Besides the fragrant rice and meat platters, there are exquisite paintings and statues of villagers, books with poetry and pictures of old Iranian cities, and a hand-painted tiled oven.It is a place that draws many young Iranians Most were toddlers when their parents fled They don't feel British; nor Iranian either. Everything else smells, looks and tastes like Iran, I am told by the Iranian customers who fill the place on a Sunday afternoon. Little black fish swim and bump frequently into watermelons lying in the water I presume that they are some poetic cultural symbol. Hassan laughs: "It is to keep them cool, like we did in Iran, in the rivers." In another fish tank, curiously, an enormous green-haired plastic troll keeps guard. And so this place represents the stuff of his fantasies.At the front of the cafe is a DIY plastic pond (money is not freely available even to dreamers) and a fountain. His heart is still there, but safely nestled in a time and place before the megalomaniac Shah and the cruel Imams caused such devastation.

Roberto tells them with passion: "You politicos don't understand - we also suffer for Colombia."And it is that pain which they say makes them turn to strong food and drink, the sleepless nights when they dance salsa till they drop - usually at Bilongos in North London, in a beautiful ballroom where formality helps to rein in the sensuality of the dancers, turning the plainest of them into the most intensely desirable creatures on earth.La Piragua Colombian Cafe, 176, Upper St, Islington London N1; Bilongos Latin Club, 6-9 Salisbury Promenade, Green Lanes, London N8Persians, poets, plastic pondsHassan, who runs this extraordinary cafe in downbeat West Ealing, spills over with natural warmth He came after the Iranian Revolution in 1980. "It is even better now," says Hernando, because some men have become less macho - they even change nappies - "but I used to be frightened when Englishwomen came after me in a pub" The refugees go silent and look disapproving. They abhor the violence, where "the killers and the killed are young boys who want to help their families".What you also notice is the potent love and lust that flows between the sexes. Posters on the wall ask for still more donations for liberation causes."We never got independence, we just changed owners," says Asdrual. They all resent the arrogance of the USA and claim Colombians are merely producers not consumers of drugs.

The tensions between these two groups are real enough, but so is the loyalty. He cannot understand Roberto and his petty bourgeois friends. An Amnesty International investigation shows that state terror is getting worse. Asdrual Jimenez, a man without a smile, has been here eight years A Marxist lawyer, he was shot at and nearly died. Hernando disagrees: "When I think of home, the hair on my hand, it stands up.

In my house here I make a little Colombia." There's no going back because the country and the immigrants can no longer understand one another.More recent political refugees also hang out here, like the disconsolate Gloria whose husband was kidnapped and killed by the Colombian army, she says, and who now fears for her own life. We have surgeons, bankers."The lure of London in the Sixties - "and of Emma Peel" in The Avengers TV show, one jokes - brought these early economic migrants. They have lingered much longer than they intended, although Roberto now loves England, especially its law and order. Roberto, the flirtatious owner, tells me that Colombians are voluptuaries. We drink aguardiente, which burns my entrails, but to complain would be asking to be mocked. Being Colombian, they tell me, is an act of faith and of pictures in your head - of the Andes, the light, the valleys, the forests. "Look," says Hernando Reyes, a driver with Parcel Force, who has been here since 1979, "we are not only about drugs, coffee and Marquez We export emeralds, flowers.