By the way, in case any of you have been cross-referencing blogs, we're no longer in Togo - although we did get there a couple of days after a military coup and left the day before the protests turned nasty and demonstrators started getting shot.

There's now talk of Nigeria and even Ghana invading Togo to restore the rightful government, which I'm hoping is fanciful because the situation there's bad enough as it is. Having said that, our two days in a coup-torn country weren't quite what I was expecting: from all those breathless news reports I've read, I had imagined the whole place would be under a pall of anxiety and tension.

In practice, we didn't even realise what had happened till we checked out the Internet. Lome, the capital, was in the grip of a general strike but to our naive eyes it just seemed more-than-usually sleepy for a West African city: people sat around in the streets, there was a big crowd watching a game of a local variant of backgammon, the stall-holders were still selling water and deep-fried yam because they needed the money, and even a decent number of the restaurants were open. People were friendly and we wandered around the streets almost oblivious to what was afoot.

In the evening, we wandered back to our hotel and watched the requisite speech by president Faure Gnassingbe, the son of the dead former dictator who had been appointed a few days before by the army in defiance of the constitution; he looked like a silver-spoon kid in a suit too big for him, stumbling over his speech and eyes darting nervously about as he mumbled away in front of a limp Togolais flag. I'd like to tell you that a silence descended over the city as we watched, gripped, but in practice we had to head up to our room because a couple of local kids had spotted us and were advancing, singing the "Yovo" song (see previous posts). The childish fun was drowning out the noise of President Gnassingbe talking into his tie, so we headed off to let the hotel staff watch in peace.