writer's moll

I like mint. It’s a versatile little plant and you can do a lot of nice things with it – wrap it in thick dark chocolate for an after dinner treat, mix it with chocolate chips and churn it into ice-cream for an even nicer one, whizz it into a sauce to jazz up your lamb chop, suck it in peppermint form afterwards to get rid of the smell of said lamb chop, scatter it on salads or even frost it and use as a decoration – but stuffing it into a pot with half a pound of sugar and some boiling water and calling it tea, is not one of them. But mint tea isn’t just the national drink of Morocco, it’s an obligatory ritual. They don’t ask if you’d like some – it’s an essential part of a welcome, so that when we arrive at our riad in Fès we’re obliged to play our part. It wouldn’t be so bad if the recipe weren’t invariable, but there’s no point trying to catch the eye of your hostess before she brings it in to ask her to go easy on the sugar – it comes like it comes - teeth-meltingly sweet and it takes all my concentration, under the watchful eye of the staff, who appear to outnumber the guests, to control my shudders as the vile little potion slams into my tongue with an electrifying jolt.

As we’re walking through the Medina the following morning, I recoil as a man is belting the life out of his donkey with a stick. The donkey is protesting at either the weight he’s being asked to carry or the direction he’s being forced to go and I start to say to my loved one “still, you have to remember that it’s not our culture” when he interrupts with “yes, you have to remember that it’s not our donkey”. They may have taken the lad out of Liverpool but they couldn’t take the Scouse out of the lad.

There’s an organization devoted to improving conditions for donkeys in Morocco where you can report mistreatment of them. In Fès they rely on them almost exclusively to transport nearly everything – even the global giant Coca Cola gets its pound of flesh from the poor beasts with specially constructed panniers crammed full of its bottles and emblazoned with the famous logo. But when the cheapest thing in Morocco seems to be labour - a talented craftsman sits on the floor all day for two months to turn out one exquisite mosaic table top and a man sells two kilos of his freshly-picked oranges for less than an imported tin of tomatoes - it’s hardly surprising that the donkey’s welfare isn’t top of their agenda.

If it looks as though I don’t like Morocco, it’s simply that it’s more fun to write about the things that go wrong on a visit to somewhere new, rather than because I’m not having a good time. I’m especially enjoying people-watching here. They don’t smile a lot so, quite illogically I know, I’m surprised by their kindness – someone will always lend a hand with whatever you’re struggling with (not just us, but they all help each other), people frequently give to the poor on the streets, though they often look no better off themselves and they’re remarkably passive at unfolding street scenes: a group of kids baited a tiny dog with imitation barking and bystanders smiled as indulgently as we do watching our toddlers chase pigeons; two rival shoe shiners approached the same customer together and looked set to provoke an ugly scene, but the customer (who didn’t get his shoes cleaned by either in the end) and everyone else in the bar relaxed, knowing that it would lead to exactly what it did - an exchange of insults, the old guy taking off his coat and squaring up to the young guy, who walked off laughing, with the old guy striding after him in a manner borrowed from John Cleese’s ministry of funny walks, clutching his crotch in both hands as a Moroccan version of the hand signal we use to indicate uselessness. But best of all is the exhilarating sight of the beach on Sundays. It doesn’t remotely resemble a beach in England or France – they’re not there to lie in the sun or splash in the water. There are virtually no horizontal figures to be seen and you can almost feel the swaying movement of a continuously moving vertical tide of thousands of people playing either serious or some mini version of football and it’s quite mesmerising.