Even writers need a holiday. With a certain regret at leaving a warm keyboard, especially at a time when my US agent is shopping my new novel (hopefully first of a series) ‘Old Habits Die Hard’ and I am getting interest from actors to come on board my proposed TV drama ‘The Forest’, I revisited Marrakech with my wife.
As I write this I realise it is St Patrick’s Day. When I was young we all wore a sprig of shamrock in our lapels before going to Mass. How things have changed.
Well, Marrakech. The Square, Djem El Fna, is just as noisy and smoky as it ever was, although I felt it had become a tad more sanitised since the old days of Paul Bowles and the hippy trail. It’s now a world heritage site and still attracts the storytellers, Gnaaud musicians, tooth pullers and street crazies.
But Morocco is much more than Marrakech. We visited Imlil, the trekking trailhead for the High Atlas, and were shown around the snowline by Ibrahim, before he cooked us a delicious Cous-Cous. He’s a Berber, and unlike most other Moroccans, Berbers do a lot of the cooking and child rearing. It is not all left to his two wives.
It was, however, on a camel trek near Zagora into the fringes of the Sahara (or what is in actuality desertification on a grand scale), that I renewed my acquaintance with the ’ship of the desert’ – the camel (one hump or two?) One, actually, and that was quite enough.
I should have known better.
I had an unfortunate experience with a camel on Mount Sinai many years earlier. I only hope that Moses walked down the mountain after receiving the ten commandments and did not decide to hitch a ride on a passing dromedary.
It was then that I made the painful discovery of the exact location of my gonads.
“It’s all flat,” my wife assured me. “Just make sure you tuck your bits in.”
Easier said than done. Where is the 4×4 when you want it most? Never again.
We listened and danced to Berber folk music that night after Tajine and smuggled plastic bags of illicit beer and wine we had procured from a back street warehouse in Zagora.
So, I decided to join in and my old Irish folk music skills had not deserted me. I heard the Berber’s intake of breath as I bent a pair of spoons first this way and that and played them like castanets meeting a rattlesnake inside a bucket.
They were mesmerised. Irish spoon playing met Moroccan drums in a cacophony of world music.
I am sure, if I ever return, the ancient Berber art of spoon bending and playing will have become part of their ancient heritage to mesmerise American tourists.
