I live very well on my limited income,
mostly by buying safe but short-dated food.
I have no problem with the pennies I spend,
and never will have, all things being well.
But soon I will have a problem with the pounds
I might pile on with all the moreish junk food
I see, which my wallet can afford,
but I don't need, and when I buy it
and don't do the exercise to work it off,
eventually it will add to my waistline.
There are two newish youth movements,
'The lying flat movement'
and 'The let it rot movement',
both of which exist to protest
against the Chinese work ethic,
working nine hour days, six days a week.
It is clear to these protesting youths
how much the jobs they are offered
draws them into cycles of work, debt
and attempted property ownership
where they never earn enough
to own the property they might choose
and they cannot stop their job owning them.
This makes their only real choice
to be to set their lives and selves
apart from work that does not work
with clear, if passively set, boundaries.
I admire them in their passive resistance.
There was youth-a-plenty
about the town I lived in
when I was their age,
but we were all pre-aged
into passivity to authority
through our education.
There was no movement, no group
identity with which I could resist
being taken in by the activities
that euphemised unemployment
that were common to those days.
Thursday October the 19th
Our breakfast was quiet compared with how the bikers breakfasted. From our table we could say that it was enough to enjoy their high spirits, as after eating they put on their leathers and got on their bikes, and the furniture van was opened up again and bike parts and tools were stored for easy retrieval at the next stop.
Our own breakfasts seem to have been prepared with a lack of forethought, as if the breakfast chef was also distracted by the sights and sounds going on outside. Anthony had to ask twice for what he ordered and the orange juice was bitter. Partly because of the way breakfast was served Anthony suggested that we leave Sidi Ifni that day. He felt that the place seemed to be done with us. He had looked up hotels in Tiznit, where we had stopped briefly en route for Sidi Ifni. There seemed to be plenty of characterful places to stay there. The inattentiveness that was with the staff over breakfast was still present when we settled the bill, over which there seemed to be some initial muddle. Eventually it was clarified that Anthony had paid quite a lot up front well before we arrived in Morocco. All I had to pay extra was 500 Dirhams before we packed our bags, put the bags in the car, made sure that we had left nothing behind in our room, We were set to go.
On the way to Tiznit I very much admired the mountains. They were majestic rather than dramatic, slower in how they impressed me than mountains I'd seen before. Every mountain was spotted with dark foliage that seemed to be small at the distance we were from it, but close up the foliage must have been much larger. It was hard to take the scale of views we were taking in except by how small vehicles looked on the narrow roads next to what was beside them.
Tiznit was slow to come into view, and then there is was. Tall thick sand coloured walls with entrances at several different points all of which which led inside the outer walls. The first thing we had to do was park the car to work out where we were and where we wanted the car to be. This was when we first realised how labyrinthine and narrow the streets of The Old Quarter were, how much it was a place best explored on foot. And even then the goods on sale in small hole-in-the-wall sized shops were often repeats of what was in other hole-in-the-wall sized shops.
We eventually found the right road into the city square, and parked where our car would be watched, but we would have to tip the watcher, to have more coffee before we started looking at the different hotels. I have not been a tourist very much in life, and the habit of having small amounts of money to give away, say, to the person who guides you safely out of the car park was something to adjust with.
Anthony rested whilst I went off to explore the old market, not wishing to buy anything-I had most everything I needed-but wanting to see the sights of the place for myself. It was part of the tipping culture that a person, usually a young man, would latch onto a tourist and take them directly to where they thought the tourist wanted to go. I got caught in that a bit, but also resisted because what he showed me on the way was more interesting than where he wanted to take me. I thought the doorways sunk into the outer walls of the fortress were
Jewish silversmiths found themselves a new base there when they made the town famous for it's fine silverware.
In the early evening Anthony a guide soon found him and helped him find the restaurant mentioned in his guide book. The guide took us part of the same route that I had been unwilling guided early in the afternoon. We had the nearest experience of the week to gay, or camp, fun at the restaurant. The food was very good and we were offered beer to drink. It was all served to us by a young waiter who having to decided that we were 'gay'. He clearly enjoyed flirting with Anthony, who good humouredly flirted back. I have gay friends who like visiting eateries with young waiters who are nearly always wearing tight fitting trousers. This young man was never going to be that knowingly louche, but there was a distinctly non-literal tone to the conversation in French, which I was surprised at. Anthony was charmed.
And so, after a last late night walk back to the hotel, we came to rest at the end of another day. The communal washing facilities were easy to navigate, there were very few of them.
Please left click here for Day Five of this diary.
Was it merely evil genius
on the part of Soviet Communism
to not only to craft propaganda
that had the highest ideals
that humans beings might aspire to,
but then thru sequential five year plans
kill as many of the local populations
it contained is it could, because
of their sense of local ethnicity,
as it could? And in bigger numbers
than the Nazis could dream about?
Not only did tens of millions of people die,
but The Empire kept a vast paper record,
surely now digitised, and definitely secretive,
so full of the details of the arrest, torture,
and placement in death camps of more people
than anyone could take in how accept as a record.
And to do all that whilst denying the victims
any easy-to-identify handles-place names
like Treblinka or Auschwitz that the families
of the liquidated who survived-might use
as a shorthand to explain their sense of loss
-that takes a genius of statecraft beyond belief.
Before the Soviets, in 1915, the Ottoman Empire
did something similar to Armenian Christians,
but that was a once off and it is doubtful
that there was any quality paper trail left behind.
To cause a suffering on a vast scale
is not beyond belief, and is far from unique.
Even now, newer empires seek a similar
destructive power to that of the gulags (1917-1986)
with which to repeat the worst deeds in the past
but this time do it morally, and in the name of virtue.
Wednesday 18th of October 2023
Awake gone 8 am, and dressed and down for breakfast for 9 am. A fabulous breakfast, warm flat breads, butter, marmalade for me. Anthony had pancakes with fresh banana and chocolate sauce. Fresh orange juice and milky for both of us. At home I would have my coffee black and strong, but with the coffee as it was presented in Morocco, the milky version tasted best.
After Breakfast it was time to walk into the town. Our first task was to find a chemist.
Getting 2000 Dirhams out of the bank proved to be much more of a trail. First Anthony wanted to try his card in a hole-in-the-wall machine. He was half blinded by the sunlight so that he could barely read the screen. From his reading of the screen he thought he was going to get his money out and a receipt. When neither appeared he asked the staff inside for assistance. They assisted him, he got his card back and the assurance that he had not lost the money but he had misread the screen's instructions. Then we drove around the block to park the rental car in a better place and take a break from the stress of cash machines after the previous altercation. It was my turn to try and the first machine I tried had a touch sensitive screen and I tried using my debit card. The sun was a serious impediment to reading what was on the screen, but it was clear that the machine was not accepting the card. Enter a Moroccan policeman telling us that the care was inappropriately parked. He was calmed when I produced both our passports from my black bag. With the car moved to a place that disturbed the local police less, we found another hole in the wall and this time I could read the screen better and it had buttons to press at the side which was an improvement on previous attempts. I tried the debit card card and the machine did not want to recognise it. So I tried the credit card and slowly got the hang of interpreting the instructions. With the first two attempts I got used to cancelling the transaction and retrieving the card. At the third go, and speaking out the instructions on the screen to Anthony beside me, who told me what to press we got the better of the instructions and got the money and a receipt. All by 11 am. The point being that for me at least, in my home country I would usually fill in a withdrawal queue and get money from a live bank teller, partly to slow down the bank automating it's services. But in Morocco the hole in the wall was what we had to work with.
The walk back to the hotel was via a wander around the only French-style supermarket in the town, there was nothing there for us-at least not today.
Anthony wanted to see the mountains close to Sidi Ifni, so between 12 noon and 3.30 pm we were on the roads out and around the town. For lack of vehicles on the road, the power steering of the car making the drive so comfortable. and the dramatic backdrops we passed through, we could have been in a very long car advert. Not that cars in adverts stop to give lifts like we did. Twice we stopped and gave local men twenty to thirty minute journeys to the next town from seemingly random stop point on the road.
Soon after we arrived back at the hotel a group of motorcyclists stopped and parked their bikes close to each other, in front of the hotel, with a large moving/storage van full of who-knows-what in terms of bike mechanics connected to the bikers as back up. Their arrival and settling in rooms in the hotel, and then having afternoon drinks outside was all quite a show of activity, added to by the display of workaday masculinity where the local boys were particularly impressed by the bikes and some of their mothers got permission for the boys to sit on the bikes and be photographed on them.
Our evening meal was fish surrounded by salted ice, with side portions of stuffed aubergine. it looked impressive when it was served. The hotel had agreed the meal with Anthony in the afternoon, where if they did tell him what sort of fish it was then his hearing aid did not help him catch and pass on to me that bit of information on to me. But the town was known for being a fishing port and went with the flow about the fish. It tasted okay, and there was plenty of it. Part of me would have liked a few different veg for more variety of flavour. The bikers were again the centre of attention as the dozen or so of them ate together, and collectively decided to eat their main course in front of the hotel, by taking their tables and chairs there, by agreement with the staff.
Read more of 'Carn'-Patrick McCabe before bed. I could admire how he satirised small town Ireland by reframing his fictional Irish small town as one of the many small American towns where in the late sixties the presentation of pop music on vast temporarily erected stages nearby became like some new kind of circus coming to town. Woodstock and Monterey were the names of the towns that came to my mind. I could admire his satires of certain English towns whose previous characters were warped by forced expansion, and later similar changes were wrought by dramatic economic shrinkage. But sometimes the grafting of different imported realities onto his fictional Irish town took more than a stretch of imagination, it stretched credibility. Anthony was mostly puzzled at what McCabe seemed to be doing, he had seen the Irish town McCabe was writing about for real, in the 1960s.
The third day was over.
Please left click here for Day Four of this diary.
In the Wealthy West we know,
but don't want to acknowledge,
how close every new year is
by the increase in the volume,
and the intensity, of the adverts
in our choice of media, from
Youtube to commercial television
and every media outlet in between.
For those with the adblockers
that ease their online life
to make it more productive
the only questions left to ask
is where do they get their
Christmas blockers from?
Can they share where they get them from
or would that be too much like advertising?
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| Downpatrick submerged in flood waters Nov 2023 |
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| These floods were the worst in living memory. Not even the oldest, longest trading, local traders could remember scenes like it. |
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| In Newry a boat would have got you further than a car. |
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| The canal, central to Newry, flooded the commercial centre of the town to such a degree that some traders, and many charities, will not be back. |
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| If that car belonged to the landlord of the property then that landlord is sunk twice or three times over, with how their neighbours trading prospects are sunk too. |
