How di bohdi?

2010-10-25T03:17:00.000-07:00

Hello! This blog has moved. Please get in touch if you'd like the new address. roseskelton@gmail.com

Thanks for reading!

2010-10-11T02:23:00.000-07:00

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.

2010-10-08T01:49:00.000-07:00

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.

2010-10-03T07:53:00.000-07:00

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.

2010-10-03T07:47:00.000-07:00

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.

2010-08-24T15:10:00.000-07:00

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.

2010-08-17T08:02:00.000-07:00

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.

2010-08-12T08:19:00.000-07:00

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.

2010-07-27T01:24:00.000-07:00

"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."

2010-06-24T02:06:00.000-07:00

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.

2010-06-13T06:19:00.000-07:00

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.

2010-06-13T06:18:00.001-07:00

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.

2010-06-13T06:15:00.000-07:00

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.

2010-06-13T06:12:00.000-07:00

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.

2010-06-07T12:34:00.000-07:00

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.

2010-05-12T13:50:00.000-07:00

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.

2010-05-06T01:22:00.000-07:00

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.

2010-04-17T11:37:00.000-07:00

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.

2010-04-08T13:24:00.000-07:00

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.

2010-04-06T15:01:00.000-07:00

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.

2010-03-14T17:58:00.000-07:00

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.

2010-03-10T07:38:00.000-08:00

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.

2010-03-05T04:36:00.000-08:00

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.

2010-02-28T05:05:00.000-08:00

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.

2010-02-26T10:27:00.001-08:00

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.

2010-02-14T03:44:00.000-08:00

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.'

2010-02-12T09:01:00.000-08:00

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.

2010-01-31T03:25:00.000-08:00

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.

2010-01-19T05:27:00.000-08:00

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.

2010-01-12T01:51:00.000-08:00

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.

2009-12-29T02:26:00.000-08:00

It's been a really long time since I saw my friend Now, who since selling his small shop in Dakar has moved back to home turf in Casamance. In the end he came up against all sorts of problems in Dakar- mostly spiteful rich neighbours wanting to make life difficult for him- and unable to make even basic ends meet, he moved to Bounkeling, a small town without electricity 200 kilometres north of Ziguinchor.

After spending three months in his home village- 25 kilometres from Bounkeling along a narrow sand track through the forest- vowing not to go back to commerce, he started to see business opportunities unfolding before him. Around his village are hundreds of farmers growing lemons, chillies, baobab fruit and rice, bountiful crops flourishing in the immensely fertile soil. Most of it goes to feed the families that grow it, some of it makes it to the weekly Sunday market in Bounkeling for trade between villages but hardly any of it goes further than that. While Dakar imports rice and onions from Thailand and Holland, Casamance remains largely cut off from trade because people want to eat 'exotic' imported food, not the boring stuff that comes from their own land.

Loading his capital- from the sale of the shop- into children's plastic sandals in Dakar, Now set off to make a small profit on it. He went to villages when he heard there was a Joola circumcision party going on and set up a stall, laying a mattress down at night to sleep and lighting a torch above the stall to keep thieves away. When he made a profit on that, he rented a small shop, a couple of rooms in a big empty house and procured a table in the market.

On Sundays he goes to the weekly market to buy onions, stock cubes, tomato paste and mustard (the mainstays of Senegalese cuisine) in bulk and then on hot afternoons on his porch he spoons everything into neat 25 franc plastic bags, twisting the bags into a knot around his thumb to close them, to sell during the week. His wit and charm means he has outstripped his competitor, a grumpy old man who sits at his table opposite, devoid now of customers. Women and girls flock to his table in the morning, and he greets them in Fula, Wolof, French, Mandinka or English, depending on which side of the Gambia border they have come from, giving them each a special name. The girls giggle as they toss onions into their shopping buckets and the women bring him presents of rice or fish as he enquires after the families back at the house. He's a natural-born salesman but he doesn't much care about the money side of it, it's the people who make him happy.

During the evenings where we lay a mat out on the porch, we talked a lot about our time in Dakar and the last couple of years which were difficult for us both, in different ways. He said when when Julia, Cecilia, Naomi and I one by one went off to other parts of the world, he felt like he was stuck in a bottle. He was working all hours of the day and night but not making enough to eat, which explains the constant illnesses. Also he didn't have anyone to share his different way of thinking with; no one appreciated the small garden we had set up and the neighbours, rich Senegalese and French, felt him a nuisance and did all they could to make him leave. Even though he kept the street clean, sold them packets of Malboro and provided a place to keep out of trouble for for the dozens of Fulas - most of them with failed farms behind them- who trekked in from Casamance and Guinea in the hope of finding work, they didn't like his shop, or his success, and made life impossible for him. In the end, he just wanted to sell the shop and never think about commerce again.

On Wednesday we borrowed a motorbike and went to visit his wife and kids in his father's village. We passed through fields of citrus fruits, wide swathes of forest where only the sound of a bell told us that there were cowheards nearby, and under grand baobab trees with their jewelry-like fruits hanging, silhouetted against the setting sun.

"Look at all this forest," said Now as he navigated the sandy track, making do without second gear which had failed just as soon as we left Bounkeling.

"People could farm here, there is nothing from here to the Gambia border and the forest belongs to no one. But people don't want to do anything with it."

As we brushed the hedges crowding on either side of the track, and I thought from time to time about MFDC rebels who might, or might not, be hiding out in wait for a profitable loot, the smell of lemon, thyme and chamomile thickened the air.

"You should write a story about the rocks," said Now, as the bike shuddered over yet another set of small boulders. "That's why I wanted to bring you here, because I know you will be able to write something about it."

2009-12-21T02:38:00.000-08:00

This week I went shopping for underwear. It's the first time I have braved buying knickers in Senegal, but I thought it would be an interesting social experiment. I am still in research to find out where the latest national phrase has come from, 'salagne salagne', a word used by Youssou N'Dour in a song of the same name, so it seemed like a good part of the hunt.

One of the teenagers I hung out with last week said it was the phrase used for a woman 'who knew what to do to keep her man', and another (a man) said it could also be used for men, who should also try to do all they can to keep their woman. It is about wearing the right lingerie, having the appropriate number of bin-bin (waist beads) and burning the right kind of incense in the bedroom. But the phrase has also become a description for anything vaguely sexy, so when a woman wobbles down the street, men watching her disappear can be heard to mutter 'salagne salagne' as she goes and if a pair of sunglasses is adorned with diamante studs, 'salagne salagne' also fits. In a world where glitter = beauty, 'salagne salagne' can be heard at the moment just about everywhere.

At Sandaga market I entered one of the stall selling knickers. I wasn't prepared for a man to be doing the selling but it seems women sell bras, men sell pants.

"Oui Madame?" the stall-holder said as I entered a forest of dangling g-strings. "What do you want?"
"I just want to look," I said shyly as I leafed through a stack of nylon knickers.
"But do you want knickers," he said, holding up a massive pair of grey cotton briefs, "or do you want 'salagne salagne'?" He waved a tiny triangle of diamante-studded string in my face. I backed away.

At the next stall it was the same story. There's salagne salagne and there's something my granny might wear. What if I wanted salagne salagne but in my size? I searched for an hour through the market, men lining up along each side of the narrow alleyways which cut through the wobbly wooden shacks, hissing at anyone coming through and holding up the item of clothing they think might suit. I was offered stretchy nylon tops with incomprehensible slogans across the chest in numerous colours but always the same size: tiny size. Stretchy jeans too, but all for skinny girls. Where, I asked myself, are the clothes for the much-adored larger woman?

At HLM market the next day I found my answer.

"Hips," said the men whose stall I had stopped at. He fingered a pair of shorts, like the super-knickers which are meant to hold you in and make you smaller. But these had been pimped. They had foam padding all around them, and on the hips, extra layers of padding. My friend A., quite slim, asked the man if they were meant for people like her.

"Yes," he said, "for people with no bottom. But also for people like your friend," he said pointing to my hips.
"Even me?" I asked?
"Yes!" he said. "Even big girls like you."

That evening A. and I went to dinner with Omar and his family. We told his wife about our find. She roared with laughter and Omar looked horrified.

"Women trick men," he said, shaking his head. "They pretend they have more than they really do and the man is deceived."

What did Omar think about making your bum bigger to attract a man, we asked.

"It's not natural," he said. Breasts, bum, a woman should just be herself.

2009-12-21T02:24:00.000-08:00

"Hello?"
"Bonjour Fatou," says the voice at the other end of the phone.
"Sorry, you've got the wrong number," I say to the man.

I hang up. A second later, the phone rings again. I ignore it. The fourth time it rings, I pick it up.

"Hello?"
"Excuse me, I know I've got the wrong number, but I wonder if you would allow me to get to know you..."
"What does that mean?" I ask, stunned.
"I said," he said. "I want to get to know you."
"No thanks, bye bye."

Though I hear that this- ringing a random number and hoping to get a girl or guy on the other end- is quite a popular, and successful, way of getting a spouse.

2009-12-17T17:32:00.001-08:00

Having decided to give up smoking, I find myself tonight unable to sleep. It's not too late to pop out to see Souleymane Faye play his second set but since I'm in my pyjamas I decided I'd sit down instead and try to make headway again with the book I have wanted to write for about the last eight years. Staring at the blank page, unable now to sleep or write, I am reminded by this photo (of Baaba Maal's guitarists) of where this whole thing started.

At the end of 2001 I came to Dakar to write my dissertation about religion and Senegalese pop music and got it into my head that I could interview Baaba Maal, the musician I most admired, not just for his startlingly crystal voice and his moving, spiritually-infused lyrics, but also for his dedication to social and developmental issues. Through a contact in London I got the phone number of his manager in Dakar and when I arrived, terrified and unable to communicate with anyone, I tried giving him a ring. Of course I could interview him, the guy said, tomorrow would be fine.

Such was my naivety then that I thought it was really going to happen. What ensued was a month that touched me so deeply that Senegal became my life but the one thing that didn't happen was my interview with Baaba Maal. Desperate, I set off for Podor when I heard he had gone to his home town, and even slept the night in his brother's guesthouse, sad to find out that he had gone on to Matam, too far for me to go in the few days of my trip that remained. I didn't care all that much, because I had no schedule and no deadline to fulfil and anyway, by then I knew that one day I would meet my musical hero and ask him all the questions I wanted.

Since then I have managed to scrape a living through music journalism and I've had the opportunity to meet Baaba on many occasions. A couple of years ago he asked me why I had never interviewed him, but I said nothing. Last year I was commissioned a piece on him by a magazine but months of ringing various people came to nothing: it seemed it was never meant to be.

I still admire him, more now for his truly honest way of speaking about the things that many in and around Africa are afraid to broach, but I think the days for an interview are well and truly gone. Someone once suggested I write a book entitled 'How I Never Met Baaba Maal' and all the amazing people I met in the meantime. Sitting here at two in the morning, a blank page once again open infront of me, it doesn't seem like such a bad idea.

2009-12-15T00:58:00.000-08:00

I have been reading, or re-reading- because it's one of those books that one reads so much about that I can't remember if I ever read it-, Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness'. Amongst other timeless perceptions and descriptions of attitudes in Africa, I particularly loved this:

(Marlow, having reached the Congo, sets off on foot to meet his steam boat that will eventually take him up the River Congo.)

'Next day I left the station at last, with a caravan of sixty men, for a two-hundred-mile tramp. No use telling you much about that. Paths, paths, everywhere; a stamped-in network of paths spreading over the empty land, through long grass, through burnt grass, through thickets, down and up chilly ravines, up and down stony hills ablaze with heat; and a solitude, a solitude, nobody, not a hut.

The population had cleared out a long time ago. Well if a lot of mysterious niggers armed with all kinds of fearful weapons suddenly took to travelling on the road between Deal and Gravesend, catching the yokels right and left to carry heavy loads for them, I fancy every farm and cottage thereabouts would be empty very soon."

My father used to work in the docks at Gravesend so it's a particularly amusing image to me. I also like his descriptions of being under the weather a lot of the time, calling it "the playful paw-strokes of the wilderness, the preliminary trifling before the more serious onslaught which came in due course."

This morning, serious procrastination while oranges fall from the tree outside my window.

2009-12-13T03:33:00.000-08:00

Last night I saw the new generation of African music, and it doesn't look too much like any other kind of pop, though with its own special Senegalese twist. Rousing anthems, screaming girls, a young guitarist who can play like any of the greats and a frontman with so much presence on stage that it was hard to take your eyes off him, even for all three hours of the concert.

Carlou D makes primarily spiritual pop music but some of his songs, to those who don't understand the language and cultural references, sound like classic Bon Jovi rock anthems. As he sang a duet with the soul singer of the group Daara J Family, I could, for the first time since I've been here, see the future of Senegalese music and imagine that it won't be too long before this stuff is a regular sound on international radio. What a nice feeling to know that other people might, after all this time, also recognise the value in what you love.

I've had a lot of time in the last couple of weeks to think over my years spent living here. I've met up with Senegalese friends I haven't seen in a couple of years, people I fell out with when I was wrought with exhaustion but couldn't get them to see my point of view or lend any sympathy, people who I felt were critical of me and the way I dealt with things here, and hence I let drop. I can see it from their point of view now- that I didn't need to fight every single little thing- but I'm also not sure if I could have lived it any other way. I like to throw myself headfirst into things and defend my values, sometimes regardless of who I might offend. I can see now that there was an easier way of doing things but I was too deeply mired in my own personal issues to recognise it.

I've been accused of being negative about Senegal and as a guest in this country, I suppose my criticisms should have been kept to myself. I know lots of people who have lived here years and not ever taken a bus or paid a water bill themselves. I know lots of Senegalese who avoid that chore, for the simple fact that the bureaucracy involved is soul-sapping. I suppose I should have tried to avoid it too or at least, not whined on about it afterwards. At the same time, since I've been working as a journalist I don't think I've written one story about war or famine but have tried to present the positive side of west Africa. But as a tourist said to me last night, it's just not easy to do things here, and I suppose to be able to write about all the good things, I had to process the difficult things too.

I expect the people who got sick of me complaining about Senegal have long ago given up reading my blog, in which case I am preaching to the converted. But as someone who feels very Senegalese at times, who has spent a third of her life living here, and who loves the country from its extraordinary hill-top monument down to the red beetles that come out when it's about to rain, I feel I need to assert my point. I've had a couple of tough years here and probably said too much about it, but this is a home for me and I'll try to keep writing good stuff about it as long as there's good stuff to write about. Last night's gig was a perfect microcosm of all the great things about this place.

2009-12-09T04:10:00.000-08:00

I have known the waiter at Cafe L. so long now that I can no longer ask his name; it is shameful that I didn't get to know it when it became obvious that I was going to become a regular, more than eight years ago. He is always pleased to see me, and grins a stained-toothed smile when he sees me across the spluttering coffee machine. I haven't had to order my breakfast there for a long while, since he always brings me what I want as soon as I sit down.

On Sunday, I chose a blue formica table and sat down with a book, happy to have an hour to myself. An old Senegalese man in a khaki safari suit, short sleeves, sat down next to me and asked for an espresso and two croissants. The croissants steamed in their wire basket. When I asked for one too, he passed the basket my way, shaking it so that crumbs fell to the floor between our tables.

"Please-please," shake-shake, "it's an offer of the heart," he said.

The croissant was crisp, the inside seductively warm on the fingertips.

My neighbour left and I asked the waiter who he was.

"Ah, this man is a real Dakarois , I've known him since I was a boy. He was born in the house across the road."

We both peered out the window and past the air-conditioning units which spat water down the side of the decaying building.

"I've worked here for 22 years," he went on. "It used to be owned by the father, now it belongs to the daughter. They are my family now."

Looking out the window, I could see the balcony of my old apartment. The shutters were up, someone at home.

"They say, when you come to Senegal, you'll never be able to leave," he said when I told him there was someone else now living in my apartment.

"If you understand our customs, you'll understand why."

2009-12-08T04:43:00.000-08:00

It's been ages since I went to Ngor island, and after what turned out to be a hard week's work, I was happy to get back there. The sky was a wonderful kind of patchwork and the light soft; after a week of hard sandy skies, the air felt warm and gentle.

A., a young Senegalese friend, saw me about to swim back across from the island. He asked, with his nervous stutter, if he could come too. He went into a shack on the beach and pulled on a faded pink rash guard, then set off, leading me through the rocks.

A. is a fisherman, and lives in Ngor village, a tightly-packed mound of houses on the edge of the Dakar peninsular. He grew up swimming and fishing with his father and probably never went to school. He can swim the 700 metres across from the island in a matter of minutes, whereas it takes me 20. As I pulled my weary body through the water, A. dove down to the sea bottom to have a look around. Needless to say he doesn't wear goggles.

2009-11-29T11:51:00.001-08:00

My tour group arrived today and I took them for a wander to the beach. The town was deserted after the festival yesterday and I was enjoying ferrying them around town without attracting much notice.

At the beach we all took off our shoes to paddle. When we came to leave, D. noticed that his shoes were missing. My god, I thought, this doesn't look good.

A man with dreadlocks approached, talking wildly.

"We don't have thieves here," he shouted, waving his arms, then walked to a prickly bush on the edge of the beach and retrieved D.'s shoes.

"That guy took his shoes and hid them there. It's not right."

I'm not quite sure who stole D.'s shoes but he got them back. D. seemed to find it amusing.

2009-10-20T05:17:00.000-07:00

J., a good source of amusing stories (but some of which I can't blog about), told me a story yesterday about her search for a Paris apartment. Many property-owners won't consider her because she doesn't have a permanent job contract and she has a dog.

Last week she spoke to one apartment-owner who asked her about her unusual surname, which she took when she married her Senegalese husband. "She said she'd ring me back," J. said, "but she never did."

2009-10-08T01:42:00.000-07:00

Of the many surprising things to happen in the States was the frequency with which we went through time zones. We had been warned of it, but it wasn't as simple as passing a state line and going back an hour: in some states, Native American lands keep to one time zone whilst the rest of the state keeps to another, so we would pass in and out of zones, not ever quite knowing what the time was. Often we found ourselves turning up in a place and finding we had an extra hour before things shut, and sometimes we arrived and were noisily putting up the tent when we found out it was 11pm and everyone was asleep. In the end we ceased to be fazed by it; we were mostly keeping to the time as dictated by the sun, so it didn't really matter what time the clock said.

Driving into Utah, having had an inspiring conversation with a Navajo man about his ranching on the family corral just above the Grand Canyon, I was struck with the feeling, again, that I was putting my energy into the wrong kinds of work and should get on with writing. All of a sudden, the skies darkened and it started to rain, large, heavy drops. Just beneath the red cliffs to the side of the road and stretched above a small white house, a complete rainbow appeared.

2009-10-07T03:18:00.001-07:00

It's been 4000 miles since my last post, and H. and I have crossed America. From Nashville to San Francisco, the journey was populated by beautiful people and extraordinary lives. Some of the stories I heard I am getting around to writing down, though at the moment most people's words lie hidden in my notebook.

One of the things that made our trip special was our accompanying guide book, Roadfood, by a couple called Stern. Without it we would have missed out on some of the best food made by the most interesting people. The book is filled with loving overtures to odd barbeque joints, diners, tamale shops and cafes across the country, usually in towns where we would otherwise not have bothered to stop.

One of our big, and perhaps predictable, mistakes was to underestimate the size of everything, from the size of cups to the size of towns to the size of the country. What was an inch on the kitchen table in Clapham turned out to be a day's drive, something we found out on day one and which I carried with me as a mild panic until we were within spitting distance of the Pacific two weeks later. But the journey was often broken by a meal in one of Stern's joints, and something I always looked forward to as the miles ticked flatly by.

In El Paso, western Texas, we stopped at the H and H Carwash Cafe, a large forecourt with a small shop at the back. A man sat in a tall chair, almost like a throne, outside, waiting for customers to pull up for a boot shine. Mexicans and the (American) owner of the joint busied around the Sheriff's patrol car, wiping down the glossy black and white body, and we were shown inside the cafe at the back for a late lunch. The heat was stifling.

At the formica counter we cased the joint. A young security guard sat to one side eating quesadillas, and at one of the tables, two ladies chatted over plates of stew. An old Mexican woman asked us in Spanish what we wanted, and we ordered burritos stuffed with chorizo and omelette and tender beef, stew without the liquid. We enquired about the salsa that Sterns had described in the book with such enthusiasm, and were given a pot of it, green, zesty and dangerous, along with a basket of tortillas that the cook cut and fried, sprinkling with salt and serving with a shy smile as she set it down.

"Mexicans are wonderful people," said Mr H., whose father had opened the carwash in 1958 when he was just 12. "Many people have tried to poach my cook, and have offered her more money than I can. But she refuses to leave, she doesn't care about money, she just wants to be comfortable."

2009-09-05T12:18:00.000-07:00

New York's taxi drivers are a wealth of information on the immigrant life in America. A handsome young Pakistani driver asked me if I liked cricket, and we talked about the 20-20 World Cup all the way to the West Village. Another was Senegalese and naturally we broke into Wolof, which made us both happy. It was lovely to hear and say those words out loud.

Yesterday I had one from Liberia. He was young too, and had four children, the youngest being three years old.

"I have sent them to school in Africa so they can learn to be African," he said. "I want them to grow up with a sense of African identity, to speak my language, to know how to interact with people and be a part of a community. I want them to know about discipline."

His mother in law brings them up in Conakry, and they go to a Canadian school there. The American school was going to cost $4000 a year for each child, but the Canadian one is cheaper. When they have finished with school, then they can come to America and do what they like.

"Americans spend their time teaching their dogs to sit, but they can not get their children to listen to them."

2009-08-09T01:40:00.000-07:00

For fifteen months, more than a thousand of Paris' illegal immigrants have been squatting wherever they can, staging a mass sit-in on pavements and in buildings around the city. They are demanding one thing: the regularisation of their papers.

Having been evicted by baton-wielding police from their last place near the Republique, they moved to an empty insurance company headquarters in the 18th, a neighbourhood described aptly by a friend as 'Africa headquarters'. It is probably the only place in the world you can find a shop selling music from Guinea Bissau next to a Congolese barber next to a shop selling calabash and kola nut from Mali.

Inside the building, 1300 west Africans sit day-in, day-out while the government tries to evict them. Far from the destitute conditions in which they live, they keep up the appearance of being high-spirited, enjoying card games and the tea-ceremony which passes time so well. There are three meals a day, and everyone is friendly, happy to be together.

But in every dark corner, there is someone sorting papers, trying to get enough evidence together to show they he has been in the country for six or eight years, even if illegally. A bill from a department store from May 2003, a Metro card from July 2001, a receipt for a telephone bought in 2007. If he is lucky, very lucky, he will be able to pass the rigorous tests that illegal immigrants have to go through to become legal.

I asked one man if it was better to live in this squat, knowing he could get arrested, jailed and deported any time he goes out, than living in Mali as a legal citizen. "Yes," he said. "Because at least while I am here there is a chance I will get my papers. Then I can work." And what would he do once he got his papers and a bit of work?

"Go back to Mali."

2009-08-08T09:43:00.000-07:00

"I saw you this morning; I said to myself, that girl there is not from around here, she doesn't know where she is going. Do you want to come now and have a glass of bissap at my mother's restaurant? It's very nice, and you can try an African dish."

After a long afternoon at the illegal immigration sit-in in Paris I went for a stoll around the 18th district, Chateau Rouge and along Rue des Poissoniers. I wanted to see migrants living in the outside world, on the Paris streets, perhaps offer myself some sense of hope that those who live underground will one day become part of those who live above ground. But all I saw were swathes of Africans swarming around the Chinese and Arabs earnestly selling fish and herbs and plantain, and groups of armed police wandering amongst them, sticking out as much as I was. The till at the KFC at Chateau Rouge was ten-deep with west Africans, and the tables were littered with chicken bones, and everything was sweaty. It was like being in Lagos- the chaos and shouting. It felt so odd to look up at the attractive French buildings high above the cacophony of the streets and remember that we were in France.

At a wig shop I watched women with skin burned pink by bleaching creams come in and demand this wig and that hair-piece, the one with the purple underneath and the tight-cropped blonde one. I unthinkingly told one woman that the wig she was trying on suited her, though it wasn't true- I was just trying to fit in. The manequins modeling the wigs did not seem very black, even though I was the only white person I saw- except for the police- the entire time I was there.

2009-08-02T08:38:00.000-07:00

It's been a long time since I spent any time in Elephant and Castle, a largely migrant area in south-east London, but I have rented a small desk space in an office in a cobbled street full of photographers and artists, and am now back there more often. M. also lives near there, and to celebrate being back in that area we met one evening and went the the Afghan restaurant around the corner for dinner.

M. knows everyone, because she is the kind of person who talks to people and isn't afraid of sticking out. She has been out of England a long time, which might explain it, and I like to think that I feel an affinity with her because of this. At the curry shop, all the men working there greeted her warmly as we both ordered spicy lamb curry, paratha bread and cauliflower and peas. I enjoyed eating with my hands, and helping myself to water from a jug kept in the drinks fridge. The toilet out the back was disgusting, but added to the sense that I was in a foreign land.

Perhaps I will feel more at home -or away from home- when I am living back in that area and am once more a minority.

Sorry sorry-o

2009-07-11T05:01:00.000-07:00

A day on the English transport system nearly broke me. Somehow I expected that people who have little in the way of external concerns would be more polite in their bustling from one place to the next. Being trampled on by a woman carrying a baby on her back and a pile of cloth on her head, while she hitches her skirt to clamber across a swampy riverbank and onto a ferry which may or may not sink seems reasonable. Being trampled on by someone in a race to get onto an air-conditioned train with seating for everyone, when there is another in five minutes, does not.

Of course, life here isn't all that easy, even though it appears to be so. Life is hectic, expensive, and everyone is full of inward concerns (Am I happy? Am I fat? Am I earning enough?) that don't always exist in a place where more pressing concerns (Will this ferry sink?) do. Life here is just as hard as life elsewhere, just in a different way.

While I swayed about on the underground wishing I was anywhere else, I listened to Femi Kuti's 'Sorry Sorry' to remind me of people with different concerns. Friends in Lagos told me this week that they hadn't had electricity for days now and that they can't afford to fill the generator because petrol, in this oil-producing wealthy country, is now rationed. The batteries on their Blackberrys are flat as a result. When Femi played this song live at the opening of Big Brother Nigeria, the press damned him the next day in the papers, saying, 'why does he have to wash our dirty laundry in public?' It seems to me that if people like Femi and his father, Fela, weren't risking their careers and lives to wash Nigeria's dirty linen in public, then people would be even worse off.

Look my friends,
Them no like to hear word
They will follow follow, follow their enemies
Like zombie, they'll go march dey go.
They fight for other people
Wey spoil Nigeria so
These politicians and soldiers
They be one and the same
No one different from the other
My people don't want to know.
But with these kind of leaders
Africa no get hope,
Africans will suffer
We go suffer reach our bone

I'm sorry sorry o, I'm sorry for Nigeria,
I'm sorry sorry o, I'm sorry for Africa.
I'm sorry sorry o, I'm sorry for Nigeria,
I'm sorry sorry o, I'm sorry for Africa

Supermarket observations

2009-07-06T10:39:00.001-07:00

Against blustering winds and bursts of rain dotted with rays of sunshine, I made my way to the supermarket. Discovering that my cycle panniers fitted neatly onto the side of the trolley, I had time in the queue to look around while others piled on and off their purchases.

The man infront of me wore earphones, though from the flat look on his grey, aged face, it seemed as if he wasn't listening to anything, rather, blocking out any sound from outside. He wore an anorak over his creased linen jacket, and comfortable-looking leather shoes. He did not greet the man at the till, just asked for a bag and waited to load his shopping.

He bought two red apples, a small block of Sainsbury's cheddar, one tomato, and two of slices of ham. The teller passed the tomato to him as if it were a newly-born kitten. The unsmiling man did not say thankyou, and walked away.

Behind me were a young couple who jostled over who would carry the shopping. She unfolded a shopping bag and he said he could fit everything into his rucksack. They bought 40 plastic coat-hangers, kitchen roll and two bottles of fruit squash, the makings of a newly-acquired home. She, wearing a silk blouse and looking at her boyfriend adoringly, had an infectious giggle. After the sadness of the man's tomato, it was quite warming.

Yapping at the Jazz Cafe

2009-07-02T03:43:00.000-07:00

Photo from: www.netzpolitik.de

Seun Kuti, son of the great Fela Anikulapo Kuti, is a funny chap. At Monday night's gig at the Jazz Cafe, he spoke about something I wrote about in an earlier post : these blessed MP's expenses.

“Your MPs, man, what’s going on? You people are insulting this man because he stole £400, £1000, £200, £6000. What? What? You got it good man, you got it good. I’m sure the Nigerians are just watching the news laughing, ha ha ha, look at that guy, he stole the amount of money I use to fill the fuel in my car, ha ha ha. Oh, look at that guy, he is arrested because of money I sent my son to travel with for holidays, ha ha ha. You know, if you guys attack your MPs like this, they will just become sneakier, and they will steal more. So just let them take their £400, £600, before it comes to £6 million, £20 million. Just allow them to take their £200, the £100. Just forget about this, they uncool man."

Musical interlude of brass cacophony and the nagging, frenetic afrobeat which Seun's father created. So many saxophones on stage that it was hard to know who was playing what. The whole room was sweating, and the 13 band members on stage, playing their long, repetitive, trance-like beats, basses and melodies, exuded concentration as they drove the song on.

Seun may not have created anything new with his kind of Afrobeat, but he knows how to yap, as they say in Nigeria, do someone down, just as well as his father did:

"Before I continue, I have to tell you the secret behind the credit crunch. You'll be hearing it's the bank, the housing, it's all lies. Listen to the truth; they are all lies, all those stories you hear on CNN. The truth is this: the world's decided to start arresting African rulers who carry their money abroad. So for protest, they all decided to take their money back to Africa and hide it in their house. So now, all the dollars and pounds and euros, they're in their house. They are refusing to spend it or take it abroad because they now arrest them. That is the secret of the credit crunch. Just wait, they will hold a new meeting with IMF in two months' time, they will sort it out, they will bring the money back and everything will be fine. The money is in houses in Nigeria, precisely in Nigeria, point, right there. So just relax, it's coming back, I know the meeting is going on right now."

If you want to hear a recording of the track, you can download a zip file here

2009-06-22T13:54:00.000-07:00

An old man with a thick scar zigging across his bald head sat on a bench in the fine rain eating an ice cream.

"How far you going, young lady?" he asked, as I packed my tent and paniers on to my bicycle.

He started to give me his life story. Before and after school- he left school when he was 14- he worked on farm land on what is now a forest belonging to the forestry commission. He was born in Walberswick and lived there all his life. A few years ago his car was hit by an oil tanker and they thought he would die. He survived, but his wife left him and wouldn't let him see his three children. He claims incapacity benefit- because the knock to the head obviously made him a little what the English like to call 'special'- and then his house burnt down. But life, he said cheerfully as I tried to protect my sleeping bag from the drizzle, has never been better because he lives on his own and can do what he likes. He got a new thatch roof on the insurance, too.

It was a magical weekend of sleeping in the sand dunes and waking to the perfectly wide and calm sea. We played cricket with some local boys on their stag weekend, using two burnt sausages as the bails, while the summer solstice sun lit us late into the night. We bundled firewood in the forest, strapped it to the bikes and cycled through the narrow lanes knocking into trees as we went. We ate Sandwich Spread sandwiches on Southwold pier and drank red wine from tooth mugs. We ate chips and drank Adnams in a pub while the rain came down, and had cream tea in a garden full of poppies and lavender. Back at Liverpool Street station, someone had put a piano on the pavement. As the perfect end to the weekend, H. sat down and played.

2009-06-15T05:24:00.001-07:00

Late last night, while I was negotiating the London underground filled with eastern Europeans and African shift workers, a +221 call buzzed on my phone.

"Hello?" I said.
"'Allo. C'est qui?" asked the caller, a classic Senegalese way of making a phone call.
"Who are you?" I asked back.
"I'm looking for Rose. Rose Mbaye. She's a Senegalese. Are you a Senegalese?"

His squeaky voice made me think it was a friend playing a trick on me. While people rushed around me, I stood in the ticket office and giggled at this ridiculous conversation, enjoying it for its unique west African flavour. The guy eventually hung up. A complete, random mystery that in the cold light of a London Sunday night, was ultimately cheering.

2009-05-18T23:33:00.000-07:00

In the UK, in the wake of swine flu no-story, a number of British MPs were discovered to have been claiming from the UK tax payer things like moat-cleaning expenses and for mortgages that they had already paid off. The Prime Minister claimed rather too much for two toilet seats and someone else claimed a large amount for some light bulbs to be fitted.

The press, who paid for the information from a civil servant leak, are horrified. I am indifferent, because my bench-mark for things like police brutality and government corruption is low. Clive James in 'A Point of View' put it rather well:

"In liberal democratic societies, where the free market is regulated by government, there is a limit to corruption. What we are all being asked to be amazed at right now, is that there is such a thing as human dishonesty, but really we should be amazed by how it is being kept in bounds. In countries where no bounds are set, and corruption remains unchecked, hardly anyone can afford to be honest. The terrible truth is that the full force of corruption is doing its dirty work even among us. We, however, have the luxury of being able to call it crime, not politics. The apparent scam of MP's expenses looks bad but the fact that it looks bad is the very thing that makes it not so bad. The outrage that we are encouraged to feel means that we live in a country where corruption is not the norm. If it were, some members on the front bench would be laughing at us right now, not sweating."

2009-05-18T00:54:00.000-07:00

Though I nearly expired from a hang-over yesterday, D. had the very good idea of going to the park with a picnic. It was a blazing hot day, and the park was filled with people playing frisbee and football. I fell asleep to the calming sound of conversation from the Romanians near to us, and was awoken by the sound of young Romans squealing over a volleyball game. The park, once belonging to a Roman aristocrat but now turned over to the city, had some beautiful buildings in it which look over the city down below, very red in the late afternoon sun.

2009-05-17T11:20:00.000-07:00

The light in the streets of Trastevere at night is almost infra-red, tight alleyways lit by strong overhead lights. The piazzas are full of cautious English tourists with a finger in a guide book, and Romanians and Sri Lankans selling fluorescent whizzing toys. Everyone else noisily eats ice cream and celebrates being in a city where life is warm even at 10pm.

D.'s street is quiet, just wide enough for a small car to pass and has that strange Trastevere feeling of ancient medieval civilisation and 21st century social grit, graffiti over almost every carefully-laid wall. At the end of the street is a small high-up shrine to the Virgin Mary, where a candle flickers day and night.

2009-05-17T11:13:00.000-07:00

Rome, a city where everything looks quite perfect but, on closer look, isn't quite, but is stunning all the same. This old pomegranate sitting in D.'s fruit bowl seemed to have aged beautifully.

2009-05-15T11:19:00.000-07:00

Incredibly, after a week of hail and rain, the morning I left Scotland, the skies cleared and the water became still, like a mill pond.

2009-05-11T04:57:00.000-07:00

C. and A. are neighbours, living in a remote stone house almost an hour's drive away from us. The house, which was once a school, is hidden high up on the hill and has views sweeping down the slopes and onto the sea, out to the Treshnish Islands beyond. The day we visited, there was little in view from the kitchen doors as rain and fog had obscured much of the heather-covered hills.

Tea seemed more of a formality, served up in a metal teapot alongside a lovely Victoria Sponge. Soon after we had finished out first cup, A. started rootling around in the fridge for tonic, coming back with some large drinks, the ice tinkling in the glasses. We discussed my recent parasite- A. is a parasitologist-, love, the state of the roads and the wind. The wind features heavy on the agenda in Mull, especially in this old school house, stranded alone on the hill with nothing to protect it from the raging gales that blow in from the Atlantic.

On leaving, C. offered us some eggs laid on Saturday by the golden chickens that pecked in and amongst the thick heather of their garden.

"We're selling them in the kiosk now," she said proudly, and led us to a small shed sitting proudly beside the gravel driveway, though not near the single-track main road. Lowering the front shutter and putting right the sign that had fallen to the mud, we stepped inside to find eggs and cards for sale (honey to follow) and I thought, this is what Britain is missing. In Dakar, this would be known as a 'Diallo' shop, referring to the hard-working Fulanis (often named Diallo) who take over small boutiques and run them day and night, selling eggs, single cigarettes, hair-weave and toothpaste. In Bissau, it might be known as the 'Narr', referring to the Arab Mauritanians who seem to make such good shop-keepers, keeping tinned mackerel, peanuts, raw shea butter and soap powder for sale in tiny quantities in their tightly-packed shops. The boutique is the quintessential emblem of west Africa- for its readiness to face any eventuality, any time of the day or night, no planning required.

C. and I played shop-keeper for a while, pretending I was in Abidjan and selling "a-thie-ke chaud" to imaginary passers-by. C. said that the first day she opened shop, she came home to find three cards and six eggs gone and a £5 note in the honesty box.

*****

There was snow on Ben Moore, but we only saw it once or twice, when the cloud lifted just enough to be able to see the white-capped hill across the loch from the house. The week brought gusts of rain, gales and a hail storm, and three sheep camped out on the lawn and ate their way through the luscious grass that had shot up with all the water.

Last night, as we were eating dinner, a car pulled up into the drive, our first visitor in a week. It was M., the farmer from down the road with his dog Taff. He was looking for his sheep, which had just that afternoon moved off elsewhere. I invited him in for a drink; it was a lovely still evening and the wind bristling the loch had dropped so that the hills were reflected in the glassy waters infront of the house.

"Aye," he said, "I'll just find my sheep and then I'll be in."

He went to the cab of his red pick-up, pulled a ten-day old lamb from inside, and handed it to me along with a Sprite bottle filled with milk, and a long red teat.

"He'll be needin' feedin'" he said, and drove off to find his tups.

The lamb dragged on the teat, and drank the bottle of warm milk in just a few minutes. His wool was tight, warm white curls, and I could feel two hard horns just emerging beneath the black wool on his head. As I held him by the stomach, his umbilical cord, now hard and black, stuck like a tangled wire into my hand. His bursting, wriggling energy reminded me pleasantly of home, origins. It's been more than twenty years since I fed a lamb, but it served to remind me of my very happy childhood.

2009-04-27T02:12:00.000-07:00

Sitting high up on the stands at Ibar Mar Diop Stadium in Dakar, a Senegalese won the long-jump competition and the Americans won most of the running races. We cracked peanuts, shivered in the shade, and I cheered the British competitors. AB said he could tell who they were because they seemed to always be at the back. The view of the Medina, buzzing with noise and energy, is one I will remember when I am back home.

At my favourite cafe in town, I had one farewell croissant and cafe au lait. For sale on the pavement outside the cafe, which I busily noted in my book as one of those useful pieces of information a writer sometimes has need for, was: phonecards, bathroom scales, an iron, Le Monde, sunglasses, calculator, coffee machine, head scarves, belts, door mats and an ab-stretcher.

2009-04-17T09:12:00.000-07:00

In Senegal, when concerts or wrestling matches or any event where thousands of people are gathered in a tight space, come to an end, the place will empty in seconds. Patient people- not naturally disposed to hurrying- who have waited quietly for five hours to see one man throw the other down, or angry 20-somethings who have waited all evening for their rap group to come on stage, will suddenly be gripped by a fury to get out of the stadium, ignoring any encore or post-match activity, and will scatter chairs, climb over people, stampede: anything to be out of the stadium in seconds. Watching it, it's like someone pulls the bath plug and the whole world just drains away.

I've never understood it myself. J. and I were caught in a stampede at the stadium after one wrestling match, having sat all afternoon with the docile crowd who suddenly leapt to their feet and careered down the stands to push through the small exit door. In Ziguinchor, I asked T. what it was all about.

"We call it Se-tan," he said. "When the music is playing, Se-tan stands still and people are safe. But when it stops, he comes back again so people hurry home."

Se-tan. Satan. I get it.

2009-04-17T08:56:00.000-07:00

A long morning of re-constructing my previous three months' writing and I felt I needed a long walk on the beach. Here and there, dotted along the wide white sandy stretch were the gnarled stumps of dead trees, twisted with fishing wire, blue and aquamarine ropes, a coat-hanger, someone's lost flip-flop. Some of the stumps were coated with greasy green seaweed that made them look like the hairy backs of deep-sea creatures. A lightbulb lay broken on the sand.

"What do you think of people who get annoyed quickly?" said A., one of the guesthouse's workers who had offered to accompany me on the long walk to the end of the island. As there was no one about, only a lonely fisherman straightening his nets, I had accepted A.'s offer of company, remembering what happened to Martha Gellhorn on a beach in Kenya. I didn't want to be raped in a place that had the illusion of being so cut off from the world that not even crime existed.

I wondered if A. was meaning me. I admit that things piss me off quickly and years of travel in slightly annoying places has done nothing to teach me that I always regret it afterwards; I am still the easiest person to annoy.

"Well," I said, trying to sound as cool as anything. "People are different all over the world. Some people store it up and let it out later, some people show their annoyance as it's happening." Was that a diplomatic response, I wondered hopefully.

"Yes but," went on A, starting to annoy me. "It's bad to get annoyed."

"Maybe," I said, singing to myself and looking out to sea, trying to block out the sound of his voice. "People are different."

"But you," he went on, really wanting a proper answer. "You're not like that. You're Seno-Gauloise now."

That did it. Dreadlocked ganja-smoking idiots in the centre of town accused me of being Seno-Gauloise, the supposedly flattering term that the Senegalese give to anyone who can say one word of Wolof and which means that you have transcended your Frenchness to become almost a Senegalese national. The jibe usually leads to an offer of some wood carving painted with black boot polish, and an accusation of being a racist if you don't give in and buy it. I usually respond by walking infront of a fast-moving taxi, hoping they will follow me and be run down.

I responded breathily to A. that I was neither Senegalese nor French.

"Yes but you're a toubab, and toubab is toubab." All whites are the same.

With no taxi in sight I raised my voice and said, "that pisses me off." We carried on our walk in silence and I wished, ashamed, that the sea would just go on and swallow me up.

2009-04-17T05:21:00.000-07:00

There's nothing I loathe more than a wildlife bore. Animals more or less leave me cold, especially birds, but sailing up the Casamance River I was surprised by how lucky I felt to see dolphins, many of them in bouncing, leaping tribes, sailing alongside us.

2009-04-09T04:24:00.000-07:00

I had it on good authority that in African cities from Abidjan to Kinshasa, Senegalese girls are famous for going all-out for their men. Clipping toe-nails, massaging, cooking and always being available, are female traits that I thought were common across west Africa, but, I am told, are particular to the Senegalese.

Yesterday I had lunch with A., a Senegalese male friend married to an exceedingly clever and feisty Senegalese woman. I began my sentence, "I hear that Senegalese women..." and he rolled his eyes and said, "yes, are mok-potch".

Mok-potch literally means "silky-thighs". She should be ready to attend to her man's every needs; sooth every ache and pain, cook anything he likes, look fabulous the whole time and of course be ready for whenever he feels like having sex.

I asked if it had anything to do with polygamy- the woman needing to be on her best behaviour to prevent him from looking elsewhere, but A. thinks not. "There are a lot of countries where polygamy is practised but the women are not mok-potch. Girls here are told from the moment they are born that this is what they must do, it's just the way our culture is."

2009-04-04T07:14:00.000-07:00

The hot weather is here. The sea is a perfect blue, as is the sky.

2009-04-01T03:18:00.000-07:00

Khadim Sarr, or 'Boy Sarr' as he is known amongst us wrestling fans (which I have become), threw Fifty Cent down in a sandy brawl which lasted less than a minute. Though Fifty Cent was the larger and uglier of the two, Boy Sarr was more technical and had him on his back in no time. The stadium erupted, the winning fans lighting fireworks amongst the dangerously packed crowd and spraying shreds of school exercise books like confetti into the wind, the losing crowd in tears, holding their heads in their hands and asking, 'why?'

The press area was full of radio journalists swanning around in fantastically-large and luxurious boubous. "You see these people?" my friend M. asked conspiratorially. "People pay them to say nice things. You don't see me wearing cloth like that, but then, I'm not a journalist."

It is the west African way to think that anyone who is doing well must be getting rich off bribes or government contracts. It is a way of belittling anyone's genuine efforts and successes, to bring them down to the level of his neighbour. In many cases it is true. But in most cases, I suspect, it is that people wear their best boubou to the event to cover up how much money they really have, for in this non-consumer society, money is still king.

2009-03-28T05:40:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-03-27T12:28:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-03-25T12:31:00.000-07:00

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."

2009-03-20T11:18:00.000-07:00

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."

2009-03-20T06:12:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-03-18T01:58:00.000-07:00

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!

2009-03-18T01:32:00.000-07:00

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)

2009-03-16T15:48:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-03-14T11:38:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-03-08T16:05:00.001-07:00

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.

2009-03-08T15:59:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-03-02T00:49:00.000-08:00

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.

2009-02-26T06:32:00.000-08:00

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.

2009-02-21T03:03:00.000-08:00

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.

2009-02-18T00:31:00.000-08:00

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.

2009-02-15T11:34:00.000-08:00

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.

2009-02-15T08:11:00.000-08:00

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".

2009-02-11T05:18:00.000-08:00

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.

2009-02-02T14:24:00.000-08:00

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.

2009-01-07T04:33:00.000-08:00

I was lucky enough to have Pauline with me in Dakar a couple of weeks ago, who took this photo of the street outside Omar's tailor's shop. It is taken at my favourite time of day in Dakar, just turned dark, when I have spent the late afternoon watching Omar sew or talking about new designs. Three is something very cool and soothing about the light; she captures it beautifully.

2009-01-05T05:25:00.000-08:00

Of the many fabulous evenings I spent leading the Songlines Music Travel trip to Dakar, this soiree senegalaise
was one of the more entertaining. I had told Moussa, our fatherly driver, in Wolof (so the others couldn't understand) that I would lose my job if we didn't find music that evening. We were in St Louis and the town was dead. Moussa had been telling me to take people home, we must be tired, we shouldn't stay out alone. I was tired of his mothering on a trip that was meant to see us out till all hours. When I told him I would lose my job, he stepped his foot on the accelerator. Hands to the wheel, nose pressed against the windscreen, we bumped the two miles down a deserted road through the fish market, ending up at the Papayer Nightclub.

Before I could stop him, Moussa had leapt down from the driving seat and charged, wooly hat and all, into the glitzy nightclub. By the time I arrived, he had gathered the doormen and bar staff and told them he was leaving us in their hands, that we were their responsibility. They were not to let us walk the 100 metres to the hotel alone; we were to take a taxi.

Up for grabs that night at the dancefloor competition was a ram.

2009-01-05T03:53:00.000-08:00

"Hello? Hello? Yes, Madam?" came the response over a crackly phone line to Lagos. I had telephoned my friend C., a retired army captain, who promised to meet me at the airport if I ever went back to Lagos and warmly extended 'compliments of the season'. It reminded me to look through my notebooks from my last visit to Lagos, where I had scribbled some phrases as C. entertained me with stories of his life in the Nigerian army.

'Operation Nightwatch,' I have written. 'For fear of the unknown.'
'In the trenches there is no bed, no air-conditioning. You have water, you sip and put back, sip and put back,' (here I remember him knees bent, half-crouched, motioning taking his hip flask of water from his belt and putting is back as quickly as possible for 'fear of unknown').
'Magistrate has no eyes in back of head.'

Reading these garbled notes, I was reminded of an incident at the airport. C. was taking me through the security scanner to the area where the baggage carousels whirred under the weight of Nigerian suitcases. I was not meant to be in there, but he managed to wangle it for me. I had not seen him go off to the scanner, and was left leaning exhausted on the Bureau de Change counter.

"This woman is with me," he told the security agent, pointing with a thumb to the empty space behind him. "Please let her through."

We laughed about that for days.

C's response to everything is, "Because I am an army officer." He fought in the Nigerian civil war (of 1967), and although now retired, maintains Operation Nightwatch in his alert stance and reluctance to sleep. Once I left him dozing on a sofa and went off to the airport, only to find him already there, waiting for me ("You are late!"). He comes across as serious, sharp, his pressed shirts rigid with starch, the buckle of his belt gleaming. His eyes have hollowed in their years, and seem shadowed. But he knows how to laugh better than anyone else, and would do anything for anyone he deemed worthy, never accepting a penny in return.

2008-12-23T10:20:00.001-08:00

A day of consuming. This morning I bought a phone card from a cheerful fellow who this evening remembered me. "Ah," he said. "My first client of the day," flapping his phone cards.

This evening I tried to buy some shoes. A friend A. told me on the phone where I could get some from his friend, and when I went down stairs to this guy's shop, A. rang him up and told him to make me a good deal. The guy, about 18, was instantly friendly to me, telling me the exact, non-inflated, price of the shoes which were stacked up like half-fallen dominoes on wooden shelves. But he didn't have any my size. I tried, in vain, to coax him into selling me something, asking him if he had something, anything, in my size, but he looked forlorn as he said no, nothing. He did, however, send me to his friend down the road who had exactly what I was looking for.

Down the road, a similar shack on the pavement had red shoes in my size. We chatted, bantered a little, and I decided to buy them. He asked 3 times the price, and I told him to cut the crap. He reduced the price a little and I walked away. You win some, you lose some. Neither my Wolof chatter nor my minutes of sitting about chatting would convince him to give me a fair price.

On my way home, I went into a shop to get change for a 100 franc coin. Since yesterday I have owed the paper shop around the corner 25 francs, and no one in Dakar seems to have the brassy coins anymore, perhaps because they are now worth so very little. The Mauritanian who sold me a sachet of water did not have the right coins, but a young guy who came in the shop after me had one, and offered it to me as a cadeau. I took it, reluctantly, realising as I walked away that in trying to pay back one debt I had created another.

"Excuse me, miss!" the guy called out as I walked down the street. "I really want to know your name. You are so nice!"

Eventually I gave him my name, paid back my debt to the paper shop owner, and retreated inside as quickly as I could.

2008-12-23T08:36:00.000-08:00

I'm off back to London tonight and feeling strangely ambivalent about it. The down-side of being in a place where there is time and space to breath and be is that too much thinking goes on. Perhaps it is better to charge ahead through life and not think about anything much.

Yesterday P and I sat looking at some kids playing in the dramatically turquoise shore waters, kids covered in sand, plunging again and again into the shallow surf.

"Most Africans never get over their happy childhood," said P, who is probably right. What a great way to grow up.

2008-12-22T03:19:00.000-08:00

I think P. will blog about Christmas decorations, for who could come to Dakar at this time and not be impressed by the extraordinary glitzy decorations which deck out every patisserie and street vendor's neck? Today I saw Santas swaying from left to right as they played the saxophone; yesterday my taxi door was opened by a Santa with a whited-out face.

Usually the Senegalese hate to have their picture taken, unless they know and trust you. This guy, with a fake pot-belly, was happy to be snapped; he was rightly proud of his costume.

Yesterday I was called by the mother of one of my little girls from Ziguinchor.

"I annoyed K. yesterday," said the mother, laughing. "And she told me, 'tonight I will kill you in your bed'. I told her, well, then you will lose your mother. And she said, 'No I won't, I have another mother. Rose will take care of me.'"

I am far away but I am not forgotten.

2008-12-22T02:47:00.000-08:00

"Danke danke moi japal goor si n'iaye," said my shy friend El Hadj as we enjoyed the warm Sunday afternoon sun and smoothed little piles of sand with our hands. This Wolof phrase is used in almost every situation, and translates as 'slowly slowly catch a money in the forest.' "It doesn't interest me to know someone today and then tomorrow not even greet them when I see them. If you want to get to know a girl, you have to go slowly slowly, so that you can become her friend first."

El Hadj and I were talking about Senegal and the Senegalese. "I love seeing foreigners come to my country," he said. "If people come here to visit it means that we are at peace." But, he went on, he hates it when Senegalese act like idiots when they see a foreigner. "You see some guys, they call out to a girl, 'hey, la belle' and they think they will be able to catch her like that. No," he said, "first you must become her friend."

El Hadj went on to tell me, in hushed tones, that some white women come to Dakar and they get with one of these guys just for a week. That's why, he said, they keep chasing white women. They think that they are all easy.

2008-12-20T03:53:00.000-08:00

'A dirty little bar' is what I call this place but it does actually have a name: 'R n B bar' flashes in green fluorescent piping near the doorway- some stiff saloon doors and a grimy brown curtain which sweeps over your face as you try to get inside. Once inside, there is nothing much to light the place, but a blue fluorescent string of lights over the back wall showed the elements of a drum kit lying in pieces on the floor, and a few empty chairs.

A musician approached us, in a red cap.

"Hello, have you come to see the soiree?" he asked. "It is going to start right now!"

P and I both looked incredulously at the pieces of drum kit and the empty chairs where the band would eventually sit.

"Right now. In half an hour."

2008-12-19T11:39:00.000-08:00

I am lucky to have great blogger staying with me, whose blog about last night's dinner conversation eminently cheered me. The Dakar air is gritty today, a sand storm blowing somewhere far off, and even more gritty human relationships that I can not quite understand leave me feeling puzzled.

2008-12-14T12:13:00.000-08:00

This afternoon at the small sports stadium in the medina, we watched pair after pair of muscular men punching and grappling at eachother in an attempt to throw the other onto his back during a traditional wrestling match. Behind us, the supporters of Gouygui and to our left, the young men and women supporting Building, aptly built as his name. For hours, the two combatants had been parading around the stadium, flanked by diamante-studded youths eager to get their share of the fame and massive fortune that falls to successful wrestlers in Senegal.

Gougui, dressed in a shell-studded loin-cloth, seemed the favourite to win, or at least the most popular. Building had less supporters and less of an entourage, but was eminently tall and quite handsome, except for his broken front teeth. The two stomped around, covered in talismans, herb-filled waters blessed by the most powerful marabouts in the land poured endlessly over their big bald heads and backs.

Finally they stepped into the sandy ring and started to batter eachother. Gougui's supporters, orange bandanas on their heads, were wild and festive, while Building's supporters, perhaps nervous that their hero couldn't pull it off, were less confident. Red beret policemen with ancient rifles knelt beside the ring to stop a pitch invasion, though when the invasion did finally happen, they could do nothing but stand back and watch impotently.

After a couple of minutes of cat-fisting, Building had Gougui on his back. The cry that went up from the loser's fanbase was one of terrific disappointment, and soon the girls had started to cry. The men just stood with their hands on their heads, a look of cold emptiness on each face. Their loss was palpable.

2008-12-13T05:17:00.000-08:00

A trip to the supermarket to buy some of the fresh local milk that I so crave here.

"Hello Madam," says a young pretty girl dressed in the blue and white colours of the milk company. "Do you know about our product?
"Yes," I say, ever-impressed by this company who now seem to be doing customer satisfaction polls at the milk fridge.
"Oh," I go on, reaching my hand to the empty shelf. "Where's the milk?"
"Oh," she says, smiling unsympathetically. "There isn't any left."

2008-12-12T02:22:00.001-08:00

Omar was shyly taking my bust measurement ("You have changed a bit since you went to England. I must re-do you") when he suddenly fell into fits of giggles and started scrabbling through his notebook to show me something.

Usually as discreet as your local doctor, he pulled up a page with some measurements on it, the usual stuff, until I saw that the measurements were not usual.

Longeur: 167
Poitrine: 147
Centure: 148

"The height is normal," he said, "but look at the rest. She is the biggest woman I have ever seen."

Omar, who still closes his eyes when he has to stretch a tape-measure around me, went on to tell me that when he wrapped the tape measure around this lady, he had to press himself against her or else his hands could not meet to take the dimension. He was terrified that she would think he was doing something inappropriate.

*****

An early morning fight in the local computer/telephone/printing/internet shop.

Customer: "I don't have the right money. Can I come back later with 1,000 francs?"
Boss: "Ah! I can't leave the till without the right money in it. Pay it now or leave your printing here and come back with the money and collect it."
"But I will bring the money, I promise."
"I can't leave the till with the wrong money inside it"
"Why don't you trust me?"
"It's not a question of trust. It's a question of accounting."
"Stop with this attitude. I will come back with the money."
"Attitude? Attitude? Get out of my shop, now!"

The boss, a fat, heaving man, comes around to the front of the desk, shoves the skinny man with the printing in his hand to the door, then pushes him out onto the pavement. The customer looks shocked, embarrassed and angry.

"Never darken my door again," says the boss, whose workers tidy him up and send him back to finish serving me.

2008-12-08T14:12:00.000-08:00

On day one of leading my tour of Dakar, we were taken up into the lighthouse near where I used to live. I have always loved that place, it's the most westerly lighthouse on mainland Africa and feels completely forgotten, just an old building on a hill which despite its isolation and seeming neglect, is still functioning and essential to Dakar life.

The man working in the lighthouse, a young guy, took us all up into the tower, guided by some very well-polished brass banisters. One by one we climbed into the revolving cylinder of mirrors which reflects light from the tiniest little bulb dozens of kilometres out into the sea and across the city. Then he showed us a huge bulb, supposedly the first one used there, at the end of the 19th century, though I wonder if that's true because the glass would have had to be hand-blown. In any case, how would it have lasted 150 years of Senegalese man-handling?

Taking us out on to the terrace, our guide showed us a whole load of antennae. Some are for embassies, some for the national TV station, he said. And some, he went on, I can not tell you who they are for, because it is a secret.

2008-12-08T05:06:00.000-08:00

It's that time of year again, the streets are literally lined with sheep, and headscarved-men sleeping in between, reposing in the soiled sand, watchmen over their numerous 4-legged wealth.

J and I went sheep shopping. Sunday night, a cool sea breeze, what more peaceful activity than walking out with a friend and perusing the wares on offer? The first place we stopped at, the watchman got up and kicked his sheep sharply in the ribs, pulling on its tail, hoping to make it stand and show us how big he was, how much meat on him.

I asked for the sheep's name. He reeled off the names of all three of his prize muttons, then told me that for £500 he could be mine. We walked on, tip-toeing through the sand to the next gathering of sheep and men, and were offered something slightly more affordable, at £300.

At the last place we stopped, a group of guys sat around an oil-drum fire and warmed themselves. We chatted to the man nearest the sheep; he asked if we had husbands.

"I am looking for a white wife," he told us hopefully.

"I am looking for a white sheep," I replied.

"Look," said another who had come over to see what all the chat was about. "Are you here to buy a sheep or just to talk?"

I said that talking and buying sheep went hand in hand.

"Yes," he conceded, "talking is an important part of life."

2008-11-29T03:28:00.000-08:00

Omar is learning English.

"Can I offer you something to drink?" he said proudly. I don't know what other convoluted English phrases his teacher is teaching him, but he is managing the basics of verbs extraordinarily quickly, considering he probably has his lessons whilst bent over his sewing machine.

This week I went to have dinner with his wife and their three children. The youngest is six months old, and very plump. He looks like Omar, and giggles non-stop, lying on my chest as I lay on the family bed and giggling into my face.

I told Omar he had put on weight.

"Really, it's because you have gone. I do not stay up all night working anymore. Really, yes, it got a bit too much."

2008-11-22T10:20:00.000-08:00

Belgium is a funny little place, divided between Dutch speakers in the north and French speakers in the south, with Brussels, a French-speaking capital marooned in the middle. Tribalism is alive and well in Europe, with three linguistic groups fighting for resources and recognition in one tiny land.

"We may do fifteen concerts in Belgium," said my Belgian friend and producer of some of Africa's greatest acts, "and twelve will be in the north. The northerners are completely curious about African music but at the same time, 35 percent of northerners belong to the Far Right and are completely racist."

The Gangbe Brass Band blew me away with their wicked Voudun, Afro-beat, jazz, marching band sounds and Beninois softness and humour.

*****

P and I spent a happy evening in Abidjan in the summer at a Kofi Olomide concert; we only went to see what kind of sunglasses he would wear on stage. Walking through the Belgian drizzle, I was delighted to come across a station bridge plastered with posters bearing his arrogant image. I thought of P and happy African days. Somehow, my African days all seem happy, I can't remember now, if I ever knew at all, why I left.

2008-11-20T06:40:00.000-08:00

Out the back of The Shrine, where we were looked after, entertained, fed and watered, for our days in Lagos, the women got to work cooking food for us and the hundreds of people traipsing in and out during Felabration. One minute, it looked like this, just a few pots of chilis and packets of oil hanging around, innocuous-looking dried items sitting in bowls.

By evening, the place was alive with the smells of fried plantain, yam mash and crispy fish. One large lady scooped servings onto plates, while musicians and stage crew passed along asking for more of this and that. Under a canopy we ate, tired, looking forward to the show.

I never got used to cooking whilst standing up, the pot on the ground, stoking the fire or fiddling with the gas ring as I went. But I guess you get used to it eventually.