Ennui!

I have been sitting at this desk too long and have done no work! I am supposed to be writing a chapter and although it is going well, I keep being lured into wasting time on the internet and frittering away hours doing things that I *tell* myself are practical - researching things about Paris, keeping up-to-date on other blogs and buying winter woollies on ebay, but you know as well as I do that as delightful as the archives of Petite Anglaise are, or as diverting as searching for cashmere on ebay.com is, it still doesn't *quite* count as PhD work, does it?

To add to the gloom of internet guilt, it is a lovely afternoon outside (thirty-two degrees) and I could be sitting on the roof and reading about Gide (or indeed, reading Gide himself) with a glass of wine, but instead I have wasted the day sitting not just indoors, but in a very dark and frankly, chilly room, as we are not blessed with wireless here and I am tied to this room if I wish to, well, waste the day online.

However, all is not lost. With a burst of superhuman determination, as soon as I hit the "Publish Post" button, I am unplugging my little ibook and taking it upstairs to our sun-bathed sitting room where I can lounge on our lavender couch and gaze idly at the contrast between the blue sky and the pink bougainvillea. At least then I will be wasting time sensibly.

I know you're out there...

Readers, I need your help. When I move to Paris at the end of this month, I will be closing this blog and starting a new one and I need a name for it. Something chic, simple, non-location-specific and relevant to an academic girl's interests in fashion, interiors, food, culture and literature. I like texture - grosgrain, velvet, brocade - and I had thought of things like "Grosgrain and Velvet", for instance.

What do you think?

The post of the bath...

It has to be said that I love baths with a passion. Oh such a passion. It has been a point of almost daily heartbreak for me that we do not have a bath here in Marrakech, although there are certain moral issues to such wanton water wastage here in North Africa and particularly in Morocco where there has been a drought for the last decade, but such issues aside... I miss my bath. Of all the glories of our new apartment in Paris, the fact that it has that longed-for tub almost brought tears to my eyes, but still, it has to be admitted that even through a claw-footed, cast-iron Victorian bath is rare in the average Moroccan household, they have certainly dreamed up a few rather fabulous alternatives.

Now, I must first disabuse my romantic readers of any notions of scenes like those above. Unfettered orientalism completely aside, it does rather seem as though Debat-Ponsan, Bouchard and Ingres were just looking for rather tenuous excuses to paint naked girls in exotic (i.e. sexy) environments. But it has to be said that the luxury of some of the hammams here in Marrakech does make one feel rather like one of these extremely clean young ladies by the time they are done with you.

In Le Bains de Marrakech I was steamed, soaped, and blissfully scrubbed to within an inch of my life and slathered with mud and left to steam a bit longer before having bucket after bucket of hot water poured over me to wash the mud away. At Les Jardins de la Koutoubia I had a similar experience, albeit in far more luxurious surroundings, and delivered by a girl so tiny that she had to stand on the edge of the fountain to reach to pour the hot (and cold!) water over me. You leave both relaxed and invigorated and cleaner than you have ever felt before in your life. Practically any luxury hotel here in Marrkakech (and most of the non-luxury ones too, for that matter) feature a hammam somewhere, even though it does seem that saunas and Western steam-rooms are unusual, and even if you are staying in the cheapest of the cheap, eighteen euros will see you scrubbed and steamed in Bains and twenty-five or thirty in Jardins. Who needs Clarins?

If you simply must have more, then you must surely buy The Book of the Bath.

Bernard Debat-Ponsan, Scene du Hammam
Paul-Louis Bouchard, After the Bath
Jean Ingres, The Turkish Bath

PS: I have added a few more blogs to my list on the right hand side of this page - do give them a visit!

On choosing your perfume first...

Well, perfume is a recent thing for me. I always avoided it, reluctant to partake in a mass Chanel sillage down Grafton street (and if you don't know what sillage is, go here). Finally, I caved and started to look for the right scent, eventually alighting on Burberry Brit for the warm vanilla spiciness of it. But I had to have more. Still avoiding Chanel, I found Flowerbomb, just as it was released. But then I got snobby about it and have since flitted around smaller perfume houses like Penhaligon's (Artemisia), L'Artisans Parfumeur (Safran Troublant), and Rancé 1795 (where to start?), although it has to be admitted that my favourite evening perfume right now is back in the mainstream:Hermes Eau des Merveilles, full of peppery warmth.

However, pretty as all of these bottles are on my dressing table, I feel that they could almost be hidden in the drawer and replaced by, or decanted into, the gorgeous bottles that you can find everywhere here in Marrakech. They are prefectly decadent, marvellously delicate and there must surely be *no* limit to how many you could have cluttering up every available surface. I confess that I haven't taken the plunge yet, but I will certainly have five or six of them in my suitcase when we leave here. Oh so much more accessible than Lalique, don't you agree?

www.living-morocco-online.com
http://shop.momo-interiors.com
L'Orientaliste, Rue de la Liberte, Marrakech

Indulgence and a catastrophe

Today I allowed myself the greatest of all indulgences - I got us two tickets to see Paquita at the Palais Garnier in December. Won't that be marvellous? But what to wear? A long dress? Cocktail? Bear in mind that I love dressing up...

In other news, my camera has died. Completely an utterly. It was sick for a while, but now it is just plain dead - it won't even stay turned on. And worst of all, it is entirely my fault for letting sand get into it at Essaouira.


(Images with thanks to Paris Marais, Candida Hofer and Answers.com)

'twas brillig... (two posts in one day!)

As I have mentioned before, I love reading my hit statistics and seeing where my readers are and how they found me. Many of my hits come from quite mundane google searches - Acima supermarket (I get that a lot - twice today alone), restaurants, and wifi in Marrakech and so forth. Some are a little more unusual, such as Marrakech neo-colonialism.

But best of all has to be fact that yesterday, two separate people, on opposite sides of the Unites States, found my blog by googling "Oh frabjous day! Calloo! Callay!" Isn't that wonderful? I wonder why? If either reader comes back and sees this, please do tell me if there was a particular reason, such as a competition, or if it was just a marvellous coincidence.

Although I assume that all of my readers can recite Jabberwocky from memory, for the benefit of the one of two of you who can't...

JABBERWOCKY

Lewis Carroll

(from Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, 1872)

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought --
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

"And, has thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!'
He chortled in his joy.

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

To make up for all that sugary excess...

... we went fruit and vegetable (and egg) shopping today in the Djemma el Fna. Unlikely as it may seem that the Djemma or its environs has anything of any use to real people (and it is sometimes hard, even for me, to see past the glitter of all the tourist shops), on the Eastern side of the square, there is a proper food market, which is where we generally go to get our fruit and vegetables rather than hiking out to Acima on the bus.

Today we got exactly what you see above: pomegranates, avocadoes, artichokes, green beans, oranges, apples, limes, aubergines, courgettes, carrots and eggs. All for about eight euros. And we can't tell our housekeeper that we paid eight euros for all that because she would be horrified and tell us in no uncertain terms that we were had. Sometimes I really love Marrakech. I wonder how much all that will cost at our nearest open-air market on Rue Mouffetard in the Latin Quarter?