1. The substantial woman in the booth beside me immediately notices the otherness in my voice. "Where are you from?" she asks and when she finds out, her features soften in mock commiseration. "Oh, I'm sooo sorry.", she croons. She is Nigerian too, but has lived in Britain since childhood. "My father keeps telling me that I should go back, that all the dibias' children I'm so frightened of are here now, living amongst us" And at this she looks pointedly at me, eyes twinkling in her porcine face.

2. During the lunch break a small group congeals around my chair. One Zambian and two Nigerians. The Zambian introduces the other two : "Your people," she says smiling but I shake my head. "Yorubas," I reply half in jest. "An entirely different species."

3. The other day a man followed her in his car, offering her a lift as she walked to the station after work. She turned down his offer but he persisted, crawling beside her along the curb until she finally relented. You must be a Nigerian, she told him as soon as she got in, because only a Nigerian would follow so persistently a strange woman who had turned him down.

3. There is a discussion about language and identity. Who we are. Who we will never become. No one shares my preference for silence. My longing for an empty cubicle and a quiet day.

4. Later that evening I am at a pizzeria and a young girl, probably seven or eight years old, walks in unattended. After placing her order she takes the empty seat beside me. One glance is sufficient to assure her that I am harmless. Slight, bespectacled, and reading a slim volume of poetry, she surmises that I am hardly a threat - she could probably shatter my clavicle with one blow from her prepubescent arm. After a few minutes, however, she grows weary of waiting and tells the man behind the counter in perfecly phrased and beautifully cadenced sentences that she has to leave and will be back later. How ordered her mind must be, I find myself thinking. O Brave New World, that has such people in it!