It’s near impossible to see this slideshow of photographs of Gambian shops and signs by Nichol Brummer and not smile. The photographs are so evocative of the country – its colourful exuberance and its tattered edges – that in them there is a good deal more truth and honesty than a thousand brochure images. Wherever you travel in The Gambia, be it on foot or in a hulking jalopy, you see, along with (the vaguely unsettling) myriad billboards in praise of President Jammeh, these roadside stalls and shopfronts: selling fruit, sunbright textiles, cheap phonecalls. This evidence of basic commercial transactions, of fundamental survival, is part of the fabric of The Gambia; it seems to emerge from the cracks in the pavement, the paintwork – it’s like an analogue of the bustle and teem of the wildlife.

Looking through these photographs again it feels as though, at times, you might be looking at some encoded message that, if you could only decipher it, might reveal some vast, but simple secret. Which from this vantage point, looking out of old, cold windows at grey Hampshire skies might be as good an explanation of The Gambia as I can think of.

Thanks again to Nichol for letting us host this slide show.