is very hard to express why life is so very hard in Lagos. It is so all-consuming that it's impossible to make comparisons or look at the situation objectively. It is hard to remember what life is like elsewhere, as the body sets its airbag to the Lagos setting and forgets what kind of defense system other places require. I haven't been to the interior of Nigeria, so I don't know what life is like in more rural places; life in the village is often a lot harder than life in the city. But Lagos is a beast, and I can't imagine that life elsewhere can be more difficult.

The state of decay that is found all over the tropics is somehow more obvious in Lagos. There are so many people that a bout of heavy rain can cause the most tremendous chaos. Yesterday I was 12 hours trying to get home from friends, stopping for a short lunch on the way and then having to take shelter at The Shrine to wait for the rain to stop. Lorries burnt out their clutch cables stopping and starting in slow traffic up the hill to Akute, passers-by forced to act as vigilante traffic wardens in order to clear up the mess at crossroads. The generator ran out of fuel; muck and air was sucked up into it. A bolt snapped during being repaired, the metal had completely rusted. Now it is well and truly bust.

People in Lagos go to church in a big way. This morning I was allowed a lie-in, the woman who warms the crowd up before the pastor arrives didn't get screeching over her megaphone until 9.45am. Until 2pm, the entire neighbourhood was filled with the excruciating shouts of people trying to improve their lives through god. What would improve life is some infrastructure; people would be less infuriated and shout less.

After I had given up hopes of being a gymnast and a synchronised swimmer (around age 15), I decided I wanted to be a dancer. Around the time I was trying to get to grips with the moves of a Ghanaian dance troupe, I heard 'He Miss Road' by Fela Kuti, saw a few old clips of him and his terrifically sexy dancers, and decided that if there was such a thing as life after death (and time travel), I wanted to come back in the year 1975 as one of them.

Fate would have it that Fela's daughter, a wonderful dancer, decided to teach me how to dance Afrobeat, the music that Fela invented. Femi, Fela's son, runs a band and is constantly flanked by three dancers on the stage, as well as an alternating crew of dancers who come out into the audience and climb up into a cage, a wooden frame on stilts covered with netting to stop eager hands from wandering inside. When they move, the cage sways and jiggles from side to side. Though the girls are small, they are strong and powerful and it often feels as if a flick of the hips could bring the cage down.



The three girls on the stage are the full-time dancers. During band practise every Tuesday and Thursday they wear t-shirts and tracksuit pants but when they perform, either in Lagos or overseas, they wear fabulously-crafted outfits usually made from strings of beads and the bare minimum of underwear. Great chains of coloured glass beads hang heavy over each shoulder, crossing at the back. The hips are adorned with more strings, and when they move, the beads jangle and clatter against eachother, in a mind-boggling frenzy of colours. From the waist up, the girls sometimes appear to be standing perfectly still, waiting for a bus perhaps. From the waist down, they move their ample hips in dizzying circles, up and down and around and around. If the audience wasn't already in a state of smoke-induced transfixion, then this would do make sure they were.



It is very hard to dance Afrobeat. Clutching onto a railing, flicking my hips this way and that, I am trying my best, and I have been told I am "not a lost cause".

Lagos is so large a city that my trip to see friends near the centre of town on Friday has to involve an overnight stay. I am out in Ogun State- still a part of Lagos but in an entirely different state- staying with a friend in a rambling house that has not seen a clear-out since about the early 80s. Crazy floral carpet, years of dust underneath it, hides funky 1970s orange tiles and when the generator is on, beautiful glass chandeliers glow in all sorts of shapes and sizes. The house is set on a compound almost entirely filled with aloe vera plants.





I've been afraid of dogs ever since I was chased by some Dobermans in Japan. Even when I'm not scared of them, I've got it into my head that I don't like them. I am staying in a house with eight dogs, and there's not a thing I can do about it.

Patch doesn't like me. He thinks I will steal his prize pineapple, and in the morning he nips my toes when I am outside watching the sun come up, hoping that a little morning cool air will take away the heat that has built up inside me over night. Those quiet hours between waking and when the generator comes on at nine, are silent and beautiful.

The evening brings the same quiet, and that golden sun which mellows everything it touches. I have become quiet fond of Jessica, a ridgeback, who is lumbering and large but inoffensive. The bench I was sitting on, crumbling like everything else in the compound, cast a shadow on her soft fur and for a moment I thought she too looked very beautiful.

Today I was supposed to go to Dakar; it was the first day of my new project which, on bad days, is tainted by self-doubt. But, having bought the ticket and decided it was now or never, I was pleased to be getting on my way. This morning I awoke to find 6 inches of snow plastering the garden and street. The French girls next door came knocking at my house to ask me to come and play, and I enjoyed it except for knowing that my plane wasn't going to leave for Senegal.

So, bags packed, I am still in London, and so tired from all the ringing around that I can't think of anything except that this must be a sign that bad stars are surrounding the trip, that my self-doubt is justified.