Don't Believe The Hype

However you look at it, Marrakesh, in my humble, is way, way, way overrated. If the truth were told, it's a shithole.

**I must state upfront, that these are all my own opinions and in no way reflect those of my good lady wife -- who is a pioneer, traveller par excellence and woman of exquisite taste. She loves the place BTW.

If you're a consumer of British media - everything from weekend broadsheet supplements, lifestyle, fashion and travel magazines - you can't have missed gushing photo-spread feature after fawning photo-spread feature PR-ing this noxious little outpost in deepest Morocco. For the last four or five years it's been building a reputation as *the* place to go if you crave easy-to-get-to poverty, street hassle, sickness and tourist crap.

We went there last week and it was poo.

It has no architectural merit. It's not picturesque. It's not even quirky. There is seemingly no point to it.

Why would one go? It's dirty. Smelly. Overcrowded. Intimidating. Irritating. Dangerous.

I mean, how many brightly coloured slippers can a person reasonably have? Who needs a tatty carpet, lantern, bowl, necklace, lamp, shawl, drape, belt, bag, photo frame, rug, tagine pot, dervish knife or sword, tribal mask, joss stick, joss stick holder, rucksack, plate, saucer, vial, soap dish, soap, oil, incense…

All this -- and lots of it -- is available for haggle at the infamous souks.

But buyer beware. Souks are narrow, poorly lit, overcrowded hellholes where you're overtaken by the deafening bids of shopkeepers on all sides pimping their shoddy wares. That and all the random people -- milling tourists; just looking tourists; on the trader's line tourists; being reeled-in tourists; and poor, resigned-to-the-rip-off tourists. Not to mention the locals -- flitting hither and thither; pulling carts; leading over laden, broken donkeys; panhandlers; beggars; chancers and thieves. Oh, and scooters. Thousands of then. Toot toot toot. With their collective exhaust, the place smells like a lawnmower convention held in a sewer.

And then there's the food. Tagine. Big wow. It's not a culinary epiphany, it's a pot. Into which, the Moroccans put principally chicken or lamb. That's it -- lamb stew. Intriguing n'est pas? Stand down Heston, it's not the discovery of the century..

I'm being unfair, of course. Very unfair.

But the problem is -- I got food (or water) poisoning mid-way through the visit and have carried it for eight days now. The experience (I'll spare you) does, ehem, colour the experience. I lost half a stone (~3 kilos) as indication of the voracity of the viral or bacterial infection of my guts.

All this is most unfortunate, as I did manage to ape those Conde Nast Traveller-type shutterbugs with some damn fine pics taken on the iPhone's meagre camera, see below.

Anyway, that's me done with the exotic. In future, I'm not straying far from the tried and tested golf resort in southern Spain.

"I'm Caliban-I-Am I-Am,
I'm Caliban-I-Am I-Am."

**Expression of jaundiced views is a raison d'etre here. But editorial wilfulness can sometimes get me in trouble Chez S.

Random alley

Random alley

Door -- down a random alley

The Square

The Square

Donkey looking very forlorn and forlornly, ehem, very sad

A souk -- shudder to think..

Ceiling of our fancy room in the Rihad

Courtyard in Rihad

Pool and private courtyard in suite No.1 in Palmerie

Blossom In pool, suite No.1

Flower at our 2nd suite in the palmerie

The pool, suite No.2 -- a Hockney-esque study, innit

Wall of 2nd suite in the Palmerie -- A shadow play(ish and -esque;-)

Wall in suite No.2 courtyard in Palmerie ..Isn't the blue divine?

Cactus against [magnificently blue] wall of Palmerie suite No.2

Le posh hotel thingie

Graffiti -- Gooners get everywhere ..and probably pissed up the wall too

Airport -- brilliant architecture and a vitally important and welcome route home!

Airport -- another view. Quite magnificent

Ever Feel Like You've Been Cheated?

I suppose we should count ourselves lucky that we havn't been touched too directly by the rampant crime of grimy north Gotham.

We aren't completely untouched, but nothing bad. P had her phone snatched from her hand on the street a couple of years ago. Some dullards pinched three topiary planters from our light well. A moron broken into the car over the first May Bank Holiday, but only caused a broken rear passenger window and nicked the TomTom from the glove box. ..And last night I was scammed at my front door.

At about 20:15, half-way through a (homealone)dinner consumed in-front of a rerun of British Style Genius, I was disturbed by a knock at the door. A very apologetic smartly-dressed (business casual) gent in his late 20s/early 30s introduced himself as our new neighbour (on the right). Not completely implausible as the house next door has been sold and this same chap introduced himself as such to P on Monday evening too.

Him to me (and also on mobile phone to supposed wife): "I'm very sorry, but we're awaiting a delivery and I have no cash and my wife is stuck in traffic. I wouldn't ask, but the delivery will be here in a few minutes and I need £7."

My mind: Tick. Tick. Tick. He seems OK. P did say that she'd met the new neighbour. He looks tidy and is neutrally well-spoken. Does he want me to take his delivery? I'm kinda pissed off as I'm half-way through my food. All I want is for him to go away -- and quick. OK. Here's a tenner.

Him to me ('corrected' via mobile phone by 'wife'): "Oh sorry, that's £27 not £7."

Me: "OK, as your going to be living next door -- heck, I know where you live. Here's £30. Pay me back next week sometime."

And about 15 minutes later, our neighbour (a real one this time, on the left) knocked on the door and asked me about my ...brother.

Me: Eh? I don't have a brother.

Legitimate neighbour: "That's funny, a guy saying he was your brother knocked on the door a few minutes ago asking for money to cover the cost of -- yep, you guessed it -- a delivery."

Thinking back too, a couple of bobbies did come by on Monday evening responding to a call from two doors down regarding a man asking for money at their door..

Ddduuuummmmmm. Eureka moment. I've been done up like a kipper.

And here's me, Meldrew of the North, out of the goodness of my heart and against my better (or worse) nature, being taken for thirty quid on my own doorstep.

So as an additional security precaution and should matey boy be planning to inflict greater injury to my property, the heavy wooden doors in the lower ground floor bay are tightly shut until the pooch returns at the weekend.

And I never thought I'd be actively welcoming the return of the dog's most annoying habit -- loud, incessant barking at the front door. But it's a great deterrent to n'er do wells of all stripes.

And if I ever see that 'neighbour' of mine again ...I'll call the cops, of course.

The Fall

Dobbin the horse accidentally slipped and fell in the exercise yard yesterday.

....


Vets were quickly on the scene and by all accounts, old Dobbin is in a stable condition.

Oh Boy

We had scan #2 this morning and I'm very pleased to report that baby S is fine -- the right size, weight, brain OK, spine good, the right number of fingers and toes and is 'swimming' in the right amount of amniotic fluid, fed from a right sized placenta.

Oh, and he's a BOY! Yay!

And the Easter Island angularity of the first scan seems to have passed to more naturally human features.

..So now we throw away the baby name books (we were undecided on girl's names) as George Frederick Haymer S is alright as he is thank you very much.

(Haymer, btw, is a name given to the males on my wife's side of the family).

While all I wanted was for a healthy baby and its sex was immaterial, I am looking forward to a more evenly balanced gender spread at home.

"Oh My, And A Boo Hoo"

Well, the England football team wasn't entirely convincing against a plucky Kazakhstan, but 5-1 is a comfortable victory in anyone's book. And in football, it's the result that counts. You grind 'em out and take the points, right?

Take a trip to a trip up Stamford Hill to N17 on any grey Wednesday afternoon and ask the residents of that grotty postcode how they'd feel about achieving a few dire victories with a four-goal advantage -- or even for that matter, a paltry one-goal up. I'll wager they'd swap the entertaining but goalless worst start in over a century for a bit of that as quickly as you can say, erm, Danny Blanchflower very quickly..

And that's my point and why I'm so incensed at the cowardly and unsporting booing by the Wembley crowd -- and the equally banal bleating of the tabloid backpages -- of Messrs Cole (A), Lampard and Gerrard whenever they don the lilly white Three Lions.

Yesterday, Ashley Cole was booed at every touch after haphazardly gifting the visitors a sitter. Hey, everyone makes mistakes, and I'm sure Cashley would be the first to admit he's made more than his fair share. Don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of the puking, preening adulterer either, but he is giving it a go on the left.

But frankly, I resent the griping, booing and hissing of 'fans' from Scunthorpe, Market Harborough or Telford -- or whatever God-forsaken parochial hole these morons come from.

In football it's club firmly over country.

The boys, more habitually in Blue or Red, have more important priorities in their obscenely over-paid day jobs. These silly national games are a mere distraction and potential threat of costly injury.

I was pleased -- pleased, I tell you -- when England tumbled out of Euro 2008. No more of this international silliness. For what's the point? If the nation hates Super Frank and Stevo, then why should they bother? What thanks do they get for their efforts?

Zip. Zilch. Nada.

So chaps, let's just throw it all away, again, and get back to what's really important -- the Premiership and Champion's League -- and leave the provincials to their piffling Conference League tedium.

Carefree.

Are You Receiving?

So here I am happily taking advantage of the weekly luxury of working from home on Fridays. Yay. :-)

It gives me an extra couple of hours a day without the commute and affords a bit of a lie-in and a really good long walk avec pooch first thing, while providing a sense of an extended weekend. All this, and I still get started earlier and run a wee bit longer into the evening. All in all, very efficient and most equitable. :-))

However, all this efficiency is rendered merely theoretical as the VPN from my work laptop don't work too well today. Actually, now I think of it, the VPN hasn't worked very well for nearly a month now. And without a VPN I have no email or network connection - therefore the point of efficiency is somewhat compromised and I can't actually do any work. (Well I do have a connection of sorts, but it's very intermittent - 2 minutes on, 10 minutes off, and impossibly slow and narrow-band when on). :-(

Of course, my connection via the pretty iMac is perfect, but then I'm not using this machine to send and receive kilobytes, megabytes and sometimes gigabytes of data..

Lo. Instead of doing anything productive, I'm just getting more and more irate. :-((

So I begin the arduous and frustrating task of locating and fixing the problem. :-[

The IT guys at the office can't see a problem with my equipment. So I determine to check my broadband speed with Virgin, my ISP. :-p

After nearly 15 minutes negotiating the Kafkaesque complexity of Virgin's automated call centre, so-called customer service operation, I finally land in Bangalore or some such place on the Indian subcontinent. And after another 10 minutes of re-treading my 'problem' and listening to muzak, the 'fault' is detected. :-]

Virgin, in its infinite wisdom, decided to upgrade my already 'Large' broadband package to 'Gargantuan' with effect start of September. ..Which is nice. :-)

The only problem is that they didn't think to inform me of this service enhancement. Nor did they think it relevant or necessary to arrange delivery of a new modem capable of handling the monstrous bandwidth hike. :-[[

Doh!

Thanks for nothing, Mr. B. you arse. :-L

..And the Apple bugs reappeared yesterday with the iPhone needing its first re-boot after freezing. Not bad though -- an Apple device that lasted six weeks before its first stall.

Damn, I sometimes hate technology. Or rather my reliance upon it..

I wonder how on earth we managed before the Internet.

I know. I'll Google it.

Aw, Bugger

You've go to feel for the poor [sic] geyser quietly going about his digging business this morning when he haphazardly located the Victorian water pipe..

..And if the weather isn't bad enough.