Memories of Marrakech

This was many years ago, but I was recently digging around in forgotten corners of my brain in an attempt to reconstruct a journey I made in the summer of 1987, and the memories of Marrakech were especially clear, and they seem worth writing here even now.

The train from Tangier as far as Casablanca was very modern and comfortable. Someone said that the French railways had given Morocco a number of disused or never-used trains and they ran on the long distance lines. (The others we took were much older and much worse.) The station I remember as open and sunny, with a number of platforms and lines. It was early afternoon and very bright. The journey was extremely enjoyable, and I remember it especially well because the railway line is very close to the coast most of the way. For much of the time you could actually see the beaches and the sea. I watched the shorego by, the beach, the sand, the sea, the people walking, playing, swimming, and the sun shining brilliantly down on it all. It is just over 300kms, the journey took maybe 6 hours, and I recall that for much of it we were looking at dunes and people and water. I’m sure I remember only the best bits but there were certainly a lot of good bits.

The next morning we went to Marrakesh on an older, more cattle-like train. It stopped at all the villages and people kept getting on with baskets full of fruit and vegetables and chickens. It got very full.

 We went to the bazaar or souk (I don’t know if there’s a difference), a collection of covered alleys full of stalls, open alcoves, really, where they sold carpets and clothes and ornaments and household things and accessories and doubtless a lot of other things too. They drank a lot of tea, calling it down from the tea-shops that were part of the life of the place. I imagine the sellers must be there six days a week and their life is very much bound up with it, so their friends and their rest is there as well. I bought something, I don’t know what, for which I paid with money and a half-smoked packet of black cigarettes. The deal was done. So, I expect, was I. There was lots of colour and life and smell and facial hair.

The thing I remember most was the market square, not the only one, but the main square of Marrakesh. It was large and open, with a road around three edges and building only beyond that road. It was clearly an important centre of commerce. During the day there were stalls, where those who were there every day had their produce and their lives organized. It was mostly fresh fruits and vegetables on the stalls. I don’t remember much meat, and in fact I don’t think they ate much of it, and there was no fish, of course, that I remember.

There were other sellers who mostly seemed to be Berbers come down from the mountains for a few days to sell what they had. Craftwork, non-perishable produce, maybe some longer-lasting stuff but I seem to remember objects rather than food. They had it all laid out on a carpet, and in the evening when they had sold all they were going to sell that day they told stories with what they had left, and left out a bowl for donations. The children were not expected to pay, and they were sitting on the ground all arou
nd the rug. Adults came and went. I understood nothing, but I got the impression there was magic and spirits involved.

Around the edge were a number of stalls, vans I think they were, selling fruit drinks, cool but not very cold, and very sweet. One was from a green fruit that I didn’t know and can’t remember the name they gave it.

Around and about, I remember them as being at the opposite side of the square, near a colonnade, there were remolques which consisted of a large board with bowls of different kinds of food, a light, a flame for cooking, a space for the owner/waiter/cook, and benches on the sides that folded down to sit on. They were towed in in the morning by car, and towed away again at night. An efficient and popular way of providing food to the people, the sellers and the customers. You sat down, ordered what you wanted, or in our case pointed to it, it was put together on a plate, heated as required, and you ate it. There was couscous and some kind of meat (rabbit) and vegetables and a lot of stuff that you couldn’t identify. I just pointed at a few things and ate what I got. It was ok. I assume there was drink as well though I don’t remember it.

Also in the square were snake-charmers, photographers, guides, and others who live, honestly or less so, from the tourists. I took a picture of a snake, or with a snake, possibly. For some reason those photos were never developed. I bought a camel-skin handbag for my mother which she used for years, and bracelet in the form of a snake for someone or other. I bought it from a man who seemed prepared to throw in his sister to clinch the deal. I may not have understood the fine print.

On the train back to Tangiers we met a couple of lads in camel-skin hats, like the Arabs wear. They were sheepish about it but in the end they told us how they had been persuaded to buy Arab cloaks so they wouldn’t look foreign and people would leave them alone. Needless to say, it didn’t work. They were blond Scots, but even had they been darker they would obviously have stood out. It is easy to spot a foreigner by the body language and the guides and beggars are very used to it. When they saw it didn’t work they persuaded the seller to swap the robes for hats, which were at least interesting and could be worn back in England. We joined indulgently in their laughter at themselves, and kept our mouths firmly shut. We, of course, had not done anything remotely as silly...

Otis tarda

It could be the name of death metal band (perhaps it is), but I'm referring here to the great bustard, a large bird which has traditionally nested in the south of Spain, and over the last few years is back in increasing numbers. As I cover a lot of ground on my travels, I have seen a few of them this year. They seem to like some of the farmland near the lakes. They nest on the ground, and they congregate near the centres of large fields (fields are large here because the land is poor and you need a lot of it to grow a worthwhile crop). They avoid the paths where people and vehicles might go. I don’t imagine they can conceive the purpose of paths, of course, but by constantly moving away from any people they do see, they will end up with a preference for a spot in the centre, where they will only be bothered at ploughing, sowing and harvest time (or by the occasional lost wanderer who, having given up hope of finding a path that actually goes somewhere near his goal, and wondering vaguely whether he will be missed at lunchtime, or they’ll have kept his beer on ice, decides to walk straight across on the off-chance that on the other side of the field there is something that is of use to him). There are rather beautiful birds. Light earth brown on the wings, bordered and finished below in white, they look at first sight a little like emus. They vary greatly in size. Some are like turkeys, but I came across a small group the other day that were around four feet tall. They were only 50 yards when they too flight, and for a moment when I saw them I genuinely couldn’t work out what they were, so impressive was there size. They fly little, but with an elegant, efficient grace which is a pleasure to watch. They are, it is said, the biggest flying things on Earth, and yet they have none of the clumsiness of many ground-nesting birds (watching a partridge fly you wonder if the chap in the workshop in Switzerland who put it together had lunched rather too well). Whole families stay together until the chicks are hard to tell apart from the adults, so you might suddenly see a dozen of them rise from the corn in front of you are argue briefly about the best direction to take before splitting up and reuniting somewhere beyond the next copse. It is a remarkable sight to see them fly, and they give a different scale to the skies. They make the eagle owls look small and clumsy.

At Orëbro

Mrs Hickory came across this area by chance when she was looking for somewhere we could go walking well away from Stockholm. There is a large and beautiful system of lakes nearby, a lot of people have wooden cabins there for holidays, and so we went for a couple of days to walk around. Cue photographs of water and birds.

The river runs through the centre of what is only a small town, really, and it divided and rejoins itself again to form a small island called Large Island. It’s a matter of perspective, I suppose. The island and the neighbouring banks are a park, a very green and pleasant one full of unnecessary bridges and playgrounds and peculiar objects that were part of an art exhibition. There is a castle on another little island next to it and this was the view we had from our hotel room, which was across the river. It’s a conference centre now and inside it looks like one, but it has an impressive presence from without. A marauding band of brigands or disgruntled thane of lands to the North would think twice about trying to take Orëbro.

And bicycles. There are a bicycles everywhere. Huge numbers of bicycles. Just as in the other cities we saw, but in such a small place the quantities are exaggeratedly large. Everywhere there are people riding bikes, but also there are banks and hoards and rows and columns of bikes parked by the dozen or the hundred on almost every corner and every widening of every street, in racks intended for the purpose. The bikes are old-fashioned and in most cases just old, with high wide handlebars, the people are not dressed for cycling, they often look as though they are doing it for transport, not pleasure, and despite the numbers on the streets, many of the parked bikes have clearly not been moved for months or years.

The Gentlemen are Speaking Well of the Gorgonzola

I have heard recently a number of people, who do things related to cultural psychology, literary studies and the artier bits of 'neuroscience', discuss the idea that we like reading or hearing stories because they help us to develop theory of mind. The lecturer in Spanish theatre said that this applied specifically to literary novels, and in a way defined them and set them apart from popular novels, because they expose the empathy between the characters and help us to share it. Thus we grow in an important social skill.

There are clearly other motives for telling and listening to stories.  Whether this is an important one will be determined only by a lot of work in neurobiology, serious anthropology and psycho-linguistics, and we won't have an answer quickly, but the idea has some promise. I cannot comment except to say that I await the results of research with interest.

I was explaining abstract art in 1ºA ESO this morning (12-year-olds). That class can be lively, and they were today at first. I spoke for nearly ten minutes about the distinction between representational and abstract painting, compared it with the use to which elements are more traditionally put in music, and illustrated it with just a couple of slides. Most of this was in English. In some classes I have done it all in English. There was not a sound. Wrapt, they were. It happens that way sometimes. In fact, I know how to exploit it, I've been doing this a long time. Sometimes I tell stories to 6-year-olds, in English, who respond in the same way.

It is clear that they do not understand the whole story. What I was telling them today was not even really a story, and I am by no means an expert in the history and psychology of art. They responded, however, as though a great drama was being played out before them, one so absorbing that they could only hold their collective breath and wait for the ending. And it was true. That drama was me.

More than the words of the story, the drama was my tone, the music of my voice, my body language, the atmosphere that they themselves were unconsciously involved in creating. It is a curious thing to be part of. There is much more to story-telling than stories.

Easter in the South

Celebrating the Joy of Easter Morning

The Easter processions are not only one of the oldest traditions in many towns and cities of (primarily Southern) Spain, they are also one of the biggest public spectacles. The small city I live in has about two dozen ‘cofradías’, brotherhoods, which celebrate a particular aspect of the Passion of Christ either through the experience of the Virgin or a scene from the narrative.

Our Lady of

These scenes are figures, usually slightly more than life-size, made of wood and ceramic by expert specialists in the genre. They are ornately decorated with gowns, halos, garlands, flowers, silk handkerchiefs, candles, placed on a wooden float rigged with an ornate linen cover supported by posts at the corners, and transported through the street on the shoulders of strong young men. They are accompanied by the members of the ‘cofradía’, dressed in the garb of penitents, with gowns and pointed hoods in the colours of the group, and by a band, providing rhythm to the bearers and the walkers, and generally livening the whole thing up.

Jesus the Nazarene

It is a slow business, because they are very heavy, and the idea is to show them to the crowds, not to get it over with quickly. They stop to rest, they stop to listen to ‘saetas’, sung from balconies on the route, during which the bearers do not rest, at least not early on, but dance the platform in honour of the singer. It’s hard work. The bearers of the processions that go out on Good Friday are dispensed from the obligation of fasting and abstinence which binds other Catholics. Mrs Hickory’s Virgin is meant to go out tonight, as part of a complex of processions involving ten different images which meet and separate and meet again, then chase each other back to the Cathedral.

At one point the crucified Christ meets two versions of His mother in the Main Square and greets them in ritual fashion, bowing and dancing. Each of them, let me remind the reader, a life-sized statue on a billiard table with 40 second-row forwards underneath it. All of this takes time and energy.

The Last Supper

After some 4-5 hours of this, at about one in the morning, they arrive back at the Cathedral and take the statue in, backwards, on their knees, in the presence of a crowd that numbers in the low thousands.

This is not just a religious activity. It is not a handful of the devout doing inexplicable things, perplexing the majority of passers-by. It is a cultural and social event lasing a week, participated in directly by perhaps 1500 people in any given year (this in a city of some 80,000, and watched, with interest, respect and understanding by many thousands who line the streets to watch them pass, waiting hours to get a good place, clapping the more difficult manoeuvres of the bearers, remaining silent for the ‘saetas’, and staying up late into the night to watch the return of the images to their home church. Most of them probably don’t visit a church from one year to the next, it includes many teenagers who would normally be out in the streets or the bars with their friends, but it is a shared experience, a part of their culture and their hometown, which they want to continue to be part of.

It is very unlikely that the processions will be able to go out tonight, because of the rain, but the experience in other years of the reception of the Virgin by the crowds outside the Cathedral is remarkable in its intensity.

Lake Types (Laguneros)

The lakes, because of their beauty, their extent, and the fact that they are a hundred and fifty miles from the sea, attract a lot of people who don’t have the time or the money to go to the beach. Most of them are there for a swim and a rest, and why not. They mostly use the campsites, or the cheap hostels created for the purpose.

The water is much better for looking at than for swimming in. The good swimming areas are few and small. At busy times, summer weekends, and most of August, they are horribly, insufferably full. Since I don’t usually go to swim, except in September when it’s all much quieter, it doesn’t bother me, and on the other hand it gives me the chance to study types, which is always interesting.

There are the young. Some are couples, vaguely hippy/Bohemian types, who don’t have any money because hippy types don’t, for some reason. They have knotted hair and tattoos, are always painfully thin, and usually have a dog that eats better than they do. Such couples are usually pleasant, open and interested in everything they see. They are the ones who look for Don Quijote’s cave, and find hidden places among the reeds on the lesser-known lakes where they can put a towel down and enter the water easily. They are to be found at the campsites, along with the Northern European families who’ve crossed France with a little camper van and whose children are determined to look as though they enjoy this sort of thing. They are also cheerful and lively, and don’t have an ounce of spare fat either, but what is good to see in 20-year-olds looks a bit creepy in middle-aged Danes.

The other type of young people are groups of students, usually mixed, with a bit of everything, friends who are doing what they can on their budget. There is often a fat girl who is delighted to be there, and a thin girl who isn’t happy and is going to make sure her boyfriend knows it. But people come here to have fun, and the groups like that are especially good at finding places away from the crowds. They tend to have a car so they drive around until they find somewhere they can jump in the water, spread out a bit, pretend to fish, and encourage each other to hire a piece of plastic in the shape of a racing car or a giant swan with which to pedal around the lake and generally have a good time. They don’t have children to think about, are tireless and find everything a big laugh. Ahh, youth. I used to have one.

There are gypsies, too. You don’t think of gypsies as going on holiday, and it’s true they don’t seem to go far, but those that live near the coast, or in this case the lakes, sometimes take the children there. Gypsies eat very badly. You can see it in their skin and their eyes, and they are always fat and flabby. When they swim the women sometimes take the opportunity to wash the clothes. I’ve seen it at the beach, too. Otherwise they’re just more people relaxing.

There are older families who are there for the same reason- they have no money- but they are used to having no money and to making do with a cheap hostel at the lakes, and to having to explain to their children yet again why they aren’t going to Estepona like their friends. It is a subgroup of these who eke out their holiday money by poaching and stealing from the surrounding land, or by selling drugs to the others. You can usually tell this type easily, because they don’t look as though they’re having fun.

You have the ones who park their car near the water and turn the radio up full blast, providing entertainment to all those around them whether they want it or not. There are those who set up a table and a sunshade anywhere they can and spend the day sitting under it, come what may. Nearly everyone brings their own sandwiches, so the bars only sell a few cokes. These are bad times for dealing in luxuries, and anything extra is a luxury to many people now.

Then there are the Rumanians. I’ve written about them before. They love water, and they especially love fishing. The quieter parts of the lakes are full of groups of Rumanians, fishing and picnicking.

Lucia di Lammermoor

Your blogging hedgehog likes the Opera.  I'm not a buff, not having had the opportunity to watch much over the years, but I go when I have the chance and I always  enjoy it. I listen to the live performances from the Met and watch on the TV on the rare occasions there is any. Recordings almost invariably lack something, and compilations of arias are like watching highlights of old cricket matches. Not the same thing. The Three Tenors are not for me. Opera is a spectacle, a show, and admiring the technical ability of Plácido Domingo as he sings a nice song out of context is a cold, abstract pleasure, lightyears away from watching him perform Siegmund at Covent Garden.

We don't even have a proper theatre here, so the cultural offerings are minimal. There is an old cinema which is often used as a theatre, a stage was added years ago, but it's small, the sound quality is poor and there is no orchestra pit. A reduced orchestra sits literally under the stage. There is an outdoor space which is good for performers with powerful voices or microphones, music and opera, say, though not theatre as such, and in any case it's rarely used. And a new theatre is allegedly being built, but I'll believe it when I see it.

This is just my reaction to a performance I experienced. It's 'what I did last night', not a review for the New York Times. And it's as I wrote it, not adapted for consumption by the reader.

Lucia di Lammermoor. The whole thing is coloured for tragedy, except the chorus which a couple of times thinks it has something to celebrate. The production was cheap but with some imagination. The directing was poor, lots of walking very slowly across the stage for no apparent reason, people standing in the wrong place and moving in the wrong ways. And some of the acting was terrible.

Dolores Lahuerta was Lucia and she was very good indeed. She seemed a bit shrill in the first act and I wondered how she would handle Il Dolce Suono, but, although she cheated a bit on the highest, most difficult part, (and I'm not going to blame her for not being Joan Sutherland) she gave a brilliant performance in which she took control of the stage, the cast and the entire theatre and sang lke a woman mad with love. It's not easy to do that. Not easy at all. It was wondeful to listen to and to watch. I didn't want it to end. For nearly 15 minutes (I think) she had the entire theatre scared to breathe in case it provoked her. Terrific stuff it was.

The brother Enrico had a poor voice and was a terrible actor, almost embarassed about being on the stage. Not a tyrannical figure at all. The lover Edgardo had a nice voice but was a wimpy type, not one to dedicate his life and death to a woman, and not someone a woman like Lucia would die for.

The first scene of act three between Enrico and Edgardo should be dripping with tension and menace. They are two brave and powerful men who hate each other and don't kill each other only because they each have an idea of honour that stops them short for different reasons. Instead they looked like a couple of nerds playing at being hard. The whole show failed because of that.

And Edgardo's final death scene, coming after Lucia's, is likely to be anti-climactic and struck me as too long, but with this chap playing the role it almost became ridiculous. A pity, really. Presumably Donizetti knew what he was doing and placed it here for a reason.

The orchestra, a local one,  was good, and I liked the conductor. The choir was also local, experienced and competent. The flautist, a young blonde woman, who was on the rostrum for the mad scene also did a good job. So a varied evening, cuarte's eggish, but when it's all you've got you learn to enjoy it.

Things I Noticed on the Beach

There is always somewhere people gather to relax, a place associated with exercise, hobbies, activities of great and surprising variety and strangeness. In the centre of Madrid it’s El Retiro; in my little retreat it’s the old railway line; and in Málaga it’s the seafront.

There you will find the usual collection- a large collection, even on a cool January morning- of runners, skaters, walkers, strollers, cyclists, and old people not exactly moving but not exactly keeping still. And among them, and on the beach itself, the more unusual collection; people you weren’t expecting to see but you register without surprise. The sand sculptor who has created a little zoo of flattened animals, a lion painted yellow, a giraffe with darker spots, an unhappy looking elephant, a fat rhino and a rather terrifying crocodile.

There was a girl who appeared to be testing her abseiling kit. She had stretched the belts between two trees and was repeatedly pulling it as tight as possible and checking some aspect of it which I might have been able to define more precisely if I knew anything about abseiling. I hoped that when she’d got it all set up and working she would run into it and do a kind of human catapult thing, but it turned out that that was not the purpose of the exercise.

There was a pair of middle-aged tramps who were trying to work out how to have sex on the beach without attracting attention. If they’d simply got their kit off they’d have had the entire shore to themselves in a matter of seconds but they didn’t think of that. I assume they found a solution in the end.

After the 6th Jan, the front was also full of children on new bicycles and rollerskates, and skateboards and other, more modern forms of locomotion which passed this hedgehog by some time ago. It’s a standard post-Reyes scene, in which parents with hangovers have to take the kiddies out to play with their new presents. Imagine how her eyes will light up when she sees it, they said to each other with joy both paternal and maternal as they bought the new wheels. And they were probably right, but their own eyes did not open with joy, or anything much at all, at six in the morning when they were dragged out of bed to go and watch it being ridden. Such, I imagine, is parenthood. Ups and downs

A great swarm of cotorras- a kind of small parrot, this one I think- flew around in rough formation for a while as we sat eating fish. About thirty of them, a colony formed as a result of a pair escaping from captivity some years ago. They flock, and seem to obey either a leader or a collective, sheep-like instinct to avoid being seen to stand out. As the leader of a flock of sheep at any moment is the one most recently frightened by its own shadow, so these birds seemed to go where the most nervous one was taken by its fear of noise and movement. They are emerald green and strangely compelling to watch. The photo was taken on the phone from a distance and doesn’t do them justice at all.

The fish and the prawns were excellent, too.

Now I’m back at home, working and battling the frost that covers the trees every night. Not everything in life can be selfish pleasure (well, in theory it can, of course, but I’ve never got it properly worked out).