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. But many, too, have flourished, delighting in the way their presence has altered landscapes, lifestyles, the very definition of Britishness. A very proper Englishman once spent an entire train journey expressing his joy that Britain was now a multi-racial country: "You couldn't get any aubergines before." Reader, I married him.But the most integrated immigrants still have to deal with complex dilemmas. When Britain took in Vietnamese refugees, even Margaret Thatcher made glowing speeches about our international obligations.Life for these arrivals was not easy, and many of their children have ended up feeling it has been a wasted journey.

For years afterwards, you would find in the houses of immigrants garlanded pictures of Prime Minister Edward Heath next to images of various deities, an expression of gratitude to the leader who stood up for us. When I arrived here in 1972, one of 30,000 Asians with British passports ejected out of Uganda, we did have to confront overweight Smithfield butchers who stood outside the airport spitting out abuse, but many other people in this country took us into their homes, gave us warm clothes and became trusted friends. And, as Paul Foot wrote in 1965: "Commonwealth immigrants in Britain, before they became playthings of party politics...were greeted with general friendliness and hospitality."In the Sixties, it became trendy to befriend soulful intellectuals and artists fleeing communism and military dictatorships. We must maintain our great metropolitan tradition of hospitality to everyone from every part of our Empire." Enoch Powell encouraged nurse recruitment from the West Indies.