– Today is Tuesday, right? The cleaner should be here by now. I wonder what happened to her. Has anybody seen her? She is not here, is she? 
I amuse myself thus, talking  half to myself half to other family members who are busying themselves around me, making coffees, buttering toasts, packing lunches. I don’t expect any meaningful response to my musings. 
– She is in Poland this week. She went for 10 days, she is going to Zakopane, and she is also going to the place she is from, I forgot the name of it.
I stop stirring my cappuccino, everybody else freezes too. All eyes on my husband. 

– How on earth can you possibly know this??
– Honorata and I chatted last week. She told me. She will be back next Tuesday.

He gets up and makes his grand exit, leaving the rest of us to pick up jaws from the kitchen floor. Being up to date with domestic logistics has never been my husband’s forte, to say the very least. Until now that is. Clearly. Last  month ushered in a few ground-shifting changes to our family daily routine. Husband has been working from home.  Nobody knows how long the current arrangement is going to last, least of all, I suspect, my husband. For the time being we treat it as an interim order of things, and carry on as normal as we can. Husband walks the treacherous path of the Working From Home jungle with surprising skill, even if it is sprinkled with a dose of coy curiosity of a newcomer. He is showered, dressed and at his desk by 8am. He goes on short walks around the neighbourhood twice a day, he makes sure he breaks up for lunch, and he switches from sedentary (Google Chrome) to horizontal (Netflix) at 6pm sharp. He makes us hot dinners mid-week and he takes our son for driving lessons mid-morning. He has worked out where our local mobile vet lives, and he knows all the builders in our street by name.   In fact, now that I am thinking about it, it makes perfect sense that he should know where and how long for Honorata went on holiday. 

Where does the work-at-home husband scenario leave me? Interesting question.
I have never been a domestic goddess, my husband was always much better in that role. His cooking and sewing skills had always made me look amateur. But now that his day no longer includes 3 hour commute, he is posing a real threat to my one and only remaining title, the MD of the Family. If he is already more familiar with our cleaner’s summer plans, keeps up with which offspring is off to where, why and what time on Saturday and remembers to buy milk, then whatever next? 

Tonight comes a major test. Rubbish bins need to be taken out. To date, he has never remembered to observe this weekly ritual unprompted. My future in the family hangs in the balance. 
It’s safe to post this tonight. He never checks social media or blog sites during the week. Unless….? 

Today Poland, my country of origin, celebrates International Children’s Day with family days out, fun fairs, sweets and ice-cream. As a nod towards this tradition I planned to write a Proud Mum Moment sort of blog today. Just as I was mentally pencilling in my opening line, an email came from my son, with his own blog piece. He does not publish anywhere (yet?), he calls what he does a ‘subscription only’ blog. Without further ado, I give you Matt’s blog piece. Proud mum moment after all.

Dear Reader,

Thank you for joining me on my exploration of London’s Communities. This is my first piece. Your thoughts always welcomed.

A Roll of the Polish Dice

What: Piątki Przy Planszy – Friday Polish Board Games
When: Every other Friday
Where: Lewisham Polish Centre, Waldram Park Rd, Forest Hill, London SE23 2PP
Cost: Voluntary donation of around £2 for room use
Number of attendees: 15-20
Food and drink: Bring Your Own

Organised by: London Polish Cultural Group – Meet Up Group
Community Type: Social, Cultural, Language

Crowd: Friendly, welcoming, mainly 25-40 years old, professional, all Polish-born, English speaking skill is variable, not all that keen on board games, easy-going, some geeky (remember it’s board games), and entertainingly chatty.

Possible to make new friends…? A small core group of 4-5 seem to go frequently enough to be friends. You would certainly know a few faces after a couple of visits.

Skills Required: Polish Language
Learning Potential: Polish language learners: come one, come all!

If only…? There were pictures online of what to expect, i.e. which games.

Inclusive: 0.5/5 for non-Polish speakers… 4.5 for everyone else.

Welcoming: 4.0/5

Overall Rating: 3.0/5

In a tweet: No-thrills, simplistic, good fun route into London’s Polish community. Basic level of Polish required, liking of board- and card-games recommended. Come as an outsider and leave feeling part of a hidden little group.

Link: https://www.meetup.com/kulturalny/events/259707102/

My experience:

“I knew I’d stumbled upon something special when I felt surprised to still be in the UK.

This happened when I had popped out to the Co-Op across the road to pick up some beers. I was suddenly surprised to be hearing everyone speaking English. My ‘holiday-mode’ had already kicked in by this stage.

I’d come from the Meet Up group across the road in the Lewisham Polish Centre. The evening’s event was the playfully alliterated ‘Piątki Przy Planszy’, which translates to ‘Polish Board Game Fridays’ to give the Slavic rendition a run for its money.

I’m not an active member of the Polish Community – at best a passive observer over the years who guardedly kept his distance.  Occasionally I’d dip my toe in Polish school on Saturdays, a holiday to the Polish mountains, and another one-last-attempt at reviving the language. One more linguistic dash was in store that night I suppose.

The night began when I arrived late to a room full of Poles, huddled around three sets of tables. Someone whose name I promptly forgot shook my hand, welcomed me and then motioned me over to the table playing the most active game. It looked very simple too. This was ideal, the more rules a board game has, the less inclined I am to play it.

I sat down and watched those around me play. I remained almost mute.

I knew I was about to speak more Polish than I had since my Babcia’s funeral.

The language skills I had to offer weren’t much, so internally, I was preparing to instantly bemuse everyone with my grammatically broken drivel.

Imagine a long-jumper preparing to leap knowing his thighs were tied together.

Drum roll… The big reveal came … and went as I threw out a few Polish phrases: anti-climax. Nobody pretended to notice my mistakes, but they were pretending. A couple threw the occasional suspicious glances at me.

I crawled my way over a few minutes of conversation in this more foreign than not language.

Then, to be fair to my table of board gamers I showed my hand. I explained I was British-born, in London, to a Polish mother, and have repeatedly picked up and given up the language over the course of my 24-year-long lifetime.

So the expected rough landing was not so rough at all. That said, I did get a few doting mothers telling me in their (broken) English that I spoke very ‘cute Polish’.

***

There were some 15-20 players there, mainly 25-40 in age, the age tail-end drifting off around 55.

The atmosphere was hushed on the table pressed into the corner, a drawn-out battle of complex stratagems and wits. This was taking its course through tokens and figurines exchanged over a board with a Viking-themed landscape. Those around the table held themselves in thought like chieftains of old as they considered their next moves. On the other table, a Scrabble variant was being played with applaudable concentration.

We played a game with dice and dominoes first, that fortunately needed few words to be spoken. One only exclaimed missed opportunities and amusing clashes of hands: “Hopla! … Ojejku!” I would join in the chorus, keenly aware that my enthusiasm found its expression cloned from what I could remember of Babcia shouting when playing board games with me some 15 years earlier.

The Lewisham Polish Centre had once been a priest’s home. It is housed in a tall Victorian house, just off Lewisham in a mainly residential area. The downstairs area was where we played, a small ground floor cum salon, populated with identikit school tables and chairs. It felt homely as an estranged aunt’s house might.

It took quite a while to get round to the “what do you do for a living?” realms of conversation. This was welcomed on a Friday evening.

I learnt to play Tysiąc – a card game which apparently “every Pole knows.” Seeing that my three instructors around the table spanned two and a half generations, there was some weight to that claim.

A few rounds into the game, helped by a generous portion of Whiskey and Coke from the player to my right, my language skills started to flow back. I was able to worm my way through sentences ever faster: with more bravado but no fewer mistakes.

That was the backstory to my geographical confusion in the Co-Op. I felt fully enveloped by the Polish hub in Lewisham. So much so, that asking for my three beers in English felt laborious. The twisting of familiar sounds, “ffaankyuu”, was enjoyably strange. Maybe it’s the whiskey talking, but I had a good time.

***

By the end of the evening, I’d made it ‘inside’ the community. A base level of Polish eased the journey to be sure. Gone were the stereotypes I secretly harboured of London Poles… oh, what a cliché to end on.

After talking about mountainous holidays, the best Polish eateries in London and many things in between, I had become comfortable in this seemingly closed group. Looking back, it was a group of casual Friday-nighters, sharing memories of a country, which they once called home but now resembled a holiday spot.

Here it was too that the atmosphere of holiday and home mixed, and it took little more than a board game.

My 16-year-old daughter, whom I absent-mindedly allowed to blossom into a fully-fledged Marvel fan within my very nest, had read my Endgame review.

It was not good news.
I learnt that I was racist, sexist, speciest and generally ignorant. This is what she had to say;
Mummy, this is 2019, you cannot say Chinese, you say Asian.

‘Girl power moment’? Really? You liked that? Did you not see that it was a cheap nod to what Hollywood believes that feminists would like to see?

Dried up reed?? Seriously?? That is just offensive. Groot looks nothing like a piece of reed. If you really felt the irrestible need to compare him to a piece of vegetation, you could have researched some unusual types of trees to find the best match.
And Captain Marvel is not technically an Avengers film.
Otherwise, not bad, not bad at all.

My 13-year-old smiled sweetly, as she does; good effort, mummy, really well done, you are getting good at it, you should keep going.

As you sow, so shall you reap.

SPOILERS! SPOILERS! SPOILERS! 

In the spirit of if you cannot beat them, join them, I watched Avengers: Endgame last night. I have lived with Marvel fanatics for years but somehow avoided catching more than a glimpse of it so far. As a self-proclaimed highbrow cultural snob, I never had much time for comic book derived entertainment. Except Spiderman, I like Spiderman. All that changed last weekend when I found myself in Sutton Empire sitting through Captain Marvel with my dear husband. Having seen two Avengers films in the space of three day, I now consider myself perfectly qualified to give an opinion.
My biggest fear about Endgame was its, already legendary, length. I have a perfectly healthy bladder, but I feared the sinking feeling of things dragging on interminably; Tolkien cinematic trilogies still give me night sweats. I needn’t have fretted. Surprisingly, Endgame finished before I felt the first twitchy urge to check my watch, sneakily, so as not to invoke the wrath of Thanos in my slobbering emotional wreck of a husband in the seat next to me. It all hurtled towards an emotional finale at brisk and steady pace, and did not feel like it was too long, even for a massive sceptic like me. One star earned already.
I am awarding the second star for humour. There was enough of it to lighten the mood, but not too much to turn it all into a Deadpool style farce. Yes, I watched Deadpool, both of them. They were okay. Back to Endgame. 

My second biggest fear when it comes to deep space blockbusters is that it will all feel like a massive pile of laser beam nonsense with no substance beyond the crackling sound of supersized steroid-pumped creatures  flexing their techno muscles and stretching their rubberised suits to breaking point. True to type, Endgame does have its share of big guys sulking and posturing in intergalactic wasteland, but it is kept within tolerable limits. Thanos is the biggest offender here, and he made me want to shout, what is your bloody problem, man!, a couple of times, but then I looked at his face, a grim warning what might happen to your upper lip area if you carry on smoking into middle age, and I just felt sorry for the guy. 
Third star goes to the relative brevity and award-winning clarity of the final battle scene. I am aware that complex multi-species battle scenes are unavoidable in films featuring interplanetary conflict scenarios and this is another reason why, by and large, I stay clear of such productions. Endgame’s be all end all  battle is kept mercifully concise and to the point, the stone studded glove is being kicked about in a fashion akin to fast paced football game. Nice.
An array of characters in full fancy dress come to the rescue at the crucial point, which I appreciate can be an emotional moment for those who know exactly who the Masai warriors like people are. My husband recognised their silhuettes before they even came into focus, and melted with joy accordingly. 
The turning to dust process was visually pleasing and seemed like a neat way of tidying up your spacecraft rubble.
Fourth star, yeah, let’s go crazy, goes to  the way all the emotional stuff is dealt with. Even without getting many references to the previous fifty films in the series, the film has enough of its own tear-jerking content to pull at a newcomer’s heart strings. Personally, Black Widow’s last, tenderly spoken words, before she plummets to her death, will probably stay with me the longest, with Iron Man hugging his dad close second.

The final, fifth, star goes to the feel good factor, which I realise ties in with the emotional stuff, but I really feel like giving this film five stars, so will keep it separate. My review, my rules. My favourite  feel good scene came when all the female characters lined up to help each other with whatever task was at hand. True girl power moment. 
Don’t get me wrong. There were oodles and oodles of it that went straight over my head. Like what’s the deal with  Thanos’s blue tin daughter? Why is she drifting through space with Iron Man at the beginning of the film? Where does the Chinese girl with pink butterfly antennae fit in? Or the talking (only just) dried up piece of reed? I am happy to file these questions away as unsolved mysteries of the Universe. 
So there. Five stars. Good entertainment all along. 

Spoiler Alert.

I went to see it without reading any reviews, so until Judy, the main character took out a laptop out of her kitchen table drawer, about ten minutes into the play, I did not know it was not actually set in 1950s. I went to see it with my self-proclaimed feminist daughter, looking forward to post-show discussions about woman’s position in post-war society. Ten minutes into the play, that plan had to be scrapped, or at least modified.
It was still worth it for a number of reasons.
I always thought audience participation in London theatres was strictly confined to panto, but apparently not.
Audience, in this case, was made up of mainly women, mainly middle age and above, with a few husbands dragged out of pubs and DIY sheds to have their horizons broadened thus on a chilly Saturday afternoon.

There is a scene in the play when the main character’s mother makes a women’s rights equality progress empowerment and liberation from kitchen sink sort of speech. She goes on for a bit and when she stops, the audience bursts into spontaneous ovation. This reaction made a far bigger impression, on me anyway, than the speech itself.
There is another scene, where the two main characters, husband and his stay at home wife are having an argument and after the wife says, ‘I get tired too’, the husband shouts in exasperation, ‘how can you be tired, you do nothing all day’, the audience responds with a loud and prolonged, ‘Oooooooo’ of disapproval. Nice.

Overall though, a somewhat lukewarm thumbs up, 3/5.
Katherine Parkinson (of IT Crowd fame) in the lead was a joy to watch, her cut throat tension and fragility utterly enjoyable, and the set design’s attention to retro details was fantastic, but cliches did end up piling up fast, and the rest of the cast was, how shall I put this, not entirely brilliant. It’s always bad news when you hear people saying that it could have been a bit shorter, as they leave the theatre. I cannot disagree.
Home, I’m Darling runs until 13th of April 2019 at Duke of York Theatre.

After decades or rushing around, I am slowly reaching the time in my life when all I want to do, most of the time anyway, is very little. To get up at leisure, pace myself with hourly cappuccinos and idle the day away with nothing much to show for it in the evening, except perhaps a few hundred words of therapeutic writing and a couple of artistic close-ups of my cats, is my idea of heaven. No, really, I really do want to do just that. With a couple of non-demanding BBC One drama series on iPlayer thrown in too. Possibly. If they are really good with an upbeat message read out by Vanessa Redgrave at the end. 

This week all of this had been brutally denied to me. The commute alone was long enough and tiring enough for me to contemplate a host of options, which would result in removing myself from gainful employment scene permanently and irrevocably. Social sensitivities being what they are, I am not allowed to joke about anything to do with so-called protected categories, so let’s leave it at that. Suffice to say that by the time I arrived home in the evenings, all I wanted was to be fed, watered and left well alone. Last night, that was not to be. 

No sooner had I skilfully selected Categories – Drama & Soaps – Holby City – Your Next Episode than my son Matt poked his confused head in; 

– Where is Charlie?
– What do you mean where is Charlie? 
– I mean, where is Charlie, he is not in his thing, so where is he? 

As he was saying it, he started looking around my study skittishly, not unlike Charlie himself when he is trying to sniff things out. Charlie is our youngest family member, of an African pygmy hedgehog variety. For Charlie to be missing was impossible. 

– He is not there. I am not joking. 
Except, the idea was so absurd that I knew he was joking, what’s more that he was setting a trap for me to walk straight into. I played it cool. 

– I am sure he is there, where else can he be. He cannot get out. 

– Mama, come down and see for yourself, Charlie is not in his thing (years of expensive education have clearly paid off in my son’s case, his eloquence is enviable). 

As soon as he said that, I was even more convinced he was tricking me, it was all a ploy to get me downstairs for some reason, and he knew there were not many things that would have achieved this at that moment. I sighed and went downstairs, straight to Charlie’s thing. I mean his vivarium, viv for short. I patted his blankets inch by inch waiting for the familiar grumpy hiss. Nothing. Charlie wasn’t there. 

– Ok, Charlie is not there, where is he?,  I said, reluctantly, really not in the mood for the game I was being dragged into. 

– That’s what I was trying to tell you, he is not there. 
– Did you ask Amelia? 

Officially Charlie belongs to Amelia. All our pets officially belong to Amelia, in recognition for her tireless campaigning to add ever more four legged members to our household.

– Amelia knows. She is having a breakdown in her room.

Up I went again. 
– Amelia, where is Charlie? 

– I don’t know, she whispered, her voice as soft as Charlie’s belly, her face as white as, well, to keep things simple, let’s say her face was also like Charlie’s belly. Which is very white. 

I went down again. My husband had not looked up from his cooking, fully immersed in his quiche-making mission. Matt was now on all fours trying to locate Charlie under pieces of furniture. It was roughly at that moment that I decided that it might not have been a joke after all and that we were having a situation. Charlie really was missing. I stared at his viv. The viv had two overlapping sliding glass panes and three ventilation holes near the top. Hedgehogs are incapable of moving glass panes to let themselves out, neither are they able to jump up 40 cm, unless they have been placed on a trampoline in a John Lewis Christmas advert. 

Matt had moved the coffee table, the armchair, the sofa, the…

– Oh, hello, here you are! 

And sure enough, there he was, perfectly curled blob on top of a sheepskin behind the sofa. 

Matt checked him over, he seemed ok. 

– Amelia, please come down! 

A while later, still apprehensive, Amelia joined us. 

– We found him, Matt found him, he is fine. 

All this suddenly proved too much for Charlie’s official keeper, and floodgates opened.

Amelia does not get emotional very often, so that finally made Rowan tear himself away from his cooking. He walked up to us, spatula in hand. 

-What’s going on with Squirrel? 

For no particular reason, my husband insists on calling Charlie Squirrel. 
We told him Charlie had gone AWOL, but was now found; safe and sound. 

Over the years my dear husband had managed to carve out his own little planet within the precincts of our family, where, by and large, he resides and which he leaves under duress, mainly to serve us dinner, or to drive us somewhere on a Sunday. This time the combination of seeing his beloved tough girl daughter welling up and his (almost) equally beloved Squirrel going walkies made him re-join Earth’s atmosphere, if only tentatively. 

– I think it is very good for Squirrel’s mental health that he’d got out of his cage and gone exploring. He needs to expand his horizons. 

– That’s great, but I am more worried about his physical health than his mental wellbeing right now, daddy, said Amelia, cuddling Charlie and checking his four-toed feet for cuts. 

The enigma remained as to how Charlie got himself behind the sofa. 

One other person was still missing from the scene. Alexia was on the bus home from her weekly dancing practice. By the time she got home, Charlie was happily crunching his mealworm. 

When we brought her up to speed on recent developments, she remembered that the previous night, as she was being introduced into the arcane world of chicken basting by her father, the said father asked her where Charlie was as the door to his thing was open. 

After that the mystery was soon solved. Charlie’s official viv attendant must have forgotten to slide the glass pane shut after cleaning his cage. 

This latest twist meant that Houdini Hedgehog story had to be scrapped, which is a shame, it would have been so much better than this one.  

Every now and again a story resurfaces about a man who had used his daily commute to build a multi-million property empire which would allow him to commute no more and spend more time with his children. Good for him.

This week I total just short of 100 miles round trip a day. As an open and friendly person, I don’t mind sharing with you what preoccupies me on my travels. One thing for sure, no financial gain is in sight.

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Seasoned pub quizzers will recognise this line well ahead of the semicolon. It’s up there with ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged…’and ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’ in the Opening Lines of Famous Novels category.

For the non-quizzers, the line comes from Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy.

First time I heard it, I thought it was one of those too clever by half quotes, which manage to dress up lack of depth in a stylistically contrive, rhythmically pleasing cadences.  I am now willing to admit that I might have got this wrong, and I feel a bit foolish for underestimating Tolstoy’s genius.

I return to this line whenever I find myself in the middle of yet another gut-wrenchingly miserable domestic violence case, surrounded by yet another unhappy family.  It seems I am not alone; a while ago a prosecutor in a domestic assault case borrowed it as an opening line when addressing the jury.

This week’s case, which I am not allowed to talk about as it involves children and therefore, ‘reporting restrictions apply’, has made me revisit the quote. I wanted to make sure I remembered it correctly, so I googled it, only to find that the quote has become ‘an actual thing’ as my daughters would have put it.

It turns out the quote is widely referred to as Anna Karenina Principle and it is used to assist in explaining a variety of scientific and social phenomena, including reasons why relatively few animal species have been successfully domesticated. Failed Domestication Theory based on Anna Karenina Principle is, again, a thing, I kid you not. It describes the exact reasons why bisons are failing as farm animals and why squirrels do not make great cuddly pets. Anyway. Back to unhappy families.

What Tolstoy meant, and what had slowly grown on me, was that for any given family to be truly happy, everything needs to fall in place. Feelings, health, finances, beliefs, morals, goals and outlooks need to be aligned to secure complete happiness. What are the chances of that happening, ever? I dropped maths at the earliest opportunity so I would not know where to begin working out the number of possible permutations of all factors, and it only takes one flaw for the family to fail the happiness test.

This week’s case is about addiction and violence, betrayal and revenge, all within the four walls of a marriage, with 2.4 children present. It is about a family damaged beyond repair, destroyed, finished. The family whose dramas are being methodically dissected in court by a group of twenty odd people, give or take, day in day out, hour after another lingering hour.

Anna Karenina is a multi-themed novel, 800 pages of it, first published in 1878, some say it is literature at its very best. I read AK twice before.  First time I tackled it in my early twenties. It awaited its turn among the James Joyces, and the Henry Jameses’  of this world, a perfect expression of student intellectual snobbery. I remember the boredom of endlessly rambling passages, the minutiae of life celebrated at the level of detail we simply do not indulge in any more.

Second time it was an absent-minded beach read, interrupted by bouts of day dreaming that seaside tends to bring on.

Third time is now. An impulse lunchtime buy at Waterstones on day three.

AK is about many things, and one of them, fittingly, is railway travel. Trains and train stations are the backdrop of major plot milestones. In fact, the main story begins and ends at a train station.

The pace of the book is even slower than my milk train rocking me westwards via Richmond, Twickenham, Feltham, Staines, Virginia Water…

I am really getting into it now. The journey is no longer a drag.

There is a multitude of reasons why I am not utilising the abundance of my commuting time for the creation of a commercially viable enterprise, most of them to do with my personal traits and limitations. I am, however, choosing my fondness of Tolstoy as the one flaw that makes me fail. Another good use of Anna Karenina Principle.

My ‘online research’ frequently leads me to most futile discoveries and takes me to mind-boggling eye-watering time-wasting extremes. Three hyphenated words in a row is as far as I am willing to go with this, so putting a full stop there, even though I could go on describing the extent of my loitering around the internet’s dustiest, most triviality ridden corners for much longer.

Every now and again it gets so bad that somebody up there in the Cloud clearly feels sorry for me and rewards my pointless pursuit of nothing in particular with a consolation prize for my efforts.

Today, my persistence in eavesdropping on total strangers’ social media discussions (stalking for short), was copiously rewarded with a word of breathtaking beauty!
It made my, otherwise uneventful, day.

Ultracrepidarianism.

Isn’t it just the best word ever? On first glance, it doesn’t sound light years away from Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, but it actually has a proper meaning, and, if you are a linguistic nerd like me, a fantastic etymology to get your teeth into.

It means a habit of offering opinions on matters one knows little or nothing about.

This is, of course, a fundamental principle, the very core of the Internet, and the main reason for its continuing existence, as well as an overarching rule governing the use of social media. I have been rolling it off my tongue just for fun for the better part of the morning. I am happy to share it with you. Next time you get passionately involved in a discussion on a subject which you only have the most tentative grasp of, take comfort in the knowledge that you are not just being a jerk, you are being firmly ultracrepidarian about it as well!

For as long as I can remember my son had wanted to be James Bond, so when he said, a couple of months ago, that he was applying for an MI6 job and needed a copy of my passport to confirm that his parents were British, I thought nothing of it.

When, a few weeks later, he Whatsapped me asking to keep the 10th to the 15th of January free, I didn’t ask why, I just thought he was probably planning to take me out to dinner on one of those days and was not yet sure which one exactly. He is a busy young man after all.

When, finally, on Christmas morning, his present for me, methodically covered in thick layers of sellotape, turned out to be a dog-eared travel guide to Morocco, I thought he’d lost the plot. I showed the book to other family members ready to put it down, when I noticed a folded piece of paper inside it. I took it out, thinking, the cheapskate hadn’t even taken the Amazon receipt out. The A4 page contained a travel itinerary for the two of us for a five day trip to Marrakesh.

So anyway.

Just as the rest of the country had accepted that Christmas would not be stretched any further and they settled down to the inevitability of January, dry or otherwise, I was going against the traffic, on a 7.40 EasyJet flight towards North Africa.

We landed at midday local time. The airport was nearly empty and soon we were out to enjoy warm winter sun.

The taxi pickup was pre-arranged by my ever so grown-up son with our Airbnb host. The airport was only about 10 minutes’ drive from city centre.

We gave the driver the name of our apartment building and showed him the address on the map and he said alright no problem but he looked confused. We stopped half way to ask for directions. A few minutes later the taxi pulled over outside Della Rosa hotel and the driver gave us a big friendly grin and a thumbs up. We pointed out to him that our hotel was called Generosa. The driver called our host for further directions. We carried on. We turned left by a restaurant with its name – Salad Box – written in big black letters, and our hotel was just round the corner.

‘Oh, no, taxi drivers can’t read maps here, they don’t know street names either, they go by nearest landmarks’, our host explained matter-of-factly.

A few minutes later we were striding towards the Medina, the hub, the main town square Jemaa El Fna. We walked through a park, enjoying a peaceful afternoon among picturesque palm trees and snapping pictures of orange trees laden with perfectly ripe fruit.

Our mellow tranquillity was shattered the moment we entered the square.
Snake charmers with their screeching flutes, groups of men shouting in Arabic, sellers of every piece of Moroccan cliché waving their wares in front of us, women beckoning me to have an intricate henna pattern caligraphed on my hand, men with monkeys on a rope trying to catch passers-by’s attention, more men huddled together in small groups, more shouting, argan oil sellers squatting on the ground, pigeons, birds of prey, rows of orange and pomegranate stalls offering freshly squeezed fruit juice. Men in traditional woolly dress, long and hooded, looking exactly like Star Wars desert people on a planet whose name I cannot pronounce, never mind spell. George Lucas’ source of inspiration no doubt.

We were taking it all in, meandering among other tourists and pushy traders, bicycles, mopeds, donkey carts and occasional cars, careful not to step on tiny wooden figurines of camels, woven baskets and colourful hats.

We decided to sit down outside Cafe de France to people watch with a teapot of sugary mint tea for my son and a watery coffee for me. Matt has developed quite a taste for Moroccan mint tea, which is basically a syrupy sweet boiling water poured over generous handful of chopped mint leaves topped up with a few mint sprigs stuffed inside a cute little silver teapot. To me it tasted like warmed up toothpaste with several lumps of sugar would probably taste.

Next stop, the souk, a labyrinth of interconnected alleyways under a makeshift roof, home to countless market stalls flogging all flavour of Moroccan artisan produce. The souk has everything you could ever want as a souvenir from Marrakesh and nothing you actually need. By the time you realise the latter, you are carrying three bags full of bright yellow Moroccan slippers, silver plated tea sets, three types of tea light holders, embroidered purses, ivory encrusted boxes, cushion covers, leather pouffes, rainbow patterned shawls, a bucket load of spices, a small rug and a slab of lime green pistachio nuts nougat.

We strolled aimlessly  around the souk for a couple of hours until Matt started showing unmistakable signs of distress, because let’s face it, no matter how much the guidebook window dresses the souk as a not to be missed Marrakesh experience, it is just hard core shopping, to be attempted by men at their own risk.

Dinner was a tagine at Zaza restaurant off the main square. Look it up if you are in the neighbourhood as it might just be the Medina’s best kept secret. The restaurant has a great view over the rooftops and very reasonably priced choice of delicious dishes.

After dinner it was time to go home. After six hours of walking we decided to get a taxi. We approached what looked like a taxi rank and Matt showed our hotel location on the map to a group of drivers. Blank faces stared back at him. He read out the street name a couple of times, loud and clear. No go. We looked at each other and I resigned myself to a long walk back to the hotel, but then I said, without holding out much hope, Salad Box?

The drivers broke into bright smiles of happy recognition. Yes! Salad Box! Oui, bien sûr! We were on our way.

Three action packed days followed, including two trips out of town, one of them to the seaside town of Essaouira. We saw as much as is physically possible for a middle aged woman of modest fitness level to see within the time limits.

We walked straight into a few textbook tourist traps, including the infamous Marrakesh tanneries scam. Please look it up if you are planning a trip, it will save you a lot of time. I wish I had.

We also took a minibus tour to Ourika Valley and were shown around so-called authentic Berber house in a Berber village. The Berbers are an indigenous ethnic group native to this part of Africa.
I had serious doubts whether anybody lived in that house outside the hours of tourist groups visits. Then again, perhaps the friendly lady and her eight children really did live in the sparsely furnished partly roofless dwelling, and shared it with a cow, a donkey and sheep. This was just one of many impenetrable mysteries Morocco throws at its first time visitors. I am fine with that, all part of the magic.

And finally, a word about our Airbnb. Great find. It turned out it included breakfast, which was as welcome as it was unexpected. Bakery opened at 8am, and our host bought us fresh croissants and baguettes every day, served with filter coffee and orange juice with bits. He also sat with us at the breakfast table, and shared his ex-pat stories about life in modern day Morocco and about his three rescue cats, Louis, Lulu and Lily. Not what you normally expect from Airbnb, so I thought I’d just mention it.
Generosa 1, Rue Hafid Ibrahim, Hivernage, Marrakesh. You could, you know, look it up.