I arrived back on Sunday from a holiday in Taroudant and the Atlas mountains.  I’m glad to see the place is still standing.  I was worried I’d left the gas on.

Some musical memories:

1) Small children playing crude drums (see picture above).  Beating paint pots with sticks with an extraordinarily instinctive sense of rhythm.  I was spellbound.

2) Jay-Z’s “Anything” being played in a taxi.  The lyrics about bitches and strippers seemed rather out of place to me in this overwhelmingly Islamic part of the world.  The driver didn’t bat an eyelid.

3) Berber street musicians playing down a back alley of the maze-like souq with minimal passing foot traffic. The importance of having a few dirhams in coins for tips cannot be understated.  Unfortunately, the difficulty in breaking a 100 dirham note to get a few dirhams in change also cannot be understated.

4) The call to prayer, five times a day.  First one at about 5am, heard usually in a dream.  Two variants: the one that sounds like a motorbike accelerating (”aaaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAllah akbar!”), and on rare occasions, and from only one of the mosques, a gloriously melodic muezzin sung with passion.

5) Being invited into a berber home for mint tea, we spotted a large goat skin drum hanging on the wall.  They were only too happy to demonstrate (see below).  Satisfyingly loud and resonant.