London today reminds me of Ouagadougou in the 80s.
Back then, I rocked up to the capital of Burkina Faso, reporting for my old paper, The Observer. I wound up in Timbuktu—worth seeing but not worth going to see, as the great Dr. Johnson once wrote about somewhere in the north of the island of Ireland. But in Ouagadougou I had an appointment with, if memory serves, someone at the U.S. Embassy, and I looked fresh, clean, shaved, and sober.
