Old people should not travel, amend, old women should not travel, amend, old women who like the simple necessities in life like doctors, chemists and black cabs should not travel.
Day three and the sky is still grey. Granted, it is warm – but definitely grey.
No country suits grey. Actually few people suit grey, black definitely, white if young, toned and tanned, but grey? No.
So once again I breakfast in the hotel and try to think of new ways to describe the street below me. The restaurant is on the fifth floor with floor to ceiling windows and views over the faux Parisian avenue. The topiary trees are ficus’ trees. 12′ square green clipped boxes atop thick trunks. The avenue is wide with an island running down the centre. A mini 200 yard residential dual carriageway. At one end the unremarkable mosque, at the other a grand institute of education flanked by palm trees proudly sprouting red Moroccan flags presumably to make up for their lack of flowers
The car cleaners are busy. In all ‘Lands of Sand’ the cars are grey. No doubt beneath the layer of grime they were once gleaming black or Ferrari red or even, foolishly, white, but every morning they are, grey. The thin layer of the previous day’s dust fallout ensuring that the car cleaners at least will have job security.
I briefly wonder why the trees aren’t grey, or the brightly coloured rubbish being shovelled into an open, donkey led cart by a barefooted, toothless Arab aren’t grey, but only briefly; I have far more important issues to deal with.
Not satisfied with burdening my feet and their chipolata appendages (no one would ever recognise them as toes) with angry, red, bursting blisters, some malevolent higher being has deemed it right and proper that I should be afflicted with a woman’s complaint.
A woman’s complaint that only several tubes of cream, copious pessaries and a tablet will relieve.
Last time I visited Morocco, indeed every time I travel to foreign climes where fungus can thrive, I am blessed with this woman’s complaint. I know this. I’ve known this for 4 decades. Why then do I not pack a spare case full of creams, pessaries and pills? Why? Because every time I set off for foreign climes, I optimistically believe it won’t happen again.
As I sit in the busy cafe at the bottom of the avenue surrounded by young and old going about their daily business of eating their petite déjeuner, reading their papers, embracing their ‘classy way to commit suicide’ (Kurt Vonnegut on smoking), I notice that the sun is finally burning off the grey. Wonderful. For some, bikini weather.
I move one bum cheek to a more bearable position, knowing that the relief will be shorter than temporary, and rack my brain for words in any foreign language that will spare me the acute embarrassment of sign language when I finally pluck up the courage to enter the pharmacy.