Motorcycle Madness in Marrakech

crowded and through those crowds a seemingly constant stream of mopeds and scooters, some piled‐high with goods, zig‐zagged their way through the throng, very rarely coming to a halt as their riders exhibited some incredibly well‐practiced slalom stunt‐riding as if they were born to it!

In the afternoon we sat in a wonderful vegan restaurant near the Palace El Badi with a view out onto a busy intersection of five roads. Here the true scale of insanity was evident to even the most casual bystander. Hundreds of small capacity motorcycles and scooters vied for the right of way with buses, cars, taxis, horse‐drawn carriages, half‐starved donkeys pulling unfeasibly large loads on rickety old carts, little kids on roller skates and, of course, hundreds of pedestrians whose attitude to road safety was on a par with that of the many pheasants that can be seen squashed on the rural roads of Britain.

motorcyclists. About 90% of the riders wore helmets of one sort or another, however we never saw a single individual who had actually fastened the chin strap. Then there were the pillion passengers, often as many as three, and in some cases four pillion passengers per machine plus the rider. Not one single pillion passenger wearing any form of helmet and every single person we saw on motorcycles were wearing either flip‐flops or open sandals on bare feet.

Often a woman wearing some sort of sari would be riding a scooter with a small child squashed between her and her husband with another small child clinging to his back whilst perched on the tiny wire luggage rack. In at least two instances we saw this set‐up with the addition of the man also holding a baby under one arm!

Weirdly, each time there was a near‐miss or the screech of brakes, a smile, a hand to the chest and an acknowledging nod from whoever was at fault seemed to be all that was required to dissipate what in the UK would have engendered a road‐rage incident. I can only surmise that, being a quite devout Muslim country, people simply place themselves in the hands of their god and hope for the best. Sadly that trust seems to be somewhat misplaced when the official statistics show the rate of road fatalities in Morocco to be almost four times higher than in the UK!

It would be too easy to dismiss the bikers in Marrakech as ‘mad‐bastards’ but here in the UK we still have people who think Crown Green Bowling is an interesting sport and tonight my lovely partner Mandy and I will be talking to a terrifying group of Brownies in Stockport about why they should care about hedgehogs. Ain’t any of us free from the influence of ‘La folie’!

Would I recommend people to visit Marrakech? Hell yes, it’s a fabulously evocative place!

During the winter, as a kid, I regularly used to sit on the windowsill of my bedroom using my finger to draw faces in the ice on the inside of the single‐glazed window whilst wearing thin cotton pyjamas.

The only heat source available in the house, first thing in the morning, would be the grill on the cooker; until I (or one of my brothers, depending on whose ‘turn’ it was) had gone through the time‐honoured tradition of rolling and knotting a dozen pages of newspaper before laying them into the fireplace then piling on some small chunks of coal and lighting the paper with a match.

Using another sheet of newspaper across the back of the coal shovel, I would try to create a seal across the fireplace in a bid to help the fire ‘draw’ into the chimney. This invariably lead to me chasing a floating sheet of burning newspaper around the front room, trying to bash out the flames with the coal shovel as the draughts from gaps in the window frames and doors sent it floating this way and that.

In those days (the 1960’s) we also had power cuts at least twice a week and, due to the frequency of those events, I got to know every draught in the house that was capable of blowing out a candle.

None of this was thought of as a privation at the time!

Even going out to the coal‐shed to fill the scuttle on a snow‐covered night wearing nothing but pyjamas and wellies was no great hardship as a child, despite being somewhat scary due to the trees at the back of the house clacking together in the breeze like the dry bones of approaching skeletons bent on murdering me in the dark!

My home is now ‘A‐Rated’ for energy efficiency, the windows are all double glazed and the whole place has been insulated to within an inch of its life, but last winter I had to dress‐up like a Russian peasant just because my central heating boiler has been broken for 48‐hours!

As I sat miserably at my computer watching my breath condense into clouds of vapour and rubbed my thermal‐glove covered hands together, I wondered idly, “When did I become so bloody soft?”

My mind meandered back to the days when riding from Manchester to Cornwall in the pissing‐down rain without a single item of waterproof clothing on was simply considered ‘an adventure’. Yet now, given the choice on a cold and rainy day, I’ll be reaching for the car keys or even saying “Sod it, I didn’t want to go out anyway!”

Could it be that I’m ‘Getting Old’? I suppose the signs may have been there for a while…

In my youth, on seeing a patch of pristine untarnished snow, I could never resist the urge to write my name in it while peeing. Now, on those rare occasions when we get any decent snowfall in South Manchester, I instinctively know that bearing my nether‐regions to the cold night air is more than likely to leave me countersunk. There would barely be enough sticking out to point it at the ground, let alone attempt any discernible form of hydro‐calligraphy!

As an apprentice electrician it was I who would be summoned if one of the older electricians dropped a tiny brass 4mm screw onto a swarf‐strewn workshop floor because, I had “…eyes like a shithouse rat!” (Believe it or not that was classed as a compliment in Stockport engineering factories in the mid‐to‐late 1970’s). glasses was a massive blow to my ego. But now, almost 20‐years further down the road, I require three separate pairs of glasses (four, if you include the prescription sunglasses that get used for less than a dozen days of the year).

As palpable as the physical signs of aging are, they can always be dismissed or ignored but I find the psychological signs of aging can be much harder to discount.

There was a time when I and a group of friends would sit around a pub table and boast about which of us had been taking the strongest ‘acid’ tablets. In recent years I have found myself meeting up with the surviving members of that same group of friends and, as likely as not, we find ourselves compare notes on which of us is taking the strongest ‘antacid’ tablets!

There was a time when all I required for a three‐day drinking session was some good company and a pocket full of cash. Now I find that a fully charged mobile phone, a debit card, a credit card and a pocket full of Gaviscon tablets have become essential facets of a single night out!

Perhaps the most insidious and cruelly telling part of the realisation that my 59‐years of existence in this world have truly robbed me of my youth is the way in which my natural instincts have evolved.

While walking through the centre of Manchester recently I happened to pass a very pretty young lady dressed in a denim miniskirt, fishnet stockings, stiletto‐healed ankle boots and a crop‐top that served to accentuate her perfectly formed breasts while displaying her firm flat stomach for all the world to see. There are many thoughts that could, and indeed should, have crossed my mind at that point. I’m sure I don’t need to detail them here, as your own guesswork will no‐doubt be fairly accurate. Sadly, the first thought that actually crossed my mind was;

“She’ll be sorry she didn’t bring a coat out with her, it’ll be getting cold later!”

It’s really no wonder that I feel like time is catching up with me is it?