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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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."

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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."

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.

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."

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."