No.90: Guatemala

‘Why doesn’t your country shake?’

Owen Powell - 13th June 2007

Ian (we’ll come to Patty in a minute) spent a lot of the 1980s travelling around Latin America. In 1989 he wound up in LA to stay a while with an American friend, David, and his Guatemalan wife, Lily. (Ian is English, I should have made that clear at the start). Also staying with David and Lily was Lily’s cousin, Patty, who was in the States to learn English. Fortunately for Ian (and for me and Alex), Ian spoke virtually fluent Spanish, so they started chatting. They clicked. One thing led to another.

Ian had to go to Boston for a while to see another friend, but while he was away from LA, Patty’s parents got wind of this new English man in her life, and weren’t very happy. So unhappy, in fact, that Patty’s dad couriered a plane ticket back to Guatemala to her, and she had to fly home. “Guatemalan society is quite traditional,” explains Patty. “It’s customary for couples to come from families who know each other very well, and mum hated the idea of me in a relationship with a foreigner.”

“At the time,” continues Ian, “Europeans had a reputation as being hippies. It was probably fair – I had long hair then, and I’d been travelling for seven years.” He runs his hand through his hair. “I had much longer hair then.”

David and Lily vouched for Ian, there were phone calls, and Patty’s parents were gradually won round. Ian went to visit them in Guatemala, and by the end of the year, they were married. “The night before the wedding, Patty’s mum came to see me. She sat me down and said, ‘You know, Ian, it’s not to late to pull out now. You don’t have to marry my daughter.’ But straight away, after the ceremony, she accepted me into the family. It’s a happy ending.”

The newly-weds had a brief honeymoon in the UK, and another wedding over here, but then planned to live indefinitely in Guatemala. Just over a year later, however, Ian’s father died, and so they moved back to support his mother. This seems to have been a tough decision.

“The first six months in London were the worst in my whole life,” Patty says, quite definitively. “I had fallen in love with England, I thought, when we came for our honeymoon and I saw all these chequerboard fields out of the window of the plane, but actually living here was horrible. I had six months of intensive language learning, and really felt like I didn’t belong. But then spring came.”

“Guatemala is known as the land of eternal spring,” Ian notes. “They only really have one season.”

“When I saw the flowers come up, I fell in love with England all over again. That is something I’ll treasure forever.”

Ian’s brother-in-law got Patty a job as a waitress, and Patty religiously learnt the names and sounds of every item on the menu. “But every customer had a different accent, and I couldn’t understand what they were saying. I was a computer programmer in Guatemala, but there was a downturn in computer jobs. It was before the internet, so staying in touch with home was also quite hard. I felt distant from my family.”

Patty went to the Guatemalan embassy to ask for advice. Instead, they offered her a job as receptionist, where she stayed for five years. “I’ve been told that there are only 20-25 Guatemalans in the whole country. From the ones I know, it seems like they’re all women who have married British or German men.”

Patty didn’t feel that she had fully settled into London until after she had left the embassy, and had her first child twelve years ago. “When the children arrived – we have a daughter and a son now – I got into childminding work, then child care, and more community work. I’m quite involved now.”

Ian splutters. “Quite involved! When it was the Queen’s golden jubilee in 2002, she came to Walthamstow and Patty was invited to meet her as a pillar of the local community!”

Patty blushes and smiles. “Well, I suppose. I work for the local authority now, developing child care across the whole borough. It’s good work, I enjoy it.”

But does she miss Guatemala? “We go back a lot. My parents have been to London three or four times, but we make a point of seeing them in their home every year.”

“It’s expensive,” Ian says, “as we have the whole family now. But, as I always say to Patty, it’s not a luxury, it’s a necessity. I feel like I dragged her over here, so once a year is the least we can do. The kids go to a Latin American school on Saturdays, and we brought them up in the house speaking both languages, so they fit right in when we’re all over there.”

“But of course, I miss certain things,” Patty continues. “In England, the houses are dull. Where I grew up, everyone paints their house in bright colours. I miss my people, my family. But then when I’m in Guatemala, I miss my London people. You won’t see any black or Asian people in Guatemala, so I miss my London friends too. One thing I do miss? I miss the earthquakes and volcanoes. When I first arrived here, I remember asking Ian, ‘Why doesn’t your country shake?’ This earthquake in Folkestone recently ... Ha! That’s not an earthquake.”

“In 1976, there was an earthquake in Guatemala that still makes it onto lists of the ten worst ever,” Ian points out.

Patty’s eyes light up. “When an earthquake is about to happen, you know it’s near. The dogs go crazy. Even the ants come out of the ground, they can feel it. Then it hits.”

The Media

Alex Horne - 11th June 2006

Owen and I often rely on the idea that words like ‘amateurish’, ‘shambolic’ and ‘late’ can all be taken to mean ‘charming’ if we smile and apologise enough. Our approach to this quest has been decidedly haphazard so far; we’ve bumbled along, pinching (not grabbing or seizing) opportunities when they’ve presented themselves, but rarely having anything approaching a plan or a tactic, let alone a manoeuvre.

We always knew the media could be a useful tool. But as neither of us is very good with any sort of tool we never really talked about it and kept on shuffling up to people in person at random on the street – the equivalent of having a look at every single page on the world wide web instead of letting google look for you.

The thing was, we enjoyed the search and didn’t really want someone else to do it for us. Besides, putting an ad in a newspaper seemed a little bit like cheating.

But then The London Paper got in touch with us and offered to feature this blog on ‘The Web’ section of their thelondonnightin page. Well, we thought, it’s a free paper and their internet page probably wouldn’t be read by all that many people, what harm can it do? We had our picture taken (in the grounds of The Sun, the two of us smiling nervously behind Owen’s globe – thus recreating the universe in Wapping) and the article was published on April 30th. The next day, to our surprise, the floodgates, while not opening entirely, definitely started to leak.

People from around twenty different countries got in contact and our project received the shot in the arm we hadn’t really admitted it needed. Because even now, after that flurry of self-identifying nations, we’re still not halfway to our target but are almost two thirds of the way through the year. Neither of us is talking about it but our mountain’s getting bigger.

Thankfully, the article in the paper wasn’t only noticed by those much-needed nationalities. Various London-based websites also got in touch and published links to our blogs, turning up several new countries in the process. BBC London then got hold of the story with the result that on May 30th at 7.30am Owen and I found ourselves back on Trafalgar Square, in the rain, standing by a BBC London Radio Van with a roving reporter called Rob. We’d agreed to do an appeal for countries live on air. It seemed like another good and harmless idea. We gave them a shortlist of our ten most wanted countries. They duly ‘appealed’. And while much of the breakfast show was then dominated by an enormous and ill-informed argument about how many countries there actually are in the world and Owen and I were encouraged to approach people who were clearly busy/British/not from a country we were looking for, they did eventually unearth Emmanuel, a very nice man from Zambia, so it was all definitely worth it. We may not normally chase members of the public in quite such an antagonistic stunt TV type way, but for a one-off it was interesting and we’re very grateful for the opportunity. We got ourselves a bonus country and learnt that on balance we prefer our more shambolic/charming approach.

Unfortunately, that approach doesn’t make good TV. After our radio slot we were then due to meet Mike from BBC London to do a couple of reports for the lunchtime and evening programmes. Again, this was hastily arranged and we really appreciate the fact that they featured us at all.

We were interviewed in Chinatown and hopefully did a reasonable job at explaining the idea. We also managed to persuade them to show our web and email addresses long enough so that another large clump of people got in touch after seeing us on the midday news. The reporter then said we were off to find more nationalities and encouraged the viewer to ‘come back later to see how they got on’.

Regrettably, if you did come back later to see how we got on, you wouldn’t have seen how we got on. So in case anyone’s still waiting to find out, I can now tell you categorically that we didn’t get on very well.

As expected, our hurried trawl through the centre of London caught us a fair few foreigners, nearly all of whom were tourists. And those that weren’t tourists were from countries we’d already found. We got our hopes up briefly when we found ‘The African Centre’ on Covent Garden, but even they were dashed when the one lady present (from Ghana) said they’d shut a month ago and wouldn’t be open again till next year.

Having scored zero after searching for a couple of hours, the reporter decided to call it quits and the evening piece was pulled. Oh well.

Secretly, Owen and I were both slightly relieved. We’d got a load of extra countries – most of whom we’re still trying to arrange dates with at the moment – and the word was spread to more people who might in turn find us more people. At the same time, we’ve still got enough countries left to find for us to feel like we’re still in some sort of vague control over the project. When I bought a Panini Sticker album for last year’s World Cup, I found the process less satisfactory than when I was little, partly because I now had access to a credit card. The challenge wasn’t as great so nor was the pay-off. We didn’t want the media to be our credit card this time round – just a generous cash donation from a favourite aunt, or something.

And this weekend, with a bit of luck, the Observer will also be running a piece about our search, so we could just be receiving another timely gift…

No.89: Bahamas

“You can live anywhere ...”


Owen Powell – 10th June

Now then. If I was to ask you to name the most romantic places on earth, you’d probably put somewhere with a personal attachment to you at the top, so it wouldn’t be a very helpful survey. But the chances are that if you looked at everyone’s top ten you’d see some of the same names appearing. One of those names, I’d hazard a guess, would be the Bahamas. We think of sun, beaches of white sand, little fish darting around in blue seas – it’s quite a relaxing, happy thought.

Then, if I was to ask you to consider the most romantic occupations in the world, you might a bit more confused, but you’d be so relaxed with the thought of all these wonderful places that you might go along with it. Romantic jobs? There can’t be many, surely. Milk Tray man. Steam engine driver, possibly. Jobs with a whiff of the nostalgic. Forester. Deep sea fisherman. But how often do these jobs and locations coincide? In my experience, just the once. Blondie, who I met in a café in Finchley, is the daughter of a lighthouse keeper in the Bahamas.

“From the very top of the lighthouse,” she says, “on a clear day, you could see Cuba.”

(Maybe I’m making too much of the lighthouse thing. When Blondie was three, the family moved from Inagua, where the lighthouse was, to a different island where her father took a job as a technician, and then on, island-hopping around the Bahamas through her childhood. Still, it sounds pretty idyllic.)

Blondie was fractionally late for our meeting. I wouldn’t normally mention things like this, given how late I usually am (see most of Alex’s entries for details), but Blondie was very apologetic and very funny about it. As we sat down in the café, she said that “the only things Bahamians are ever on time for are funerals and church. We’re a relaxed people, very Caribbean.” According to Blondie, not many people leave the Bahamas to improve the quality of their life (even though it’s not – by our standards - a “wealthy” country). It’s quite common to do as Blondie did after school, and spend some time at University in the US, but then most people return. Blondie met her husband in the States, in Atlanta, Georgia, although he had also grown up in the Bahamas. She studied Business Education for four years, then they got married in Nassau (the capital) once they had come back to live in their home country.

Three years later, and with a little nine-month old daughter, they made the big move to London. For Blondie’s husband, this too was a return home, as he was born here. He doesn’t remember it, only spending his first year in London, but he had a British passport which was to prove vital. Their daughter had been born with a heart condition, and the treatment offered at Great Ormond Street was the best available to prevent it worsening. Blondie is vehemently pro-NHS. She thinks it’s amazing. “People bash it all the time, but you’d want it back if it disappeared. The quickest way to become poor is to pay medical bills.” Thankfully, the treatment worked and her daughter, now nearly ten, is doing well. A younger brother arrived as well, born in London in 2002. Are they good kids, I ask? “They’re more joy than pain,” says Blondie.

Both Blondie and her husband have studied for Masters degrees in London. He now has a job in High Barnet, while Blondie works as a learning mentor in a nearby secondary school. She helps kids whose behaviour interferes with their learning, and it’s tough but rewarding work. Blondie’s a great believer in education’s ability to change people for the better, although the changes are often slow ones. “In the Bahamas, literacy rates are really high, and all kids want to go to college. They’re very ambitious. People often work for two or three years after school, just to save enough money to pay their way through University. We’re really striving to get our own University status, but we also help fund the University of the West Indies, and a lot of kids go there as well as to the States.”

The American influence on Bahamian life seems to be getting stronger year on year. Since independence from the UK, some aspects of British culture have survived – like drinking tea – but from music to sports, the younger generation are turning West for ideas. “The main sports now are basketball and American Football,” Blondie explains, “and even most of our athletes are based on American University campuses. We’ve won five gold medals at the Olympics – someone once told me it was the best per-capita record of any country in the world! We’ve also got a very good tennis player, Mark Knowles, who wins a lot in doubles. I won tickets to Wimbledon a few years ago and I introduced myself to him! He was playing with Venus Williams at the time, although they didn’t win.”

On a sporting theme, Blondie points out that she left Atlanta just before the Olympics arrived there, and now she might be doing the same in London. With her daughter coming up to secondary school age, the family think it might be time to move back to the Bahamas. Blondie says she’s adapted to life in London, “to not having the sea, and the weather”, but I think she’s quite excited about going home again. “For the cost of a flat here, we could live in the lap of luxury in the Bahamas. And the beaches! I’ve never been to a beach here, but I’ve seen pictures. After the beaches in the Bahamas – some are white, some have pink sand, there are corals – it would all just seem muddy. Even in Florida, it is not the same. The sand is of a different grade.”

But there are things that the family will miss. “Of course! We’ve travelled a lot around Europe, and seen so much history. When we go back, we’ll mainly have trips to American cities which are all a bit samey. And my kids, of course, have a lot of friends here. We’ll have to return here every now and then, just so they can catch up with each other. I feel that we’ve seen a lot, experienced a lot. We’ve met a lot of very helpful people. The hardest thing, if you’re living somewhere new, is not having enough knowledge. But if you meet the right people, and find out the right things, you can live anywhere.”

Even, if you’re really lucky, in a lighthouse in the Bahamas...

No.88: St Kitts and Nevis

Brilliant Banana Bay

Alex Horne – 8th June 2007

I’d spent fifteen minutes sitting outside Liverpool Street Station in the sun, staring at men in suits and trying to guess which one was going to approach me and say ‘hi, I’m Oliver from St Kitts and Nevis’.

All of a sudden my telephone rang. And I know what you’re thinking; ‘what do you mean all of a sudden, incoming phone calls are always sudden’, and you’re right – good point - but not if it’s a mobile phone next to an electrical appliance, then you get that ‘degede degede degede’ noise which acts as a warning. On this occasion there wasn’t. So I was well within my rights to say ‘all of a sudden’.

‘Where are you?’ asked Oliver.

I told him where I was.

It was in my interests to do so.

Playing games at this point would have been foolhardy.

This was a big one (i.e. a very small one).

‘Oh yes, there you are’, he said. ‘I’m right behind you’.

I turned round, smiled and waved at a large black man in a suit, striding purposefully towards me.

He didn’t smile back.

‘Over here’, shouted a different man to his left and I skilfully transformed my wave into a head-scratch and trotted confidently over to meet Oliver, a casually dressed white guy with a yellow wristband.

I felt a bit humiliated and wanted to explain myself.

‘Yes, most people think I’m going to be black’, he told me reassuringly. ‘1% of the population is white’. I felt a bit better. St Kitts and Nevis has a population of 39,000, 390 of whom are therefore white. I’d simply played the numbers game and been unlucky. I did still feel quite awkward and red though. I don’t know why. Despite meeting people from almost half the world’s countries I guess I’m still worried about appearing xenophobic. I should probably get over it.

Oliver’s been in the UK for ten years and talks wistfully about home. ‘It’s tiny. You can drive round it in about three hours. And it’s very safe. You never lock up your car or your house – I never used to keep me keys on me at all. There is a volcano there though…’ If you’re lucky you could probably drive round London in about three hours – between 3am and 6am – but all those other things sound like a different world. Still, Oliver is happy enough here. ‘It’s just the winters that kill me’, he said. ‘If the weather was like Spain I’d think about staying’.

He’s just bought two houses in the Caribbean; one in Trinidad where his mum lives and where he spent his teenage years, and one in Banana Bay on St Kitts itself. ‘Banana Bay’, I say, ‘that’s brilliant.’

‘Oh yes’, he nods, indulging me. ‘It’s a beautiful place to live if you’ve got your own place. But it’s not so nice to live there and struggle. Once I’ve paid for the houses I’ll probably move back’. The house on St Kitts has three bedrooms and a swimming pool. At the moment Oliver’s living in Cricklewood. Without three bedrooms and a swimming pool.

I say again that St Kitts and Nevis sounds brilliant. He smiles. ‘Those lilt and bounty ads have a lot to answer for. But I guess there is some truth there. It’s an idyllic place but nothing gets done quickly. Everything’s always tomorrow’.

Oliver’s return will also have to wait for a while. His girlfriend is from Australia (yet another international couple) and they plan to live over there for a few years before heading back to the Caribbean. ‘St Kitts is just too small for a 35 year old’, he explained. ‘Everyone knows everyone – you’d get bored in a week’. Would I? I thought. I’d love to find out.

Either way, St Kitts and Nevis certainly is a diminutive country – our smallest so far and the seventh tiniest population in the world.* Kiribati and Micronesia are both three times as big. And if the Nevis half gets its way and becomes a separate country sometime soon it could even make the top (bottom?) five. ‘It’s ridiculous’, laughs Oliver. ‘They’re even smaller – I think they’ve got an inferiority complex’. Now, I’m not saying Scotland has an inferiority complex but I’m sure there’s a parallel to be drawn there somewhere.

All of which means, of course, that this meeting is a major scalp for the project.

But even without the thrill of meeting someone from a country with a population one thousandth the size of Spain it was a very enjoyable half hour, by the end of which I’d almost entirely forgotten my earlier embarrassment. In fact for the last ten minutes we talked more about my life and work than his, with Oliver eventually confessing that he’d briefly considered a career in comedy himself: ‘Lots my friends told me I should give it a go’, he said. ‘But I did a best man’s speech once and shat myself’.

I sympathised.

He told me he now works at UBS, a bank in the city.

‘No suit?’ I asked.

‘Oh no’, he replied. ‘It’s dress-down Friday’.

‘Oh yes’, I said, releived that at least one of my presumptions had been correct.


* Next comes Liechtenstein with 33,400, then Monaco (32,300), San Marino (28,500), Palau (20,000), Nauru (with a very accurate sounding 13,287), and Tuvalu (just 11,800). The Vatican has a population of 920 but thankfully decided against UN membership.

No.87: Panama

‘I prefer New York’

Alex Horne – 6th June 2007

Well, following on from El Salvador’s concise notes, here’s the encounter that took place two minutes after seeing those parakeets. Again, apologies if it sounds curt, I had to rush something out for The Observer (who then didn’t rush something out for us) (but they still might and I’m still very grateful!) and with our current b(ack)log situation, I’m keen to get as much posted as soon as possible.

So here goes:

After Antonio’s love of the city and general gratefulness towards the UK it was actually quite refreshing to meet someone who didn’t really like London all that much.

Anette is 28. She’s working as a receptionist in the building where Antonio’s office is located, about ten minutes walk from Parsons Green. She started work last week and Antonio soon clocked her as a fellow Central American. ‘Olá’ they said to each other before he explained our quest. She was happy to help.

She’d come to London from New York. There you aren’t allowed to work while studying. Here you are. She’s finished studying now and is looking for something more permanent than her current job. Ideally back in New York.

‘I prefer New York’, she told me. ‘No offence. People there are just nicer, more friendly. Here people are quite grumpy. Especially on the tube’. It was hard to argue with this point.

She lives with two Polish flatmates and after two years has virtually no English friends. She also has no Panamanian friends. ‘I did meet the son of a lady from Panama but she’d been here for years and he was born here so he’s British really. I found out that last year there were only 25 people from Panama in the whole of the UK!’ This was, of course, music to my ears.

Unfortunately that was all we had time for. My car was parked on Parsons Green and the meter ran out in five minutes. I ran back and made it without getting a ticket. I did forget to pay the congestion charge though so have to pay an extra £2 today. And there was still congestion. But I didn’t mind too much. I’d found a Panamanian needle in a grumpy haystack.

No.86: El Salvador

Craft, Design and Technology

Alex Horne – 6th June 2007

A few weeks ago we had a call from The Observer saying they were going to publish an article about us in that Sunday’s paper and they wanted to use twenty of the people we’ve met so far to illustrate the story. This was on the Thursday. We had to get permission, photos and extra details from as many of the people we’d met as possible in about 24 hours. Unfortunately, despite the best efforts of the brilliant journalist in question, the article hasn’t actually been published yet (it’s now Saturday June 23rd and we’ve got our fingers crossed for tomorrow but realistically think it may well be delayed by another week). However, in the initial rush I was asked to write up my meeting with Antonio from El Salvador in a brief but detailed way. I’ve therefore decided to add this version to the blog – there’s not a lot of colour to the writing but hopefully you’ll get the gist of his life-affirming story:

*****

Antonio came to England in 1989 at the age of 14. His parents sent him over to escape the civil war that was bubbling away in El Salvador. He came here to live with his aunt in much the same way that children were sent out of London during WWII.

The timing was good. The civil war ended a year later but Antonio stayed and made the most of his opportunity. ‘To be honest’, he said, ‘my parents probably knew they were sending me away to somewhere I’d have a lot more prospects’.

Despite not having any English when he arrived, Antonio struggled through his GCSEs before getting a B Tech, a BA and an MA in product design. He’s now got his own business and sells his own products in Conrans on Marylebone High Street, as well as well-known shops in New York, Paris and Japan (see http://www.studiofusion.co.uk/, a brilliant website featuring many of his products, my favourite of which is an enormous beanbag with a table bit attached. ‘Ideas That Make You Smile’, says the slogan. It did).

Antonio was ‘lucky’ to be able to stay in the UK. The civil war boiled over just two weeks after his arrival, in light of which he was granted a visa. His aunt was working for the embassy at the time so he was able to get residency without too much difficulty. His sister, meanwhile, had to stay behind in El Salvador. She now leads a very different life to him.

He told me that at the time he got through the trauma of moving away from his family and his home – the first time he’d ever left El Salvador – to a foreign and unintelligible land, by thinking that it was a great big adventure, that he was in a film. He also decided that he must make the most of his chance. Even at that young age he knew that if he stayed and educated himself here he’d have many more opportunities later in life.

He was right. His interest was sparked in CDT lessons at school (my favourite lesson too – Craft, Design and Technology – basically, making things out of wood that you never want to throw away, even when you move house). Now he’s settled here (his wife is from Canterbury and his two week old baby has the wonderfully English name, Rosie-May), he’s keen to give something back to the country that gave him his break by working hard, paying his taxes, providing employment and teaching design himself at Central St Martins.

He says that while British students do work hard, the foreign students tend to work harder. Deep down the British kids know that if it doesn’t work out they’ll have support. Foreign students don’t – and they have to pay so much more. Like Antonio a generation before, therefore, these students strive to make the most of their chance.

He doesn’t see himself ever going back to live in El Salvador. He’s picked up too many London habits now that can’t be fulfilled back home – like meeting his mates and going to the pub for a Sunday roast. He does adopt his Salvadorian culture when he visits and both he and his wife are keen for their daughter to learn about where daddy grew up, but he now feels out of place when he returns.

He was interested in our project from a cultural point of view. As a designer he welcomes and encourages endeavours like ours. In fact, he gave me a very practical example of why London’s cosmopolitanism is so good for the country, saying that in design you can normally tell where a designer comes from; ‘it’s like accents, you could spot something designed in Japan a mile off thanks to its neatness, gadgetry or minimalism’. British design, however, is unique in that it has so many influences. Everyone here learns from everyone else and London design benefits from its multiculturalism. ‘It’s eccentric’, he says, ‘but great’. Most of his work comes from abroad because foreign companies realise how avant-garde British design is thanks to its varied influences. Apple, for instance, gained its edge when British designer Jonathan Ive joined the company, he explained. ‘And you know the Renault advert with the French girl and the British guy being competitive? When he says ‘British Design’ it’s true. British design is great.’

Two small points of interest for me: One, I drank another Banana Java Frappuccino on the park, as recommended by Indonesian Andrew. Two, at one point a man drove past in one of those converted sofa-car things; ‘that’s mad’, said Antonio, with a mischievous smile. Like I say, go to his website, I promise his ideas will make you smile too.

Finally, on the walk down to his office (where he introduced me to one of the UK's 25 Panamanians) a flock of Ring-necked Parakeets flew over. They’re my favourite London bird. Rumour has it they were introduced to the city when Jimmy Hendrix died and his two pet birds were set free to, apparently, reproduce remarkably successfully. Antonio used to see flocks of them on his way to school in El Salvador. Later on I remarked how nice the houses were around there (Parsons Green). ‘This is my hood now’, nodded Antonio, ‘as they say here’.

The Other World in One City

Owen Powell - 5th June 2007

Today Alex and I met Philippe Sibelly, a French photographer and artist who lives in London. He'd contacted us after we appeared on the London news, sending us a link to his website that contains details of a project of his called (you've guessed it) 'The World In One City'.

Philippe's was a photographic project, aiming to take a photo of someone from every Olympic nation here in London, in the run-up to the decision about the 2012 Olympics. He began it in 2004, and finished it just in time for the decision day in July 2005. When we met him in the Great Court of the British Museum, he had a huge tube with him - inside the tube, rolled up, was a vast poster showing over 200 faces (the Olympic nations are more numerous than the UN members). Philippe took Polaroids of everyone he met, then asked new people to hold the previous Polaroid in their photo - in effect, the final photo in the sequence contains all the other, ad infinitum. It's a genius idea, and you can see an animation he's made of it on his website.

Sadly, we met Philippe too late for him to be our French representative in London, but he certainly represented London's multiculturalism well. He has an Irish partner (she's the Irish representative in his project) with whom he has a tiny little baby, born in London, and given an Italian name (just to provide him with a fourth national influence). Philippe's current project, called 'The Other Africa', is a tremendously ambitious and exciting one - he plans to visit every one of Africa's 53 nations, photographing people, buildings, institutions and radio DJs to give an insight into the Africa we don't really get to see, the Africa that isn't about war, famine and disease. Alongside this, and with a tiny baby on the go as well, he's also training to become an art teacher.

Our time with Philippe was pretty inspirational. Not only had he attempted to do roughly what we're trying to do (wielding a camera rather than a notebook) without going crazy in the process, he'd actually used it as a springboard to try something with an even bigger scope. We swapped tips on where we should go to meet people, swapped stories about the reactions we'd had to our questioning of people on the street, and discussed our general tactics and rules (Philippe used embassies, for example, whereas we're steering clear). Above all, it was just nice to chat with someone who could identify with what we're doing, and to bandy around phrases like 'Pacific Island nations' and 'smaller West African states' and not be met by blank looks.

The network gets bigger all the time ...