It hurt.

The flavours of the dream still clutched to me. My ears were still ringing with the beating of the drums, and I could still taste the grilled fish and palm wine. I could still smell the ancient forests and the restless, salty oceans, and feel the glacial chill of the mountain lakes. But the halogen ceiling lights were blinding me, and there was an excessive demand for documents. A stiff, silent numbness began to settle around that joyous ache in my heart that clamours for adventure.

I’ve had the same view out of my window for six weeks now. Chimneys and chestnut trees, and a row of multicoloured houses perched on a hill. Every once in a while a train rumbles past on stone railway arches, and I silently bark at it. There are bills to be paid and the pressures of society to confront. It can be a delicate balance, reality – that jarring space where heart and soul meet the highway code. It threatens to be a slow, painful death by beaurocracy, and secretly, I’m terrified.

I’ve discovered something, over this past year; something which has always nagged at me, and I’ve always managed to suffocate in a whirlwind of jobs and pubs and parties: a Sacredness, in nothing more than the beauty of the human spirit, in all its echoes and expressions. In my head-on collision with the beautiful strangeness of existence, I’ve realised that the most meaningful adventure I can take myself on is a celebration of nothing more than the wonderous potential that lies in all of us; a potential eager to explode as soon as we gather the courage to follow our heart.

Society grates, not so much in the demand for rent as the demand for spaces of your soul. I am not sure how we’ve arrived here, but we have. We’ve taken spaces that could be filled with warm-hearted expression and filled them with the X Factor. We’ve created an economy that feeds off thoughtless, empty greed. I am terrified of sacrificing my creativity, my curiosity, my thirst for understanding, to bland, relentless emptiness. I’m terrified of loosing more and more of my time to being what I need to be to pay the bills, watching hopelessly as the time I spend being what I feel to be gets increasingly pushed into treasured little isolated corners. I am terrified of loosing the meaning that comes with creating your own world on the edges.

Luckily, I’ve moved to Bristol, a city whose foundations throb with a dazzling myriad of human expression, and whose edges are wide and filled with colour. Everywhere I am meeting people who have made the same discovery as me, and whose lives inspire me, to carefully chose who I am when I’m clocking hours, and accept the gifts and the sacrifices that come with not clocking too many of them. It doesn’t rain as much as it does in Manchester. Outside a train rumbles past on stone railway arches, and I bark out loud.

Quite. But there’s something about festivals that seems to instantly, deliciously subvert all that hard work. Guards are down, decorum’s out the window, and the word of the day is colour, in all its forms; when time finds you inside that blissful bubble of impulsive freedom and creativity, you do start to wonder whether all the civilizing is worth it. And when it comes to reminding ourselves of the charm of our fresh spontaneity, there’s nothing quite like the raw, unadulterated sounds of good folk music.

This is not the world of beards and waistcoats it is often portrayed to be (although I’d be lying if there weren’t some present). Folk music is the music of the folk, the rythms and harmonies and melodies that were born in the land and take root in the souls of the communities living there. Every beat, every note, draws its expression from the particular joys and sorrows and hopes and dreams of the hands that have played it and the hearts that have sung it throughout the centuries. It is the raw expression of the human spirit in all its infinite forms; the music that dances in the undamaged wilderness in the carefully managed land of the commerical.

Every year folk from all over BC emerge from their forests and mountains and inner-city condos to bask in the wonders of the Vancouver Folk Festival.

Festivals in BC differ from festivals in England in two main ways:
1)You can’t really drink (no drinking in public spaces)
2)The sun shines

The first rule makes for a family-friendly atmosphere and a lot of pot smoking; the second means everything is a whole lot more fun.  Out on the beach, drummers were drumming and barbeque smells were wafting out on the breeze. Across the bay, the glittering glass towers of downtown Vancouver were a stark reminder that we were, actually, getting this soulful in a city. And inside, amongst the trees and lakes and grassy knolls of Jericho park, those tuneful bursts of expression from around the world were playing themselves out.

Sundrenched, drunk on friendliness and spirited tunes, dancing in a crowd of toddlers and teenagers and the toothless, my senses stripped of everything but the raw emotions pulsing from the stage, I couldn’t help but think that the world needs more of this. So if ever you fancy subverting all that hard work that’s being done civilising you and want to have a dance in that wilderness of our soul, here’s a few sounds to get you started.

The Watcha Clan – finally getting some of the recognition they deserve, these guys kick ass. Big time. Balkan, dub, reggae, drum   n bass, gypsy – you name it, they play it.

Al Andalus – beautiful melodies from the Middle East, North Africa and southern Europe

Peatbog Faeries – celtic electro beats. you can’t help but dance

Bassekoy Kouyate & Ngoni Ba – from Mali. Taking the ngoni, a traditional Malian instrument, to new levels

Eccodek – soulful, downtempo dubby stuff

Ricky Skaggs – get up and jig bluegrass

Check out the festival website for more offerings!

]]> http://jessnotinmanchester.wordpress.com/2010/07/19/sounds-from-the-un-civilized/feed/ 0 Jess http://jessnotinmanchester.wordpress.com/2010/07/15/haida-gwaii/ http://jessnotinmanchester.wordpress.com/2010/07/15/haida-gwaii/#comments Thu, 15 Jul 2010 17:23:25 +0000 Jess http://jessnotinmanchester.wordpress.com/?p=233 ]]> A web of songlines weaves its way across Australia. Their trails mark the paths the ancient ancestors walked during the Dreaming, that new-born time when the land was sung into existence. The ancestors sung the mountains, the rivers and the deserts, they sang the beaches and the forests and the caves, and their songs were not forgotten.  Even today Australian Aboriginals walk those ancient songlines, reconnecting with their land as a Muslim might sing the Koran. To hear the song of a place is to understand the emotion of its creation.

I’m not sure what has happened to the songs of the world where I grew up. Occasionally you can hear hints of what might have been, whispers in the winds or the colours of the sunsets; but for the most part I struggle to hear them, their melodies drowned, perhaps, in the constant clamour of industry and indulgence. But places exist, have no doubt, whose songs can still be heard by anyone who cares to stop and listen. On Haida Gwaii, those songs are carried on the wings of eagles.

It is a world that could have been. It lies somewhere off the coast of Alaska, but I am unsure how it came to be there; trapped, perhaps, by the beauty of its own possibilities. It is to this world that all the hope and suffering of an ancient people came to rest and heal.

Never have I come across a people so efficiently stripped of their soul as the First Nations people of Canada. You see them, sometimes, on the corner of Main and Hastings in downtown Vancouver, their eyes clouded with toxins, their bodies ravaged by despair. They are like ghosts, walking this earth half-blind, desperately searching for the humanity that was taken from them. The reservations where they are allowed to stay as a token of guilt are often haunted by dysfunction and sadness. Some have managed to escape the plunder of their homes, their health, their language, their culture, but most have not, and as the loggers and whalers and governments stole and destroyed their land, even their gods were forced to desert them, as homeless as the people who were bound to them.

They reside here now, in Haida Gwaii, beaten west until they could escape no further. It is their melodies, wild and fierce, that you hear when you pause and look up at the eagles. They are the haunting cries of defiance of spirits ancient and sad, guardians of the four hundred or so islands that make up this world – small domes and huge mountains, shooting sharply out of bluegreen waters. Their world is thickly carpeted in moss-coated rainforests – cedar, spruce and alders – racing each other to the sky. The skies here are grey and heavy, holding you close, and thick white mists travel the land, enveloping mountains as they go.

The people who live here are a quirky bunch, a people as connected to their land as any I have met anywhere. Fishermen and loggers, farmers and hippies. Twenty-somethings who hunt, skin and butcher their own meat, teenagers who bring home the daily catch of fish and crab. And, living among them as equals,  the Haida people – proud and determined, fierce warriors and talented artists, who have resisted and fought and struggled, and continue to reclaim their stolen identity. They are venerated as heroes amongst First Nations people, and the world they insist upon is nothing short of enchanting.

Eagles, bears and orca, time honoured royalty of the air, land and sea, are still granted the rule of their kingdoms, and under their watch a myriad richness flourishes. The air is thick with life on Haida Gwaii. Whales, dolphins, porpoises, seals, sea lions and otters enjoy waters filled to bursting with fish, prawns, shrimp and crab. As seven meter tides sink down the beaches, they reveal sands cluttered with clams, mussels, oysters, sea stars and urchins ready for the taking. As the sea gives way to the land, the forests are coated in greens so rich and bright that they hurt your eyes. Trees the size of houses and as old as civilisations stand tall and proud. Eagles soar above, ten, twelve of them, cruising on thermals. Huge black ravens, brash and intelligent, look around for the next piece of mishcheif. Hummingbirds zip past before you realise they’re there. Deer play shyly amongst the trees, wary only  of the bears, dark and solitary, moving quietly through the ancient forests.

Aware of the frailty of its beauty, aware of the dangers of the culture bulging out of the coasts not ninety kilometres away, a pantheon of forces protect this world. Inaccessible in large part but over water, black hearted sea gods ensure that while the waters between the islands lie still and calm, a vast fury of waves, wind, tides and currents render the surrounding ocean often impenetrable and always formidable. For four months of the year these islands are shrouded in darkness and battered by storms that only the mad or the determined stay to endure. Watchmen stand guard over the remains of villages and totem poles, preserving knowledge in their conversations, and painstakingly holding back the encroachment of the forests. Rain drizzles down with such regularity that only those blinded by the enchantment of the land persist in living there. Even Time, usually so callous, plays its part – newspapers less than three days old rarely make it to the islands’ shores, and a general absence of tvs keep attentions focused on the here and the now and the local.

And across it all, the songs, those rich, wild melodies that fill the air and remind you, always, what it is that keeps these lands alive. It is a memory we would all do well to remember.

Twee, charming and kooky, Nelson’s gritty industrial history has been firmly covered in a layer of tofu.  Dragged out of the silver mines by Vietnam draft dodgers and coloured in with West coast artists, musicians and hippies, Nelson is exactly what you’d expect after 50 years of fermenting in mountain air, pot and idealisms. It’s a place where clothes are more likely to be made out of soybeans than cotton. A place where ‘organic’ is a state of mind, and where the corner shops sell sushi.  A place where, joyfully, the second-hand bookshop is the heart and soul of downtown, where the air tingles with creativity, and where community is so ingrained that if you turn up without the address of the house you’re staying in, you can wander sheepishly into a pottery store and ask for ‘er…someone called Fiona’, and instantly be directed to the right house. A place where ‘grit’ will now only ever be something to stop cars sliding off roads, and where although it is too easy to take the piss, you can’t help falling in love with it.

An old mining town, Nelson’s downtown is adorned with that wonderful 1920′s red-brick architecture that instantly throws you into Hollywood gangster films. Craft shops and diners and bars oozing live music squat next to cute cafes and the best thrift stores in BC. It spreads out, sweet, colourful houses, pink yellow blue, all balconies and veg patches, sloping gently up forested mountain sides, and scattered around a huge, blue green lake. Summer’s are bathed in sunshine, and winters bury the town deep in snow.

We are in Canada’s wild lands, miles and miles from anywhere  – only bears and coyotes and cougars for neighbours – but Nelson is never short of visitors. It seems to be the hub of some kind of transcendental network of ley-lines, invisible rivers of energy running across the country sucking in quirky, grubby souls, who go missing from normality only to appear, often weeks later, on the towns immaculate streets. You see them often, laden only with a guitar and a backpack, eyes full of stars, bewildered to have arrived, and discarded hitchhiking signs at their feet.

And somehow, I seem to have been tugged in too,  digging and painting and plastering and cooking and carpenting for the wonderfully chaotic artists that are my wwoof hosts here. I spend my days in the sunshine, looking out over forested mountains and catching reflections of the lake sparkling lazily in the summer day, and wonder if I’m ever going to make it back home.

Grasslands  – endless, golden grasslands, rippling out into golden oceans. Every now and again, an old wooden barn sits sadly amongst the grasses, red paint chipping and domed roof rotting in on itself. Crumbling with memories and a lost romanticism, these monuments to the prairie’s pioneers can only look on mournfully as they resign themselves to the inevitable presence of the pert new farm buildings, shiny and boxy, that now stand guard over their acres of land. This is cattle country, naked and exposed. Furious, whipping winds creep up and catch some days unawares, seizing plans and dreams and roofs and throwing everything into turmoil. But they leave as suddenly as they came, and during these months, they leave in their peaceful wake hot summer suns blazing out of blue skies that arch so high it sometimes feels like the firm grasp of the horizon is the only thing keeping them from floating away.

And that’s all there is.

Grass.

And wind.

And sky.

And occasionally farms.

And now me, in a little rusty trailer opposite a big red wooden barn, world-weary monument to the prairie’s pioneers, and behind which some of the best sunsets in the world play themselves out every evening.

Greens, Eggs and Ham is my home, a little oasis of sustainability in lands sweating under the weight of industrial agriculture. Ever increasing quantities of oil, machinery, fertilizer and investment are being poured into the fields around me in a desperate bid to fill supermarket shelves. It is ruthlessly bland, and the waste of it is as mindboggling as the scale.  Sitting upon some of the world’s best soil you will find some of the world’s worst urban sprawl, and while millions of us go malnourished, acre upon identical acre produces grain destined only for animal feedlots. I have been inside cool, dark warehouses, the size of Wembley Stadium, filled with nothing but potatoes. Miles of potatoes, enough to feed a small town for months, dragged out if the ground by huge machines in a process so ‘efficient’ and, subsequently, so damaging that immense quantities of them will be dumped because they are just not  pretty enough for the supermarkets.  Not even composted. Just dumped. Who’s got the time?

But nestled deep within this madness, and against all the odds, a crazy Canadian and his family are trying to do something different. On their 10 hopeful acres they grow greens and vegetables and raise ducks, and do everything they can to make sure that the way they do it makes sense. (Improbably, they also share their home with nine birds that appear to use English as a common language.) They get stopped at every turn by a system that simply doesn’t understand, but they persist. And here I drive tractors and plant garlic and get geeky in greenhouses, and find some hope that common sense still persists in the world. 

It’s been a peaceful place to make that head-spinning transition between African exoticness and a life comprehensible. It’s a world of jarring juxtapositions – snowcapped mountains rise behind sprawling concrete strip malls; the delicate noses of inquisitive seals poke out of oceans lumbered with the weight of oil tankers heading for Vancouver; in thousand year old forests seventy thousand shades of green dance in a dappled light that stops abruptly short at the brash scars of logging massacres that mark their land like chicken pox. On the way to a day out mountain biking, stop at the drive-in ATM. It is a culture divided, two halves rubbing shoulders warily.

But here in my cabin, there is only the creek and the forests and this little co-housing. For all its problems, the people here have succeeded in creating that interweaving of human lives and dreams that we could call community, and I will miss their welcoming shelter. But there is only so much bread you can bake, and chutneys you can make, and when your best friend is seven years old, it’s perhaps a sign that times have been getting a little too peaceful. And so the gypsying begins again.

PS A soundtrack for my sunshine coast. Sweet, smiley, a sniff of cheese. It’s all in the words.

Ramona

http://www.raghumusic.com/?page_id=36

I had a kitchen to myself today. Not only a kitchen, but a living room, a toilet, a bedroom. A whole house, in fact. And a whole day. All to myself. The first time in 5 months. And I did normal things. I drank coffee and read the paper. I made onion marmalade, and sorted out my finances. I chatted with friends and family in the wonderful, wizardry world of Skype. I listened to Joni Mitchell for hours, and I still haven’t changed out of my pyjamas. For the first time in 5 months.  I’m finally breathing normally again.

It’s funny, finding normality in a place so completely different from your old world. Everything’s the same here, and yet everything’s totally different, and it’s disconcerting to discover how much familiarity is dictated by brands. Shopping can throw me completely, leaving me standing for hours in front of an aisle of items I know to be beer, but hidden behind unfamiliar labels, the liquid suddenly becomes a complete mystery to me. And they speak funny here. Officially, I suppose, they speak English, but damned if they haven’t changed half the words to render them completely unintelligible. And everyone is just so….nice. And not ‘hi, I work in The Gap’ nice, but actually nice. Friendly. And wholesome. None of this gritty drinking-after-work kind of culture – after a long day in the office people go off snowshoeing in the mountains, or night skiing, or have dinner parties and play board games. And they’re just so…nice.

But the starkest reminder I’m faced with that the cramped, grimy urbanity of Manchester is far, far away, is the land. The space, the scale of it…. If I wanted to, I could set off hiking and go for months without seeing anyone. Not hours, or days, or weeks…months. It would take me the best part of 2 weeks, straight driving, to get across this land, crossing mountains and prairies and lakes and forests. It’s wild and pure and oh so humbling. I have but to step outside to be reminded that I am but a speck in this vast wilderness, completely, totally, insignificant. It would be easy to loose yourself. A good thing people are nice.

My weekdays are spent farming. I am officially a farmer. Loves it. I am housesitting for my aunt and uncle, and unofficially Wwoofing to earn my keep. I spend my days planting and watering and wheelbarrowing and shovelling poo, and my evenings joining in on the wholesomeness. I’m not sure how long the purity will last, as 6 years of Mancunian living is hard to shake out of the system, but I’m enjoying it while it’s there.

It’s a funny transition to make, Africa to Canada. Two completely opposite ends of the spectrum, in many ways. And the change has been even more bemusing as I’ve come from living on a tiny island, whose inhabitants have lived and grown together for generations, and for whom ‘community’ is as intrinsic a concept as hunger, to a brand new shiny co-housing in British Columbia, whose inhabitants – strangers to each other – have opted to live together in order to put into practice shared values. They have opted, in other words, to create a community out of nothing.

We seem to have come full circle, in the ‘developed world’, from ‘community’ being something we instinctively do, like eat and sleep and play, to something we have to go completely out of our way to build. It looks like we have completely forgotten how to do it. There are constant discussions about the community ‘vision’, about how they want to be defined, about what their responsibilities are, and to who. Terms like ‘sweat equity’ are bandied around – how to reward hard work, and community input. It’s seems we’re starting completely from scratch, and though undoubtedly guided by hearts, it’s almost entirely an intellectual mission. Compared to where I’ve just been living, it’s a bizarre activity.

For the people on Goree, ‘community’ is just something that exists; there is never any need to define it. They don’t need to ‘measure’ how much work someone is putting in, because it isn’t about ‘doing your bit’ – it’s about living; the ‘community’ side of things is a natural byproduct to that. Fundamental to it all are shared cultural values – children are the responsibility of everyone, because everyone agrees on how to bring them up. Because, essentially, ‘on est ensemble‘, the ‘community’ just is.

Whether one is better than the other I have no idea. On Goree there is no straying from the cultural norms, no exploring your individuality outside of traditional boundaries. Social change – whether focused on women’s rights,  homosexuality, educational choices – is nearby impossible, whereas the people building communities here are free to make their own behavioural, sexual, lifestyle choices. But this fundamental respect for diversity of beliefs, made most noticeable to me by the fact that here I would heavily hesitate to chastise someone else’s child, no matter how in the wrong they were, results in a stark separation from other people’s lives that is sad. And this constant struggle to create a community out of cultural strangers, based on abstract idealisms…that deserves a hundred sweat equity points in itself.

Sometimes it can be a lonely business, dream chasing -my dreams are only ever my own. So finding a face in the crowd that reminds me that there are thousands, tens of thousands of us out there doing the same thing warmed the cockles.

And what a crowd.

For the most part of March I am snuggled in a tiny wood cabin just north of Vancouver. I am just one of a scattering of colourful wooden clapboard houses, nestled into a beautiful forest of cedar trees, alive with wildness, which sinks down to a pebbled beach ten minutes from my little home. Seals swim in the ocean, from which rise snow capped mountains. I buy my groceries from a mom-and-pop general store, and smile and say hello to everyone, because they do the same, and we leave our houses and cars unlocked, because everyone’s a hippy, and no-one needs to steal anyway. Only the bears, just starting to emerge sleepily from their winter hideouts, threaten to taint the innocent sweetness of our little community, and remind us what wilderness is really about.

But across the bay olympic madness has been bustling, brimming with passionate patriotic fervours, and taster sessions of the red-and-white flavoured mayhem that has been downtown Vancouver these past couple of weeks have left stark, if somewhat bemusing, reminders that I am but a visitor here. So I was especially moved when, sitting on a bus gratefully escaping the chaos one day, I found myself opposite a man who re-connected me to the other wandering souls of this world.

He did it without saying a word. He barely even noticed me. In fact, had any communication passed between us I think the illusion of his offering would have evaporated. His gift was his face.

It was a face that sang the emotions of a thousand stories. He was a bright, dark skinned gypsy,  neither ugly nor handsome, old nor young, thick black hair and a large, neatly combed mustache that missed a wooden tobacco pipe. His lively dark eyes twinkled out of deep creases in his weatherbeaten skin, crevasses that looked like they’d been danced in, and he wore the woven flat cap of dole queues of centuries past. He held a battered black leather briefcase that gave him the aura of having just stepped off the boat. By looking at him you understood, instinctively, immediately, the fears, the joys, the passions, the grudgings of his people.  I was certain that if I’d reached out and touched his cheek and closed my eyes accordions would’ve started playing Balkan swing and jolly fat women in peasant skirts would start dancing round wooden tables in small, dirty kitchens.

But, inevitably, social cowardice stopped me, and all that was left for me to do was indulge in occasional glances at this lone traveler. Together we stood separate from the tsunami of patriotism, the Canadian flags and sweatshirts and earmuffs and mittens that decorated our fellow bus passengers. Once again a stranger in foreign lands, I found comfort in his company, in his fellow strangeness, and in the stories silently echoing in his face.

Stories of other restless, wandering souls. Stories of gypsies and immigrants and hopeful seekers, carving their own tiny paths alongside mine, finding courage in the traces of paths left by others. Stories of people who move because they choose to, of people who move because they need to, and of people who move because they don’t have the choice. In Senegal I knew of people who watched their homelands disappear as they sailed on tiny open wooden fishing boats towards Europe. They occasionally passed my island home, travelling under starlight, a hundred cramped people hoping for a better life, trying to ignore the salt sores and stench of fear. They occasionally made it home again, bloated bodies washing up on dirty beaches. Theirs is a tale repeated across landscapes and throughout history. Some of us have the  luxury of choosing to tread new paths knowing we will always be welcome, with our credit cards and our correct passports, and we can always return safely home when we’ve had enough. Our experiences, our stories are different, but always there are people moving, crisscrossing, searching, hoping, dreaming of something different, new opportunities, new colours, sounds and scents. However much it may feel it sometimes, wandering souls are never alone.

Cultures are worlds of their own, and their landscapes shape us in ways that we cannot even imagine. Sinking so completely into a culture so utterly different to your own truly reveals how clouded you are by what naturally exists inside your own native borders – the tools by which you seek to understand the world are often rendered completely useless, and you are constantly forced to question and defend your instinctive judgements and behaviour. This trip has not always been easy, and I have often been tempted to give up on the whole thing in disgust.

But, note bene, it has been a disgust  stemming not so much from the new worlds themselves as from perpetual frustration at the cultural tightrope you, as a foreigner, are forced to walk everyday. You arrive in a strange land drawing strength and identity from the familiar; making a move from somewhere like Manchester to somewhere like Senegal…no matter how accustomed you are to foriegn ways, the barrage of new flavours, scents and spices, identities and values you are presented with can be dizzying. Thus in order to survive you must walk a tightrope between the two, retaining some of the old, for strength and sanity, while sampling the new, in order to be accepted; and it is in toeing the line that you learn to identify yourself amongst the rich array of choices newly  available to you.

It was a month that I  lived on Gorée, a tiny, sundrenched island off the coast of Dakar. Bathed in the exquisite prettiness of another time, burdened with a tragic history yet dancing with fresh African energy, Gorée has been a wonderous place to perform my own particular balancing act. Gorée is a meeting of worlds, a melting pot of times and places. Every day the boats bring pale faced travellers from my cultural homelands into this colourful, beating heart of black Africa; it’s a heady mixture, and one which, if you take the time to sit back and observe, offers fascinating insights into that most fragile of frontiers.

Accustomed to the odd solitary Westerner among them, the Goréeans more or less accepted me as one of their own. I lived amongst the poorest there, in a rickety compound, colourful with painted wood and plants, with a jumble of families. Children and chickens start their play at six in the morning, and the racket doesn’t stop until well after ten at night. I was there only by the grace of Djiby Dabo, a quiet, dreadlocked Baye Fall with a heart far larger than his pursestrings, who took me in to share his two room hut with no thought of payment. Djiby, mon frere, tu va me manquer.

My friends there were a motley crew of souls the winds blew into my path. Djeli, the local kora player, who occasionally broke from his task of entertaining tourists to delicately strum my imagination deep into Africa’s past. The shoeshine boys, oh-so Oliver Twist, who always dropped their pestering ways to join me for a  coffee and a cigarette on the beach. The Baye Falls who spend their days making djembes; the griots under the baobab tree, and the artists on the rocky hillsides.  Bobo who makes her own bread and sells the best sandwiches on the islands, and Aisha and her husband, a passionate herbalist, who’s family I sometimes joined for meals in the evening. There’s a grumpy shopkeeper, who spends most of his day sleeping and who I eventually cheeked into being nice to me, and Kaio, the reclusive Italian musician who provided an occasional portal of European sanity when the Africans got too much.

Into this world the tourists come, and the cultures start to grind.

You understand why the visitors laugh impatiently and shoo the shoeshine boys away; you understand why they argue fiercely, unthinkingly, over two Euros for a piece of art;  and you understand why they ignore the friendly greetings of the locals. But you cannot help but burn with shame for the humiliation and offence it causes your friends. And while you understand why the traders think they can irritate the tourists into buying something, why they spring so quickly to anger when greetings aren’t extended, why the lazy Senegalese informality persists, you cannot help but extend a familiar hand of sympathy to your cultural siblings.

And so you tread a delicate line, continually shaping, choosing, defining, where your own particular border between the two worlds lies. Every day I spent there forced me to define that little bit clearer what I want my own landscape to look like, define a little bit clearer who Jess is, and by what flavours, scents and spices she is outlined in the world. And every time the winds powering me through fail me, I can look down and see that the edges are just that little bit clearer, and smile, knowing that all the shit is worth it.

I love the palm lined beaches, and the brightly painted wooden fishing boats. I love the caramalised peanuts you can buy for pennies at little wooden street stalls everywhere.  I love the bright, bold fabrics that the women swathe themselves in, with matching turbans set against straight, dignified backs and beautiful black skin. I love the infectious rhythms that beat themselves out on the streets, and the rich, bright colours that splash out at every opportunity. I love the crumbling colonial buildings, and the bustling markets. I even love Dakar. If Ethiopia is peacefully steeping in the richness of its histories, Senegal is dancing on a bubble bursting with energy.

And all this is due to the people here. Insatiably sociable, inherently peaceful,  “on est ensemble” is the nation’s motto. The best translation I can come up with is “we’re in it together”. The Senegalese feed off shared experiences – I’ve often been told that “in Senegal we share everything, except women” (to which I always point out that in this polygamous society women often have no choice but to share men. Which is sometimes appreciated, sometimes not so much). They delight in any excuse to draw people into their lives – oblivious to whether that other person wants to or not – and it is always, always, humanity before formality.

Food, music, religion – these sit at the heart of Senegalese culture, and community spirit pervades them all. It is almost impossible to be left at the wayside of this society. It is unthinkable for a meal to be prepared, for example, without all and sundry to be invited to join the numerous hungry hoards crouched over the huge plate of food; and ‘terranga’ – hospitality – ensures that very few people go without shelter. And this is regardless of perceived wealth or social status – in my two months here I have been taken into no fewer than six different homes with no expectation of payment.

Fed and sheltered, you will then be swept up into the melodies and rhythms that resonate in concrete suburbs and dusty villages, in palm forests and colonial ghost towns up and down the country. Music and dance are the juice that run through this country’s veins, providing that steady, beating pulse that keeps Senegal fresh. This is a society built around an ancient caste system, and the importance of the griots – musicians and storytellers -  is so ingrained in the consiousness here that to mark an occasion without music is unthinkable. The music here is rich, deep and ancient. From the kora to the djembe to the (irritating) twenty first century rythms of mbalax, the essence of Senegalese music comes from deep deep inside the soul. Any and every occasion – and often none at all – to light a rhythm and dance and its done. And the energy and talent they throw at it can be jaw-dropping: I’ve been to shows in quiet little community centres that easily rival West End productions, and a kora player in a small restaurant in Dakar moved me so much with his playing that I forgot my food. I could live here for the music alone.

And religion -the Senegalese have embraced Islam as fiercely, as peacefully, as joyfully as they embrace their music. They have added their own exotic twists to it, mixing it with traditional beliefs to levetate spiritual leaders, or marabout, to levels akin to divine worship. For all my personal doubts about religion, as in Ethiopia, I have witnessed some remarkable sights that leave me in no doubt that it is capable of inducing enormous good. Unlike their British counterparts, for example, who head out into the world brimming with attitude, self consciousness and, increasingly, their weapon of choice, the cool kids here – teenagers and twentysomethings all – sport dreadlocks and colourful clothes, and meet up on Thursday nights to sing and beat drums and proclaim themselves Baye Fall, an Islamic mystic tradition that advocates peace, love and hard work. Last weekend I accompanied 4 million Senegalese on their pilgrimage to the enormous mosque at Touba, and was bowled over by the deeply meaningful joy and purpose shared by all members of society – women, men, children, teenagers, grandparents, sick, healthy…it was humbling, and something I wish I could have let myself be a part of.

And the end result of all of this is a nation simmering in humanity, full of contented, good-natured, fun-loving, peaceful people, who won’t leave you alone. And who are seemingly impossible to leave behind.