There seem to be an awful lot of them, for a start.  I am not sure what happens to all the spare girls.  I haven’t bothered to look up the rates of infanticide before posting.

The first thing I noticed when I initially arrived was the mark.  They all have the mark.  Very few Moroccan street boys don’t have a little round scar under their jawline from where someone has pressed a knife to enforce rules of some sort.

The second thing I noticed was the sliding scale of racism.  One of the worst racial incidents I have ever seen was in Morocco.  Two oriental people were trying to board a plane to the UK, and they were summarily dragged off it.  Another East Asian from London complains bitterly on Tripadvisor on how badly he was treated in Morocco.

I am usually treated extremely well, because I am very down to earth and I am quite savvy.  There is a kind of hive mind, where if you don’t piss people off, you are under the protection of a selection of random strangers, and I have been fortunate several times that I seem to be OK.

“Are you American? English? German? French?  Ooooh you are Scottish.” Big smiles and offers of mint tea usually follow, thanks to the Moroccan love of football.

Besides that, Marrakech in particular is basically just the Barras and the merchant city dropped into the Sahara.  If you aren’t a moron, you will be fine, but hell mend you if you are.  I also recommend you do your shopping after midnight, as that is when the locals do it during the hotter months.

I could go into detail and tell you some amusing tales of people trying to rip me off, but Berbers regard this as a game, and if you win they quite like you for it.  If you have an attitude or you are horrible, you will not have a good time, so basically go somewhere where your bullshit is appreciated.

I will never forget the boy who was sent to perform the carpet shop con.  The carpet shop con is where a 19 year old or so is sent to offer to be your guide.  He is usually quite cute apart from the scars.  The boy who was sent after me on this occasion was heavily scarred and physically shaking because he knew he wouldn’t get far with me.  I was bulk buying wool at the wrong end of the souk in Marrakech.

“I will show you the tannery? ”  he said hopefully.

“Nope, I am buying wool.”

“The dyers?”

“Buying wool”

“Argan Oil?”

“Wool”

“Carpet shop?

“Look mate, I make carpets.  I’ll sell you a fucking carpet OK?”  He was utterly terrified, especially when about ten of my friends mobbed him to tell him to stop.  I actually felt sorry for him because I knew he would probably get another slash across the face for not managing to drag me up there.

The idea is that you get very lost in the medina, and then you are dragged to a shop where you are shown a selection of very expensive carpets whilst drinking tea and whilst the store owner figures out how much money they can sting you for.  Why they wanted me is a mystery, given that I had wisely chosen to wear my studio clothes on that trip.  I was as scruffy and covered in paint as everyone else.

Anyway, the training for this starts with street performance as a child.  One of my favourites was a low level firework which you watched whilst a child robbed you.  This time I was rescued by the food vendors in Jemaa el-Fnaa, who dissuaded the tiny team from going through my 12 pockets.

I love Berbers but don’t learn management strategy from a Berber.  Ruling by fear and a knife is not the same as leadership, and lying through your teeth all day every day is not a happy way to live.  By all means learn haggling, but not management.

I got some mail asking questions about the last month or so of posts, so I am going to answer them in this post, which is by coincidence, the 400th post.

In reference to the IBM – “Are you stupid?  Why are you apologising for a compliment?”

It is not appropriate in this situation for me to be complimenting this person, and I heard myself do it rather than thinking about it.  Some people it would not matter but it upset him, upset me and it should not have happened.  If I acted like it didn’t matter then I would not be the very serious and slightly geeky chick that I actually am.

Why would you be leaving over it?

I have had people get annoyed with me for not being what they expected before – despite my having been very driven in the course of my career, I do resemble a slightly upmarket hippy that has just left an orgy most of the time and people do get the wrong idea.  I wish I could be bothered conforming in order to get on with being a work nazi, but I am afraid I am no longer neurotic enough to be as universally good at everything as I used to be.  I do not think that this is a bad thing, to be honest as I was not a happy camper, nor was I much fun to work with.

Are you in love or what?

I’m not likely to be around long enough to find out, but at no point have I made such a claim.  The dude has my every sympathy for the issues relating to nerves and ambition, and I want him to have the career I didn’t get to have.

Why didn’t you get annoyed?

I’m very annoyed – with myself.

What is going to happen to you?

Nothing pleasant, but that isn’t new.

Why is it such a big deal?

I am a person, not a robot, and if I do not treat myself as if I matter, nobody else will.  They like to try to make me feel bad anyway, so I don’t see why I should stand there and take it.  It hasn’t served me well in the past, and it won’t now.

Aren’t you just procrastinating rather than getting on with your project?

A bit, but there are a lot of other issues affecting the project at the moment.  The car is in the garage, Twisty is on the way to hospital, and my family is being unpleasant, so I have to prioritise.  The timing has to be right for Boris anyway.

When are you going to stop worrying about other people and take care of yourself?

As soon as I am not upsetting anybody, which is probably never.

Thank you for reading the blog for the last 3 years or so, and I hope to be more progressive shortly.

We have just reached the user level I was at before the website crashed at the end of 2016.  We have never reached post Brexit referendum figures, which I am glad about, because I like to be able to keep track of at least two of my daily visitors.  I am very grateful for their continuing support.

Blog readers seem to be mainly separate from readers of the books or viewers of the other pages, which is a shame because I like to veer between different skillsets.  I am almost over my uniform rage following my mother’s death (see posts from August to December 2017 for why that would be)

I have been pretty lazy about pushing some things forward of late.  This job, which I fought to get because I wanted to get back into this particular arena, is quite intensive in terms of mind space use, mainly because the shifts are very long and the job relies on your ability to follow complex documents.  I am not as great at that as I used to be.  I am better at some things, and worse at others.  I need to work on that, but I think I am better at deciding on alone time than I used to be.

Nevertheless, I am now at the point where I need to sew, which is good, although I would like to also work on Lucifer Ogilvie, as it is more cheerful than real life.  I cannot think about Boris for long without feeling a bit happier about life in general.

So, given that I will inevitably need a new laptop soon, I will need to push on with the stuff I can do.

Hopefully I should be able to make some progress on the Toby Jugs and Wolfe’s cameo before I make serious headway on the chair.  Call me Al needs some finishing work, which will take a few days, and I have some resin to go ahead and complete Darius Guppy and Iain Duncan Smith at last.

Otherwise, I am feeling a bit sad, as the car is seriously ill again and I do not want to let it die.  This is not a good time of year for that, but I have a couple of interviews for additional work on the go, so hopefully that will make life a bit easier pending my probable change of job.

It is tiresome, doing the right thing, but then so is the predictability of humans.

I have removed a lot of posts, not because I am denying that I lost my cool over this situation, but because my being miserable helps nobody.

You can decide, if you are fortunate, not to be miserable and negative about almost anything.

In this case, I am not genuinely upset that the dude is with somebody.  She is a much steadier kind of person, and she is lovely.  She shook her lovely hair at me the other day and I noted that it had taken a great amount of care.

It is unfortunate that I cannot currently get away and leave them to it. That is the part that really bothers me at the moment.  A lady gets the fuck out the way at this point. I feel very nervous about the potential disaster of this combined with the dude’s nerves.  I have a book on CPTSD which I may pass on which will help with part of this.  I think I will give it to her rather than him.

Being messed with at work?  Well I guess that makes life less dull.  Who knew that my nuclear hormones cannot allow my brain to work properly?  I had certainly forgotten.

Unexpectedly writing an extra book and starting a new collection ought to be a good thing, particularly with the apparently interminable delays in the Boris project.

Anyway, should they stop by, I have removed my personal response to the situation and left up only useful bits in terms of storyline.  I am sorry, but there was no other way of communicating and I do not do silent forbearance any more.  I learned from the Wolfe episode that it does not matter how loudly you shout about things, nobody is listening anyway and even when they are, they only hear the bits they want to hear.

So today it is back to my real job, which is taking care of this place and being Ina.

I am thinking about taking on some extra work, with a view to doing one of my usual crab like sidesteps, since this garbage has taught me that 1.  Half my week is now wiped out with emotional crap and sleeping, and 2. I’m very lonely despite the best efforts of my friends.  The impending three months of ovulation is not going to help with either of those things.

The car was damaged last week and is away.  I will feel more positive once my horizons are a little bigger.

I think I will fast for a month or two and maybe get corsetted for the good of my poor spine.