Well, this may be the last time I am in Lomé without a Lonely Planet. I have a bus ticket booked for Friday (why I am I getting a bus in Africa, after dark, on Friday 13th???) and a putative route round Burkina and Mali for the next month and a half. (Here I will pause briefly to dance around the internet café singing 'my loan has come through, my loan has come through' and generally being jubilant that my bank account is in credit once more... or will be until I transfer lots of money to my offshore bank account (or my Barclays account, something like that) to fund aforementioned exciting travels.) I am alternating between great excitement (rock formations! woo!) and fear (email from Sarah saying, 'make sure you have a wedding ring) but I sort of feel ready to move on.

Those who were aware that the end of last week was 'rather shitty' and who very kindly felt sorry for me, will now be relieved to know that this week is great and I don't want to leave. The reasons it was shitty included:

• my housemates were at each other's throats the whole time
• I had difficulty understanding an article on French syntax
• I passed the scary ex-housemate on my way home and was bizarrely troubled
• some guy grabbed my arse about fifteen mins prior to aforementioned incident
• I had no money
• the French news made Europe look all snowy and pretty
• I was having shirt issues (not my shirt, shirts for my brothers)
• STAESA were ****ing me around about paying me back my tour deposit from, like, three months ago

and various other reasons, the sum total of this all being that I felt like I was a long way away from everyone I liked. I am now upset for a whole host of other reasons, namely Lomé has been my home for ages, I've learned to be independant and self-reliant here, my housemates are no longer arguing and have been lovely to me, I've been to the beach for the last time till god knows when, Guillaume has a friend staying atm who is LOVELY and musical and funny (and 38 and a software salesman, so the boy doesn't need to worry!!).

Last night was wonderful. After the beach in the afternoon we called on some friends and they have a small pool thing (like a children's paddling pool but *just* big enough to swim in) and we splashed around in that despite the weather being freezing (or thereabouts... perhaps not *freezing* but bear in mind I haven't felt cold, bar a tropical storm in the middle of the night in early November, since Estonia) and then the friend threw Maï in, and later threw the dogs in (he has two adorable labrador puppies I want to kidnap) and we ended up staying for a lovely dinner of Lebanese chicken and rice, and extremely strong Camembert. While talking about cheese, some of the assembled company though I said 'prix' when in fact I'd said 'Brie' and (although this was probably due to the fact that I speak rather indistinctly even when speaking English and sober), inspired by the several glasses of wine I had consumed, I launched into a lengthy exposition of partial versus full voicing in English and French (fervently hope Holly is reading this or my entire reading public will have missed the funny side of this), totally undeterred by my imperfect understanding of phonetics, the haziness of my memories of prelims and the fact that I couldn't think of the French for 'vocal folds', 'vibrate' or 'voiced'. And then Guillaume and Philippe started playing chess (which I played for the first time in about 5 years last Sunday) and Guillaume's friend started playing the drum and Maï was dancing and the power went off so this was all candlelit, and, yeah, I'm going to miss this.

I sort of wish I'd just gone somewhere in October and stayed there all year. I feel like I've been leaving places and people I've grown attached to since the end of Trinity and will keep doing this until the summer. I find it hard to believe that this time last year I was sitting on a train watching 'Bowling for Columbine' with Thomas (we went first class, don'cha know!), and frantically reading Duras books, and getting horrifically drunk on a semi-regular basis, cos that was a brilliant way to cope with the fact that I was feeling unhappy, and that all seems like a very, very long time ago. Tomorrow is exactly three years since I first set off for Africa. How much I've changed since then.

Sorry for the self-analysis. I promise this will soon get back to showing off about how fantastic my life is. I was once told that Christmas could be seen as a time to reflect on how your life compared with the same time last year, and being a long way from home and the library being closed, I spent a lot of time reflecting. Hence pensiveness, nostalgia etc.

Anyway, articles on diglossia and language policy beckon. No rest for the wicked or chronically masochistic. Hope they've fixed the aircon in the library, all my clothes are in the wash, pending imminent departure.