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. Joseph Conrad wrote in Lord Jim: "Each blade of grass has its spot on earth whence it draws its life, its strength; and so is man rooted to the land from which he draws his faith together with his life."Across the country, in all our big cities, you find them, intimate little eateries, re-creations of sorts, of that spot on earth they left behind which still clings to their hearts.Colombian cantinaThe cantina looks like it's been painted with raspberry sorbet. Nothing for it: turn a deaf ear."These are the subjects incessantly, fervently, discussed by immigrants and refugees They also have other needs.