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I've been commissioned to write a piece for The Observer Magazine on my Appalachia trip, using my quest for banjo tunes and good food as a guide. For reasons of length and story-strength, the food aspect has been removed, and it's now a story about my search for the banjo. I'm really sad about that; I met so many great people and ate so much amazing Bar-B-Q on my food trip, and so I as I cut chunks out my article, I shall post them here instead.

(I still feel like a cheat though; one Bar-B-Q in North Carolina gave me a plate of luscious roast pork, wonderful red coleslaw and a bowl of delicate crispy hush-puppies and refused payment. I don't know how I will explain to him what happened without sounding like a freeloading journalist (I did try to pay!).)

‘Southern’ food, the slow-cooked meals that shimmer with love and lard, starts appearing in restaurants somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon line, where northern reserve meets southern hospitality and charm. I plunged right in at Allman’s Pit Cooked Bar-B-Q, a joint off the highway near Fredericksburg, a town full of civil war history, for a mid-morning sandwich of slow-cooked pork and lovingly-made ‘slaw’, drenched in thin-but-sweet barbeque sauce.

“Ah been here so long I don’t eat barbeque anymore,” drawled Mary Elizabeth Brown, “better known as ‘Mom’”, a small smiling black woman with two gold front teeth that twinkled as she showed me the electric ‘pit’ where every night for the last 51 years she has roasted 29 shoulders of pork.

“Every day ah make 6 gallons of slaw and 8 gallons of sauce- they ma mother’s recipes. I wrote them down before she died.”

Tales of how a man once allegedly offered Mom $10,000 for her sauce recipe resounded in my head as I set off, encouraged by the load in my stomach, into the foothills of the Appalachians that loomed large and blue above Fredericksburg.

I was delighted to be able to see a great cellist play live on Tuesday night, in a small arts centre on the outskirts of Oxford. Barney Morse-Brown, who goes by the name of Duotone is an experimental cellist with Baroque and Classical tendencies who made an album last year that cheered me through our long, cold winter. His songwriting is both sad and witty, and the whole thing an impassioned embrace of strings. I don't really like trying to talk to musicians after shows so I went away thinking about how much I would like to tell him what an impact his music had had on me, and wondering how I might do it.

The next night was a whole other show- Tony Allen's 70th birthday, a long musical party for a great Nigerian musician who is far more interesting behind the drum kit than he is infront of the mic. Weary, I left the after-show huddle and, weighed down by metres of Nigerian dress, made my way home.

At London Bridge I changed buses, only to see the 35 pull away before I could get to it. I settled down to read my book at the bus stop, wishing I had left the show earlier.

A couple of minutes later, I looked up and saw a man who looked like Barney. I looked back down at my book, assuming I was wrong, then did a double-take when I noticed he had a cello bow in his hand. It was him!

I went up and introduced myself; he must have been as surprised as I. We were waiting for the same bus- he was staying not far from my flat- so we rode the top deck together and I told him how much I loved his album. He looked a little surprised, perhaps, or maybe just shy. After he got off I wanted to proclaim to all the Nigerians on the bus that they had just travelled with a great musical talent, but it all seemed so unlikely so I kept quiet.

I was away in the USA for a month without a computer, hence the lack of blogging. To be more precise, I was in the Appalachian Mountains which should really be its own state for its cultural seclusion from the rest of the country. I can't really make up for it now but these photos do seem to sum up the trip.

The Blue Ridge Mountains, a chain of the Appalchians which give off a dew that makes them appear blue, are a soft and grand sight around every corner. In the northern part of the mountains, around northern Virginia, the ridge is slim and sharp, the valleys falling on either side inhabited by people who seemed to echo the grand mountains in whose shadows they live. Further south, getting into southern Virginia and North Carolina, the mountains are higher, broader and inhabited by people who seem more open and warm. In eastern Kentucky, where I had the amazing fried chicken, anything goes. Desperately poor and continually shafted by the policy-makers in Washington DC who want the coal to keep coming out of the ground whatever the environmental and social cost, this is a place where everyone has some sort of musical talent, where kids barely in their teens are performing old-time banjo tunes on stages and recording albums.

I discovered that I am not a lost cause when it comes to making music- I learnt five banjo tunes and am about to go to my first old-time jam in the hope of joining in. I also ate a lot, learnt a lot about old-time music and the people who make it, and made countless new friends. The USA really is a great, over-weight, friendly, proud, rich and wonderful place. But I am glad to be home.

Of the many highlights of this summer, the Salen Show in August sits high at the top of the list. I enjoyed the tombola, in which I won some Iron Bru and a mini-manicure set, and the dog show reminded me of when we used to take our dog Dolly in the hope of bringing home rosettes. But my favourite was the cows, whose long red coats shone brilliantly in the summer light as their owners, dapper in waistcoats and chaps, brushed them, soothed them with quiet voices, and polished their horns with WD40.

We used to live at the head of the loch in a big house with walls two feet thick. My room had a sloping ceiling with a deep window sill where I used to sit and watch the snow, waiting for Father Christmas. Once, my sister and I opened our stockings at 4 in the morning and then wrapped them all up again so that we wouldn't get into trouble for opening them before morning. I don't remember it being that cold but I do remember having electric heaters, so I don't think we had central heating back then. They were the happiest memories of my childhood, that feeling of driving over the cattle grid knowing that granny and poppa were waiting for us in the house, and Dolly, their springer spaniel, would come out with her soft brown ears and wag her tail. Getting there meant weeks of freedom, doing roly-polies on the lawn, exploring the trees and moss in the wood behind the house, swimming in the river, riding the ponies.

Yesterday I went to the house for the first time in the ten years since we sold it. The family welcomed me in and gave me a tour of the house. They've done nothing to it since we left, except changed the kitchen a little bit, so all the old furniture's still there, though where there was once a grand piano is now a ping-pong table, which I think we would have preferred. The banisters we used to slide down seemed tiny and the stairs where my brother got us to jump down (I think my sister broke a bone) would have been easily manageable now. The Aga, where I learnt to cook, seemed so small to me now and the big kitchen table where Grandpa would lift me up to sit on while he cooked, was just an ordinary height table. Everything seemed smaller, just a normal house really.

"We've been very lucky," said the current owner as we sat in the warm kitchen and drank tea and ate flapjacks. "We've had ten happy years here."

The house is full of children, dogs, welly boots and dripping wax jackets. The sheds are brimming with bicycles, tools, kayaks and quadbikes for the farm. Everyone seems really happy, the house full of life. As I left I gave a heavy stamp down the sloping hall floor which runs the whole length of the long, narrow house. It still made the same hollow noise as it did when we were kids and we would race eachother down that hall, invariably annoying some adult who was snoozing infront of the fire.

The other night I had dinner with C. and A. who, as usual, provided me with brilliant conversation, our topics darting from wrestling to peoples' love of eagles. A.'s watch is broken and the watch face and half the strap are attached to his wrist with three red post office elastic bands. I worried that the bands were uncomfortable but he said not; C. assured me he was going to get it fixed at some point.

On the way home from their remote house overlooking the Treshnish Isles and under a perfect mackerel sky- where the sky shines silvery and the clouds ruffle like the dark and light strips on mackerel skin- I met with various creatures of the night; rabbits (all grey but for one tiny handsome black rabbit), highland cows grazing the hedgerows, sheep whose eyes glinted ominously in the headlights, and four hedgehogs. One sloped off quietly, one puffed itself up and I watched fascinated as its cream spines grew from its black fur, one sat in a ball as I managed to swerve around it, and one was recently dead, its bright red blood spilling from its ruptured middle, a gory mess splattered majestically across the road. Over all of this, two stars low in the sky: one white, one glowing orange, probably Venus. It is in places like this, on remote hilly roads, that one remembers that up there is a whole other world to which we are totally unimportant.

I've not been to the Salen Show for years, probably since I was a little girl and used to enter my grandparents' Springer Spaniel Dolly in to the dog show. We were so proud of the rosettes we brought home; I remember a blue one which must have been second place.

Today I went along to the show, parked in the field and walked across the bridge at Aros Mains to where the Highland cattle were snorting and huffing from their pens. A judge in a tweed hat and a thick gold wedding band on his purple wrinkled hands stood in the middle of the ring and tenderly felt each cow in turn: the horns, the neck, the hips, the tail and the legs. He had them parade around and around, pulling on the ropes attached to their heads, and all the while the owners groomed and preened their long red hair, combing the fringe right down over the eyes almost to the noses and the fur on their coats upwards so it curled and flickered in the breeze. The farmer from Laganulva, not far from our house, took the first prize in a few categories and everyone leaning on the metal fence clapped and admired the beautiful beasts as he shyly slipped the red rosettes into his jeans pocket.

"Hello my sister," goes the familiar greeting, and I am delighted to hear N.'s voice on the other end of the phone. I'd been trying to ring N. for ages but I kept getting his answerphone and no answer to my texts.

"I lost my phone. It fell from my pocket when I was riding with that small motorbike I have," he said. "I went for three days to the Sonatel in Carrefour to get my number back, and those three days it was raining."

I asked him if he remembered the day we went out to his village on the motorbike which his friend lent us. His friend forgot to tell us that the bike had no second gear. We walked and pushed that bike for miles through the bush, but when he came to give the bike back, he told his friend that everything worked perfectly. I asked him why he didn't say that it had a problem.

"This is not nice," he said. "I have to tell him everything is OK or he will be cross."

Everything is going well for N. The business is successful and the rain has come. How about the motorbike which he uses to go from village to village in the forest buying up goods for his shop?

"I have a new system now," he said. "When I go on that bike and it breaks down, I push it to the next village and I leave it there. Then I take a horse cart home. The next time the bus comes through that village, I ask someone to put the bike on it then I meet it in the town."

The new iPhone is available to buy today at GBP499 for the most basic model. The iPad appeared a few weeks ago at a couple of hundred pounds more than that. G. remarked on Saturday morning, while we were having coffee after a long night selling records at the 'Yes we Can' album launch, that what has replaced buying music is buying Apple products. Steve Jobs has convinced us all that owning an iPad (3 million of which have been sold in the last 80 days) will make us happy. When I was growing up, it was owning a record that made life exciting.

We all know that no one buys music anymore; very few people actually think the recorded product is worth anything. Most people think music should be free. Why do we keep going then? Maybe we in the music industry are as unfailingly optimistic- with no reason to be- as the migrants the musicians talk about on the compilation. But then, many migrants get to Europe, find that the streets aren't paved with gold, but make it work anyway, despite the misery and hardship.

Yesterday morning I went to visit J. on my way to pick Jo up from the ferry. J. worked for my grandparents on the farm up until my grandfather died 12 years ago, looking after the horses and I suppose the other animals too. She still lives in a little cottage in the village with a dramatic rose garden out the front. J. taught me to ride horses and I loved going out on the farm with her when I was little; she seemed to me indestructible then and not much has changed now, though she's riddled with arthritis and can hardly use her hands.

She said the BBC were coming to see her next week; they'd been reading old newspapers and found out about her winning the ploughing matches in the 60s and 70s and wanted to interview her.

The first year, she won first prize in the ploughing match. The second year, she won it again, but the boys weren't happy about a lassie winning so in the third year, when she won again, the men who won second and third swapped the trophies over.

"That's the lassie's trophy," the judge stepped forward and said when they announced the winner. "We'll sort it out at the end," they said, but they never did.

"I didn't mind for myself," said J., "but my dad was on his deathbed at the time and he was awful sad."

She didn't go in for it for the next couple of years, but when she went in for it the following year, arthritis had already got a hold of her and she had her right arm in a sling.

"I can do it with both hands though," she said, and she went on to win the match. The men who had swindled her out of the trophy two years back came in second and third position.

"I knew then I could die tomorrow," she said. "I had my three trophies and I beat those boys."

As we sat in her quiet kitchen, the Aga humming in the corner, three cars went by the window in quick succession, over the little narrow bridge just beyond the rose garden.

"That's the ten o'clock ferry in," we both said, knowing that a stream of traffic in these parts means the arrival of the boat.

The boat is the clock by which Mull time ticks. Everyone knows the timetable off by heart because without it, the papers don't arrive, the Spa shop runs out of supplies and no one gets on or off the island. There is something extremely satisfying about knowing exactly when things and people will arrive- like knowing the timetable of planes coming in and out of Dakar- but I don't quite know yet what it is.

Time has an exceptional quality here; the day lasts interminably (I have not seen darkness since I got here, even when I sleep at midnight and wake up at 7am) and there is nothing, like the call of the mosque, to mark its passing. I look out on the rocks and the glassy loch and imagine it to be 5 in the afternoon, only to find it is half past nine at night. At eight in the morning it feels like midday. But it doesn't matter what time it is, I have nowhere to be and nothing to do but write and wonder what I will do when I get really hungry.

The car is still being fixed so today I walked the four miles back from the village with a bag of kale and some potatoes so I shall be alright for a while.

When I got back, I was sunburnt so I went down to the shore in my wellies and waded into the clear water, rippled with giant plaits of rust-coloured seaweed. I swam backwards and forth, though it was quite cold. I noticed a caravan parked far-off along the way and when I splashed about loudly, two figures came around to the front of the caravan and stood watching in my direction. I could tell by the way their elbows were out that they were both looking through their binoculars.

"Oh, I say," I could imagine one of them saying, "what do you think that is? Over there, look!"

"Let's have a look," replied the other probably, focusing the lenses and nestling them into his eye sockets. "Do you think it's a seal, or maybe an otter?"

I stood up in the six inches of water I now found myself in and gave them an enormous wave. Only one of them waved back.

Last night it drizzled slightly, but the air was warm and it was still light when I went to bed at half past ten. This morning I climbed up through the bracken and ferns at the back of the house to check on the burn, the small stream from where we get our water. The peaty brown water trickled thinly across the rocks; there's hardly been any rain here all winter, H. told me, and they've been taking water from the big river to water the crops. If it doesn't rain soon, we'll be completely out of water.

This afternoon, after a few hours' writing and having taken the washing in, I walked along the shore to find a place to swim. I passed two cars parked in the lay-by along from the house, their doors open and their occupants standing with large binoculars and a telescope looking back at the house.

I stopped and said hello. The three men ignored me but after a long pause, the woman said hello back. I asked if the sea eagles were around- they nest in the tree behind our house- and they didn't reply. I asked again and one of the men said, coldly, not turning from his binoculars,

"Yes."

They started to talk amongst themselves. I stood there for half a minute then said, "Good luck" and went off.

I tramped down to the shore, across mossy humps and through the brambles and irises, and found a rocky shelf slightly protected from the wind. I was still amazed and irritated by the rudeness of the twitchers, who were camped out in my front yard, when I stripped naked and plunged into the water. I hope they could see me and would be put out too. Perhaps they would think I was a seal.

My mind is starting to unknot; now I can hear the silence as loud as anything. It is raucous and it rings in my ears where normally thoughts and over-thinking are the loudest things of all.

The man I met on the ferry from Lerwick had a job ahead of him to find the owner of the little diamond ring he'd found amongst the rubbish on the beach at Yell. I had my own ring mystery to solve, but I didn't tell him that at the time.

My older sister had a ring which my mother bought her, silver tubes filled with pink and purple perspex that glowed under neon lights and could be worn in two directions. She was my older sister and everything she had, I wanted to have too, because she was what I believed to be the benchmark of hip. When I was working at Lonely Planet, I took my first pay packet and bought a ring by the same designer from a jewelry shop in Brick Lane. I think I was 20 and it cost me £60.

Roll on a decade and that ring has been all over the world with me. Of all the lovely bits of silver I own, left to me by grandmothers and some even made by my grandmother, it's the one piece that people comment on. It's unusual maybe because what looks like precious jewels is in fact perspex, set in a heavy block of silver which never seems to dull. It is smooth and angular at the same time. It is beautiful to wear because it is soft on the skin but also extremely heavy. It suits the wide knuckles that I inherited from my Granny Wendy.

Recently I started to hanker after another piece of jewelry by this same designer. I went back to the shop in Brick Lane and showed the lady the ring. She said she didn't know who had made it and had nothing like it any more. More recently I went to another shop near my office and the woman also didn't recognise it. She got out her magnifying glass and looked at the hallmark, now almost completely worn away. "W.B" she said it said, squinting at the underbelly of my ring. "Try Google."

With a day-rate pay under my wings I spent the afternoon Googling 'W.P Perspex Jewelry' and every other permutation of those bare facts. Nothing much came up and I forgot about it for a while.

On Sunday morning I was rushing out to my studio to open up my exhibition when I stopped and carefully put on my ring. Before I got to the studio, I stopped in at a furniture-maker's studio in the next-door yard to say hello. He was listening to Ali Farka Toure on the radio and working away at a beautiful wooden chair which I stopped to touch. We chatted and as I was about to leave he pointed at my ring and said,

"You have a William Prophet."

I stopped cold because of course then I remembered his name as clear as anything. W.P., not W.B.

Ian showed me his own wedding ring, made by W.P.

"He's a friend of mine. He runs a pub now round the corner."

The pub is on my cycle route so yesterday, on my way to town, I dropped by. Everyone stared at me as I went in; only Kennington locals drink in this little hole with its navy blue patterned carpet and game machine flashing in the corner. I went to the bar and said I was looking for William.

A man came over and I told him I had one of his rings, showing him my hand.

"Oh right," he said, looking suspicious. "What's wrong with it?"

"Nothing!" I told him, and started to tell him how I had looked for the designer of this ring for some time.

He smiled and looked pleased. But said, "What do you want?" as if I had come to ask for my money back.

"I want to buy another one," I said.

"Oh," he said, then started to tell me in gushes of speech everything around the subject of how he came to be running a pub.

"I thought it'd be a hobby and then I could crack on with the jewelry," he said. "But I've had commissions for a year that I haven't been able to get down to."

He gave me his phone number and told me to come back; he'd dig out what he had upstairs.

He asked me if I came on my bike.

"I could tell by the sweat," he said.

When I was at school, the beech veneer letter rack was at the bottom of the stairs leading down from our bedrooms. I used to go to breakfast early in the morning and then come back to see if there was anything in the post for me around half past eight. When there were no letters in the 'S' rack, I felt incredibly lonely and sick in the stomach, knowing nothing much ever came in the second post and it would be another 24 hours before the post came again.

Often though there were letters from my family, especially my grandparents who used to write to me a lot. Once my grandfather wrote me a long letter and, knowing how much I pinned on getting post, divided it up into nine separate envelopes and posted them over a few days. The pages just stopped at the bottom, mid-sentence, and I had to wait another day for the next installment.

After I left school, and had left Australia, I carried on a relationship with someone who used to write me long, long letters full of news, thoughts and longing. I spent my evenings replying, crafting page after page of my own news and sadness at our separation. Everything I experienced in my days went into those letters; there was nothing that went through my mind that didn't get repeated on those thin Air-Mail pages and then folded up and sent off in an envelope to Australia. Even though we could make cheap telephone calls and we did- we spent hours on the phone too- it was those letters that meant something. They had taken time to compose; they were undistracted pieces of our lives which carried so much with them.

When I lived in Ziguinchor, my other grandparents wrote to me often and I had a lot of time to reply. Invariably I would get one envelope from them with two letters inside, one from my grandpa and one from my granny. They had both spent time with my last letter and replied in their own way, my granny's reply full of news of things she had done with the French group that she belonged to ('the French Circle") and her early mornings at Columbia Road flower market, and my grandpa's letter in large scrawling script telling me about what he had been reading, what plays they had been to see, and what he thought of the things I had told him about the people I lived with and the way we lived.

Once I told them how T. was disappointed with the little moped I had bought, wishing I had instead bought a roaring motorbike.

"Typical African," my grandpa replied, suggesting that T.'s love of expensive motorbikes was somehow connected to the greedy African dictators that he actually knew a lot about.

"Typical man," my granny replied in her version of the reply.

I have kept every letter I've ever received in the years since I left school. They are in their own shoe box, with their own ribbon tied around them, kept high up on a shelf, near the door if I ever had to grab them in a fire. My grandparents- the ones who wrote letters- are gone now but occasionally I'll forget and think to myself, I must remember to tell granny that when I write to her.

It's hard to find an hour or two of uninterrupted time to sit down and compose a letter but I did this week and though it felt unnatural and my fingers cramped up, I quite enjoyed it. I wish I had more people to write to though and then I really would find the time.

The folk musician who hates to be praised, Chris Wood, tells a story on his album The Lark Descending about the twisted path of love between a young man and woman who work in a fish and chip shop. I went to see Chris play last night, a typical self-deprecating performance in which he muttered "bollocks" and "fuck" throughout the set when he forgot his chords, but suffused with the warmth and humour that his assumed grumpiness does not really manage to cover. At half time I bought him a pint and told him a story I heard on the ferry from Shetland.

I was standing at the ferry bar when a red-faced little man, also standing at the bar, asked me if I had lost a ring. I couldn't make out his thick Shetland accent all that well, but he plonked his pint down on the bar, sloshing his beer up over the sides, and reached into his pocket of his coat. He pulled out a little wooden box and with a beaming face opened it up to sighs of delight around the bar. Inside was a tiny gold band with a large single diamond sitting proudly on top of the ring. Inside the lid of the old satin-lined box was the name and address of the jewelers, an address in New York City.

This man said he'd been clearing up rubbish on the beach at Yell, one of the northern islands of Shetland. He'd picked up 26 black bin bags of rubbish- mostly driftwood and plastic brought in by the spring tides. Sifting through one pile of rubbish he found this ring and he'd kept it, wondering how to find its owner.

We each had an idea about how the ring came to be on the beach at Yell. I thought of Chris' song, 'One in a Million' in which the young man in the chippy saves up to buy a ring for the chip shop owner's daughter. After two years of saving, he presents her with the ring and asks her to marry him. In a fit of stupidity, believing it to be a plastic ring that he won in an arcade, the girl tosses the ring into the sea, declaring that all she wants is to win the lottery and be shot of the town.

They go back to frying fish. One day she slits a fish open and the ring falls out, at which point she sees it's real diamond and sapphire. She offers him his ring back and he tells her to keep it, sell it and leave the town. But she puts it on her finger and says she'd rather stay with him.

It doesn't really explain why our diamond ring is still in its box but it's a good story anyhow, and just reminded me of how often a Chris Wood song has popped into my life and given me possible answers to things that had been baffling me.

A little way into my trip to Shetland I realised that my body had been through a battering over the last weeks: the extreme work in Senegal, chasing around after the coup in Bissau, fighting off the dogs on St Louis beach, and then the stress of the volcano and not being able to get home. I suddenly found myself in a remote place with not much chance of getting any rest, feeling low and out of touch with myself and with noone around me who knew me enough to recognise that I was in one of my post-Africa dips. On top of this, extreme tooth ache rattled my head all weekend long and the fiddles that played like a swarm of hornets throughout the nights rang through my ears painfully.

But as happens, some people I hardly knew took care of me. It doesn't take much to let someone know they see what's going on and that they feel sorry for your situation. The offer of a short walk along the shore from someone I had always been a bit shy of was a reaching out that broke through my loneliness and made me realise that probably everyone feels a bit out of place, just that some people are better at hiding it than others.

Due to the exciting events in Iceland of the exploding volcano, no one can leave Dakar except for those going south to other African countries, or maybe the Middle East. I was due to leave for London last night where I thought all my problems- the broken computer cable and my exhaustion from two weeks reporting in Guinea Bissau- would be fixed. Then I was looking forward to joining friends on a quiet island on the west coast of Scotland where I would be soothed. I was so looking forward to going that infact I was already there in my mind, the 'coup-like situation' of Bissau and its endemic corruption and drug smuggling problems far behind me.

Today in Dakar everything is as usual. The kids play football in the sand below my window and the sheep bleat, tethered to the odd metal poles scattered around the place. The men in the ramshackle compound below slap playing cards on the table and furiously bet beans as currency, arguing amicably as one loses all his money. Small girls play with skipping elastic and a reggae version of Elton John's 'One more night' sounds over the compound walls.

The airport is like some vision of hell: trolleys at all angles blocking the check-in hall and people asleep on mats, t-shirts pulled over their faces to block out the harsh light and the frosty gush of the air-conditioning units whirring above their sleeping bodies. But in town the streets murmur with the sound of Saturday night, people enjoying themselves, people who know nothing about Iceland or airspace or who even care; they do not travel by plane.

Cheikh Lo was almost the very beginning of my love of Senegalese music. I saw him play at one of Max and Rita's Shrine events at Cargo, in 2002, and just remember having a lot of fun. Despite his apparent fragility- he is stick thin- his music has gone from great to even better and the album he's about to put out in the UK is pretty exciting new stuff.

We sat in his retro back Mercedes on Monday afternoon listening to it. When he opened the door to the car, which was parked outside his fantastically-tiled house in a run-down neighbourhood of Dakar, cigarette ash blew in clouds out of each door. The seats were slung far back and everywhere there were bits of paper, strands of tobacco, prayer beads, sunglasses, casettes, and plenty of ash. This was his boy´s den away, perhaps, from the prying eyes of the women of the house, though it being in full view of the street we were hot viewing material for the people coming and going from the boutique/tailor shop next door.

One by one we went through the songs, him pointing out this guitar riff and that, who played the drums on this one and who played the sabar on that. After the triumph of his record Ne La Thiass, made in the late 90s and produced by Youssou N'Dour, everyone (including myself) said it would never get any better. But this one has gone back to the acoustic style, his own choppy guitar riffs playing around with his guitarist Baye's Congolese-style melodies, his vocals more passionate than ever and some funky Burkinabe drum beats. I guess it could be called something like acoustic funk.

Cheikh was wearing his gold-rimmed aviator glasses, cool as ever. His long dreadlocks hung down to his leather belt and after much smoking he let me take a picture of him reflected in the little rearview mirror on the dash board. We passed a really nice afternoon together, then he drove me to the bus stop for me to get my bus home.

I have been back in west Africa for the last two or so weeks, not having much time to settle into the way of things. On my way to Senegal, the power cable for my computer burst into smoke and sparks when I plugged it into a socket in Casablanca airport, and then I lost my voice. With no way of replacing the cable until I get back to England and my throat filled with sand and silence, text message was about the only way I could communicate with people and for the most basic of messages: I am here and I am fine. Like most other situation I find myself in in west Africa, I could but give into it.

Tonight I am in Bissau, once more enjoying the hospitality of friends. It is baking hot and the crickets are croaking out in the street. The town is quiet; there was a scuffle within the army last week and the Prime Minister and head of the army were taken by some lower-down officers. Some say they were planning a coup and that it went wrong. The Prime Minister has been released but the chief of staff remains hidden. People are disappointed that it has yet again come to this and no one knows what will happen next.

I had lunch at Dona Berta's hotel, where I stayed on my first visit to Bissau exactly seven years ago. Back then I spent my first few days vomiting and lying in a sweaty fever, unable to communicate with anyone but finding it all a grand adventure. Bissau hasn't changed all that much since then; a few more places have electricity but otherwise it is as if time has eluded the city. Being back here it does feel like Europe is worlds away. Even Dakar, with its roundabouts and flyovers and glittery ladies, feels like a million miles away from this little town.

I've been to three gigs this week- one in a massive arena, one in a squat in east London and tonight, Mumford and Sons at the Shepherd's Bush Empire, a refreshingly homely feel for such a large space.

Everyone must know by now that the banjo has it roots in west Africa; its forbears are the ngoni and ekontine of Mali and Senegal, the latter furiously and brilliantly played by Juldeh Camara last night at Passing Clouds in east London with the rock guitarist Justin Adams.

Mumford and Sons do the banjo (post trans-Atlantic slave trade version) in a big way. M&S are from west London, formed only a couple of years ago and put out their debut album last year. They've gone from being a local indie 4-piece to being one of the most celebrated music acts in Britain at the moment, at a rocket speed that no one, least of all them, can quite fathom. It's attention they both deserve and are humbled to receive.

"18 months ago we were playing in a barn at a friend's wedding," said the lead singer, pointing out their friend who was in the audience. "It's kind of fucking with our heads that now we're here."

Homely, honky-tonk banjo and guitar-led stomp mixed with brilliant musicianship, wicked rock energy and surreal lyrical themes. Having seen an average band play a packed arena earlier in the week, tens of thousands of people happy to watch OK musicians loving themselves up with no offer of blistering guitar solos, it was massively moving to see musicians acknowledge that we, their public, are capable of understanding musical excellence. They were rehearsed, intuitive and deeply pleased to be playing.

It is such freakishly cold weather in England at the moment; no one can remember a winter that has gone on this long before, though my parents recount that when we lived on the farm, when I was growing up, it was like this all the time.

I don't mind the cold so much as the after-effects; I find scratches and sores on my arms where my dried skin must have scraped on a lamp-post when I was locking up my bike somewhere, and the tips of my fingers are constantly cracked. I sometimes eat dinner twice, as my body consumes everything I just put inside it, and I am tired a lot more than usual.

When I went to visit Now in Casamance, we divided the day's work between the three of us: his friend opened the market in the morning while Now and I had coffee on the front porch, then Now went to relieve him while I got water from the well and washed up the plates and pots from last night. Around midday, Now came back from market with fish, rice and oil and together we cooked the main meal of the day.

The housework involved in keeping a very simple two-roomed house clean and in order in Africa is incredible, because there are no cupboards, tables, or space for storing things. The washing up is done on the porch, the water drying from the concrete ground almost as soon as it touches it, and small goats come and eat whatever they can get their thin lips on, upsetting the bowls that have been stacked strategically to dry. Water must be carried in large yellow bidons, two at a time, across the hot dry landscape and all the men at the shop, who sit in the shade and listen to pop radio, watch as the white girl (who they assume can do nothing for herself) struggles with the canisters.

"Look," they say, "there's a white girl struggling with the water cans. How amazing."

The boys gather round when food arrives. One sits to the side and studies a Koran, while the others dig in with their hands and compliment the chef on the food ("How amazing that a white girl can cook rice.")

When the floor has been swept of fish bones and sandy grains of rice, Now would bring his thin mattress out on to the porch and tell me to lie down, which with great pleasure I would do. The boys would slowly disappear and we would be left to snooze in the unbelievable dry heat and wind that sweeps across the landscape in the afternoons, feeling the heaviness of the heat melt our bodies to the ground as sleep slowly, lazily catches us.

I'm not sure if this is a true story, but I hope it is. When my mum was pregnant with me, 31 years and some months ago, she was too busy to go to the hospital for a scan. Living on a sheep farm, we had scanning equipment so the first glimpse of foetus-me was through a sheep-scanner, my mum (in my imagination) laid out flat in the lambing shed.

Maybe it's not true, but anyway, today is my birthday and I am thinking, as I always do this time of year, about all the things which have happened in the last year, and also of where I came from. I started life on a farm and I hope that soon I can go back to that, in a small way. The last year feels like it has been 'my year', in a way, when all the agonising I did in my twenties suddenly faded and I was left feeling: life is short, let's get on with it.

It is very hard to find a tea pot which suits all requirements. It must first of all be a thing of extreme beauty, and there is nothing more beautiful than a tea pot of perfect proportions in dusky turquoise-blue with a hint of green, circa 1960s. Secondly, and just as important, it must be a good pourer, meaning it must not dribble down the spout and it must tip elegantly from the handle. The lid must not rattle or fall when tipped to extract the last half-cup from the pot. It must feel good when held, as if shaking the hand of an old and dear friend. It must be a thing of beauty in form and function.

This teapot was one such item, elegant yet full of character. I found it in a shop in Bethnal Green, and as soon as I saw it I knew it had to be mine. It was a lot more than I might usually spend on a teapot, but I loved it so much that I didn't care. I asked the man in the shop to show me to a tap so I could fill it with water and watch it pour. It did not dribble. He wrapped it, and I took it home, via H.'s house where we had pot after pot of tea, admiring it at every sip. We all agreed, it was a divine item of retro crockery.

Arriving at my home, I unwrapped the pot from its bubblewrap to find the handle in pieces. I had knocked it ever so slightly on the gate post on leaving H's house and now it was broken. The person in me who accepts life's tragedies and moves onwards tried to find some way to deal with this. But the retro crockery-consumer in me went to bed and cried, mourning the loss of what was a brief, but loved companion.

Minty-green Poole teapot, c.1960-2010.

Last night I had an interesting conversation with one of the small group of British musicians who tempted me away- briefly at first but more seriously recently- from African music. Chris Wood is a fine story-teller, singer and guitarist with a burning hatred for Margaret Thatcher and a love of the Kentish land where I was brought up. Since Thatcher was also a large part of my growing up (parents to this day divided over the issue), as was the joy of visiting fish and chip shops by the Kent coast on special occasions, there is a lot in Chris's music which reminds me of my childhood and points me back to a place which, in my meanderings, I thought I had long left behind.

We've met briefly on a couple of occasions and I am amused to discover that he still finds the music press in Britain a waste of everyone's time. Last night he asked me how it all worked, a question I am often asking myself as I try to navigate my way onto the pages of the papers which seemed filled with the regular names- both journalists and musicians- and nothing much new or adventurous. Occasionally you'll read about something non-commercial but once a big release comes out, you can be sure that anyone hoping to sell any papers will be printing something about it, even if everyone agrees it's rubbish.

One of his criticisms of the music press is how much we rave about things, to the point where it all becomes meaningless. I'd agree, though if I'm writing about something it's usually because I've gone through weeks or months (years in many cases!) of research, contacting, pitching, waiting, pitching again then listening, organising and finally interviewing and writing about this person who I better think was pretty interesting in the first place or else it's been a painful waste of my time. But he's right: there's a lot of shoddy journalism out there and it must be pretty disappointing to spend years working on a piece of music only to have some unprepared nit-wit turn up asking the obvious.

Perhaps I should write something critical about his gig? The audience were a pain in the arse, the extra-tall couples infront of us stroked eachother in an annoying way that they no doubt thought romantic and secretive, though everyone standing behind them could see what they were doing. Some people sung along to Chris's tunes, and they did not have good voices. It was too hot.

But Chris put on a rusty performance (it being the first solo gig in 3 months, he told us) which just added to his witty way of telling stories, made him seem even more down to earth and made us all laugh. I hate to say it, but it was a really good way of passing two hours. Sorry.

Oh, he did ask me how I ended up in Senegal. I told him I heard a Song by Orchestra Baobab and that was the next ten years turned on its head. He said he thought that kind of thing only happened to musicians. Photos back from the lab today, reminding me of why I'll be really happy to get back to Dakar in March.

This from Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina, entitled 'How to write about Africa', an excerpt from an article published in Granta. (Thanks to my anonymous blog-reader for the correct attribution).

'Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize. An AK-47, prominent ribs, naked breasts: use these. If you must include an African, make sure you get one in Masai or Zulu or Dogon dress.

In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don't get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn't care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular.

Make sure you show how Africans have music and rhythm deep in their souls, and eat things no other humans eat. Do not mention rice and beef and wheat; monkey-brain is an African's cuisine of choice, along with goat, snake, worms and grubs and all manner of game meat. Make sure you show that you are able to eat such food without flinching, and describe how you learn to enjoy it—because you care.

Taboo subjects: ordinary domestic scenes, love between Africans (unless a death is involved), references to African writers or intellectuals, mention of school-going children who are not suffering from yaws or Ebola fever or female genital mutilation.

Throughout the book, adopt a sotto voice, in conspiracy with the reader, and a sad I-expected-so-much tone. Establish early on that your liberalism is impeccable, and mention near the beginning how much you love Africa, how you fell in love with the place and can't live without her. Africa is the only continent you can love—take advantage of this. If you are a man, thrust yourself into her warm virgin forests. If you are a woman, treat Africa as a man who wears a bush jacket and disappears off into the sunset.'

Wanlov the Kubolor (right) features on our up-coming compilation out on Outhere Records in June. He's got an acerbic sense of humour, and it's often people who think they know about Africa who end up as the butt of his jokes, though his lyrics are usually too clever for the people he's attacking to understand.

I saw him perform at Passing Clouds in London recently, and much of the audience, who were just there to drink cheap beer and laugh at their own, drunk jokes, talked throughout his set. Wanlov was wearing a skirt, and no doubt the audience- who were not interested in Africa or African performance- thought this a typical outfit for an African, a colourful wrap and bare feet. If they had listened they would have realised that he, and those of us who were listening, were in fact making fun of them.

It's very hard after a knock to pick yourself up and remember who you are and that you were happy with who you were before the setback. I can't tell if this photo, taken on a hot, and sometimes rainy, day in Utah, is sad or hopeful.

Back in England. Much of the last weeks were spent looking at my old life from the outside and remembering how much I loved to be in Senegal for short periods of time. Living there gave me an insight that isn't possible with a month here or there, and part of that insight was the loneliness of a life without distraction (the cinema, fast internet, book shopping), the mind-numbing boredom of long days when there's no work and the power is out and nothing much is happening in the lives of people around you, and witnessing the desperation of ordinary people, friends, who feel dragged down by their circumstances.

I wish I had taken a photo of the bowl containing the sheep's head we ate on the eve of the Muslim new year. I remembered my vegetarian days with a sort of hazy recollection, as if it was someone else's life.

Here is a place in Britain that I really love, Ben More on the Isle of Mull, just before a storm. When I was growing up, we spent our holidays in the shadows of this mountain, in my grandparent's house. This painting sums up the memories of always being wet as we were caught out by the quick-changing weather.

It used to take forever to cross the River Gambia. Sometimes your car would pull up at 9 in the morning and all along the muddy track leading to the stinking boat there were yellow trucks carrying rice and others cars carrying people, waiting their turn to get across. Gambia refuses to build a bridge over the river and Senegal's President Wade has at mad moments claimed the Chinese are going to pay for a tunnel to go underneath the entire country so that no one will ever need go to the Gambia again. For the moment though, those wanting to get from the north of Senegal to the south have to get in the queue and wait their turn.

Now there is a second boat, and both are currently functioning. When I crossed a few weeks ago, I took shelter from the sun in a small shop selling fake football strips and sacks of sugar and tea while I waited for my car to come across. The boys inside the shop got chatting to me, though I found it hard to understand their Gambian-style Wolof, and vice versa.

Outside the shop, sitting on a chair in the blazing sun, was an old man shoveling sugar from a 50 kilo sack into small bags for sale. I admired his hat. He offered it to me for 5,000 francs but I pointed out that I could make one for nothing from a cardboard box that was lying around. He laughed and agreed. This is a hat from Guinea Bissau! he crowed, laughing hysterically as he spooned more sugar into the bags.