It was the morning of the third day of December, 1999, Manchester, England, and it was not good. The night before was no better as the stale ackee and saltfish I had at Joe's wreaked havoc upon my delicate gastric system. As I lay in bed twisting my newly acquired dreadlocks, I heard strange sounds coming from outside. I was cold, so I refused to leave the narrow bed on which I had been agonising for two months.

But, the noise continued and was becoming quite disconcerting. I slowly removed my ageing body from my refuge and staggered towards the window. With slow, senile strokes, I cracked the drapes to reveal a scene that was so apocalyptic that I had expected to see strange green creatures alighting from doughnut-shaped spaceships at any moment.

It was now 8 a.m. and it was dark. Black, low-level clouds fleeced through and flirted with ash-grey skies. Naked trees danced to the howling, eerie songs of the wind. Evergreen pines rocked and rolled as the ferocious winds ruffled their rich foliage.

From among the trees, misty images of my ancestors peeped at me. They seemed to be asking me how I got missing from the African diaspora and found myself in this lily-white country with an off-white climate and to be living among pinkish-white undergrads whose favourite pastime was to drink several pints of lager beer nightly only to regurgitate everything from their stomachs on to the sidewalks. And, as if to answer the ghosts of ages past, I opened the window, but was sliced in my face by sharp blades of icy winds. I retreated.

Within minutes, hot water was cascading down my body for I had gone to the shower to remove the mosaic of cracks and crevices that the cold weather and the central heating have etched into my skin. That done, I vigorously oiled my revived black skin with extra-virgin olive oil.

It was then to the canteen where I performed my daily ritual of moaning over the culinary catastrophe that they masqueraded under the guise of food. The lady employed to burn the bread was there going through her fiery hobby. With calculated steps, I approached her. She smiled. I did not. I was convinced she saw me as an exotic negroid curiosity with a strange but colourful accent. I saw her as an arsonist, sent to Earth to burn every bread she could put her hands on.

'Toasts?'

'No!'

I looked straight into her eyes and she blushed. Four slices of bread, two small glasses of orange juice, and cornflakes, and I was on my way.

Along the way, I felt pain as the cold wind sheathed my body and as buckets in the sky poured their ice watery content on to my body hitherto parched by the Caribbean sun. Then, without warning, the wind got stronger and noise came from the sky. I felt ice pellets piercing my skin as I experienced my first baptism of hailstones made of frozen angel piss. My black backside quivered in my washed-out black jeans as I sought shelter under a bus shed. A few minutes, and the maelstrom was over.

The sun glinted from under ominous dark clouds and mockingly smiled at me before it made its inglorious exit. Shirley Bassey's haunting voice floats on the winds as she sang, 'Little boy lost, little boy found'. In the distance, I saw Marcus Garvey at the helm of a Black Star liner. He beckoned me to come. I cannot move; I am numb. "Zion train is coming my way" "echoed in my bones" and "in the castle of my skin" the freezing pigment lamented. Then, I heard it. Not the rambling of Zion train, but the horn of the departing train from Oxford Road Station. I had missed my class trip.

I stood, in icy paralysis.