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.

Are you forever a guest? Do you have to be eternally grateful and polite? Should you assimilate? Will you ever be a person of this nation? Or will your attempts to try this simply irritate the natives the way Salman Rushdie describes so brilliantly in East, West: "Foreigners can be dogged and can also, on account of language difficulties, fail to take a hint.. Foreigners forget their place (having left it behind) Given time, they begin to think of themselves as our equals It is an unavoidable hazard... Their children speak in a foreign tongue and learn ways which wreck the cultural baggage carefully transported across the seas. They retain an emotional bond with their homelands and yet feel disconnected from them. Although they decry Western materialism, many feel superior to their brethren back home because they now have cars, colour TVs, mail-order exercise bikes and tiled bathrooms And there is the thorny question of how to behave.