An outrage echoes of work

Now I am retired I seek to put all the disturbing images of my professional life behind me and to think only happy thoughts; something which is not difficult to do here. So last May I failed to report the incident which outraged the town and caused demonstrations in Casablanca. A little girl under 3 was enticed away with sweets and taken to a derelict building where her abductor kept her and repeatedly raped her until she was dead. The perpetrator was apprehended fairly quickly but the forensic investigation and legal process took its time (although rather less than in Britain) and last Thursday the Appeal Court in Agadir sentenced him to death. He is being held in the prison in Ait Melloul and his brothers visiting him there had his confession to an earlier killing of a 4 yearold boy who has been missing for some years. Police went to the site he described and found another body.
Talking of such subjects is taboo here and Shame leads to a victorian hypocracy around sexual abberations. The general level of knowledge is as of Britain pre-Cleveland. Child Protection and its intrusions into family life is relatively un-developed for reasons of cost if nothing else, but whilst I am a firm opponent of Capital Punishment I could imagine several former colleagues may think result here quite satisfactory.  

After Armageddon

We used Eid to wander round town and take pictures of familiar places without traffic in the way. The town was looking its best with the fountains running for the holiday. The general feeling in the usually crowded places is of one of those post-holocoust movies, 28 days later. A few other stray tourists had the same idea and after one leapt forward with a cry of pleasure to kneel down and photograph a local toddler with a huge 10" long telescopic lens from about 3 paces we'd had enough and went home.

Strange Fruit

Not exactly a southern tree more a creeping succulent but the Chineses Lantern-type growths on this plant are rather exotic. The Artist has a "gonad tree"  (her name for it) in her garden in Spain which has round white ballon like things about 3" across but they appear to be fruit and hang there for some time. It's the nearest thing I've seen to this but these are a more elegant shape and about 5" long. They are a pale brown and other than the exotic shape and strangeness not overly appealing.
But wait a day and one sees they are not fruit at all but flower buds. They burst open to a starfish-like flower about a foot across. The green and red patterning is redolent of those tropical carnivorous plants one sees at Chelsea, and they are indeed greatly attractive to black flies. Unforunately I think they may act as pollinators rather than get eaten. I would like some natural fly gobbler.
If anyone knows what it is please tell me.

Back Just In Time

It's strange moving life between two houses. It's not like going to a holiday home even if you go to the same one over again You don't have to decide where everything goes and unpack and lay out your belongings to claim the place. You arrive after midnight and everything is to hand. The tissues are by the bed, spare batteries in the drawer, and when Marjane fails to supply oyster sauce, there is the half bottle left on the shelf to tide you over.

Tuesday's British weather forecast said it would be much colder from Thursday on and there would be no return of good weather and temperatures until at least the end of March so coming here Wednesday looks like excellent forward planning.
The hibiscus hedge was taking off for the stratophere but the cacti appear to have survived the summer well. Moha had told us tthat the ceiling rose in the green bedroom had collapsed so I expected smashed plaster and dust but not so. He says he knows someone who will supply a new rose and sort it for £6.50.

A Rant Against Blogspot and Android

You will have noticed I stopped blogging over the summer. I had little stored material and a real life rather than a sad blogged life but now we are back here I thought I'd start again. This has been difficult.
In the interim they have reconfigured blogspot, I think to make it easier to use on a mobile phone. I don't mind that but they ought to be able to do so without makinging it much harder to use on a computer. At first I thought I couldn't use it at all because most of the icons were covered with "Post Settings" which I couldn't get rid of and couldn't post pictures. I couldn't believe that they didn't want me to post pictures as that is a monetarised part of the  "free" site and presumably they want money, but the icon had disappeared. Also I couldn't edit and any reader will know I really need to edit.
I tried asking my  computer nerd friends in New Zealand but I think the question was a bit to simple for them. Yesterday Sweetheart and Beloved came to the rescue.
Beloved reconfigured the screen somehow so the "Post Settings"  went to the side and all the icons were uncovered. The downside of that is that the font looks impossibly small and the reconfiguration effects anything I do through Google on Internet Explorer so searches and recipes are more ore less unreadable (as is this blog) and I think I'll have to use Firefox to browse in future, except that all my recipes are in internet explorer favourites.
As to the editing Beloved found that whereas I would usually move the cursor a la microsoft word by mousing it to where I wanted and left clicking, something that is now totally ineffective, if I move it there and then right click and then left click away when the box offering delete or select all come up it moves it.  How he discovered that I don't know as it's not exactly intuitive. Sweetheart also found I could move the cursor by moving the arrows so I am back in business in a limited way. These changes may possibly be helpful to a mobile user but why why make it so much harder on a keyboard.  And why is there an assumption that I have increasingly 20/20 vision. I'm not blind, just need spectacles but this is disabling me.

The Developers

The first thing we learnt when looking to buy a property in Morocco was not to consider anything that wasn't finished. The picture above was taken last month of a deveopment at Tamagroute we were considring in autumn 2007. We were taken to the site and assured that the ground would be broken the next month after Eid. In fact the ground was only broken last autumn and as you can see progress has not been great.

                                       

Similarly the house near us which we watched being built las year has still not been finished out,let or sold but they are starting another next to it.

As houses as there is still an islamic aversion to even the new halal mortgages and are therfore often bought for cash and completed as and when there are funds available there seems to be an acceptance of delay that we don't have in Britain where houses have to be finished to a standard to be mortgageable. Our friends who are building a house to the north of town assured us last May that they would have moved in when we returned in September and then gave us the same assurance this May. We wait to see.
Sometimes this piecemeal building works against itself. There is a new development just outside town which was making good progress last autumn staring with the mosque.

We watched the development with interest last autumn and they were tiling the roof with green tiles. When we returned in May progress had ceased and the tiles were now slipping and and would have to be relaid.

New Businesses

We noticed some business development near us in Sidi Belkas. The coffee shop on the point of opening when we left seemed to be going strong. more niticeable the shop next to the hanut at the end of the street which used to sell roasred nuts and other unrecognisable treats is now a butchers and done out in the traditional red and white chequered tiling of butchers. Whether is will be useful to us as such is uncertain. I have trouble with butchers, even in Marjane. The difficulty is that animals are butchered the french way and labelled as such, not only do I have to translate but work out how the frech cut relates to english butchery so as to k now how to cook it. I therefore tend to ignore anything relating to an actual butcher and just pore over the packages of prepared meat to work out what methods of cooking are suitable. Real butchers in Taroudant are even more difficult. Not only do they speak arabic but as everybody is usually going to cook in a tajine they seem to abandon the concept ot "cuts" and just hack off the next available piece of meat on the carcass. I still am stuck in the british tradition of wanting specific bits for different recipes.
The more annoying new business is the opening of one of the garages to the flat acroooooss the road as a car/carpet cleaning business. when it is hot and the windows are open the noise from the pressure hoses are very annoying and drown the TV. Also whilst the garage and fabricators  shut up shop in the evening , this appears to be the peak period for the car wash as people bring in vehicles after work, and friends of the proprietor moonlight work vans to collect and deliver carpets.