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.