Noorjehan Barmania: As well as being British, I will always be South African, so never definitively either

Noorjehan Barmania: It started with an email from a friend: 'Any marriage plans?' The question startled me.

Noorjehan Barmania: In a rush to escape the celebration of yet another friend's progeny, I accept the offer of a lift back to north London from the Super Toff of Maida Vale

Noorjehan Barmania awaits the arrival of her all-new foreign resident's identity card

Noorjehan Barmania: Like many other Muslim children, I attended a madrassa for much of my childhood

Noorjehan Barmania: Rachida Dati will become the first single mother of North African Muslim origin to hold ministerial office in France

Noorjehan Barmania: Class is complicated in this country. If Prezza, that hero of the working classes, isn't sure where he fits into the system, who can be?

Noorjehan Barmania: Who knows whether the ID card will have any effect in controlling illegal immigration. What it will definitely achieve is a loss of our civil liberties

Noorjehan Barmania: This marvellous multiculturalism is a world apart from the days of being spat at in the street and taunted with the 'Paki' epithet

Noorjehan Barmania: I've always been cagey about my dress size and my permanently fluctuating, lifelong dieter's, weight

Noorjehan Barmania: I don't camp. It's not in my cultural framework

Noorjehan Barmania: Zainab Asvat is a tiny woman but her delicate appearance belies a core of steel. By the time she was in her 40s she had been detained, jailed and subject to a five-year banning order by South Africa's apartheid regime

I didn't want to end up like my spinster aunt, says Noorjehan Barmania

Noorjehan Barmania: The corporate world has never been a match for my nonconformity, so I was a little worried about a recent consultancy job in London's Canary Wharf