Author: damian

EXTRACT: I clung on in my rickshaw as we navigated our way across Chandni Chowk, eventually arriving onto a flowing, but still precarious, boulevard that approached New Delhi. At regular intervals, there were advertising hoardings that hailed the coming week as ‘Delhi’s Police Safety Week’. ‘We want you safe’, the posters proclaimed. Although, like that columnist, who dreamed of a return to Eden, surely this was just a pipe dream. Also, why from my own point of view, couldn’t that very week be Safety Week, goddammit? Why should I have to wait until I was no longer in the country?

I returned to old blighty in the early days of 2000. Completely unexpectedly, in the space of five months, I moved house across the English Midlands, putting roots down in the market town of Shrewsbury. I bought an 18th Century Georgian house in the town centre, in the shadow of the looming spire of Saint Aulkmund’s church, which dominated the skyline. The house was a grade II listed building; A desirable bachelor’s pad, on four levels and physically attached to a pub….

Kapuscinski is a child in 1939, when the Soviets invade eastern Poland. On various occasions, he hides with friends in bushes by railway sidings, observing the deportation of families. His school class size shrinks daily, and then one morning, his teacher is amongst the disappeared. Later, by the side of the tracks, Kapuscinski hears his teacher calling him through the slats of a container wagon. He has been impounded, ready for deportation. It is the last time the young boy sees him……

It is a November evening in 1990 and I am stood in an oak panelled bar in Seville’s Barrio Santa Cruz neighbourhood. The mahogany bar counter is covered in white chalk marks, each dash representing a beer consumed by the patron stood in front of it. There are several rows of customers stood along the length of this counter. Keeping track of which tally relates to each customer is difficult to all but the trained eye. Occasionally a bartender looks up amidst a swirl of tobacco haze and not spotting anyone immediately in front of a set of etchings wipes the slate clean with a damp cloth.

I have travelled down to Seville on the overnight train from Madrid. Breaking my Journey in this large Andalucian city is part of a wider personal mission, one which has always been at the back of my mind since before the start of my footloose Independent travelling days – I am determined to get to Morocco. This part of sub-Saharan Africa has always held a fascination for me ever since, well, boyhood. All those images of desert forts, staccato designed mosques, and teeming souks have stimulated my mind for many a year. Most of all I have always had a burning ambition to make it to what surely has to be its showcase city, Marrakech.

But what lies behind the pulling power of Marrakech? Yes, I’ve always associated it as being part of the hippie trail, flower-power, days. But much more than this, the very sound of the city’s name, and in particular just getting my tongue around its last syllable (with a strong emphasis on the ‘shhh’ bit), well it seemed that no place on earth could have a name like this, without it being extremely exotic. One day, god damn it, I would make it there….

One June Saturday morning in 2019, I received a random email from Sky Sports. Its author hoped that I was enjoying the cricket World Cup and invited me to sign up to Sky Sports Cricket for a reduced rate of £10 a month. Actually, I didn’t have a clue that the World Cup – already half-way through – was even taking place, so non-existent was my attention to cricket. But it did cast my  mind back to an enjoyable two days I spent in 1999, when the same tournament took place, again in England. I was very fortunate, courtesy of an unmentionable wheeze, to have a friend gain me admittance for free to a couple of fixtures that featured a range of international stars.

But these memories had receded to the back of my mind, until that Sky Sport’s email popped up. Well come on, I told myself, it’s only a tenner, and you might even get some satisfaction out of it.

That day, I watched in wonder as Carlos Brathwaite swung his bat for the West Indies, nearly orchestrating a mesmerising come back against the Kiwis.  I was staggered at the courage on display. He was like a tenacious whirl wind, who stared adversity in the face and didn’t bat an eye lid.

“Get your ass off home, right away,” Scott had said, “and set up a travel blog for all your stories.” 

We were sat at opposite ends of a bench during Lockdown in the shadows of the ruins of Old Saint Chad’s church in Shrewsbury, England.  

I jumped to attention and scuttled off back to my abode, but quite frankly, I hadn’t a clue as to what a travel blog was. I had vague recollections of people I knew setting up an online diary, so that they could pontificate about anything and everything to do with their daily existence, from the best deals they had discovered down at Marks & Spencer’s, to their views on war in Lebanon. But he wasn’t really expecting me to do this, was he? And anyway, I wasn’t sure exactly where Lebanon was…