Casablanca: Of All the Towns in the World

It was the prospect of the real world that first lured me to Morocco.
I was living in a pokey London flat, with no space to swing a hamster
let alone cat. I would walk the streets angry and desperate: angry at the high
taxes and at the exorbitant kindergarten fees, and desperate for affordable
sunshine and for danger.
The way I saw it, England had become a nanny state par excellence.
Any problems and the system would pick you up and dust you down. I
yearned for a place where the safety nets had been cut away, where ordinary
people walked on a high-wire of reality.
My wife didnt share my lust for jeopardy. She clutched our toddler to
her pregnant belly and ordered me to not be so irresponsible. Taking little
notice of her concerns, I flew back and forth from London to Marrakech,
where I had been brought as a child. I remembered the droves of fire-eaters
and snake-charmers in the Jama al Fna, the main square, and searched for a
cosy little house to buy.
Unfortunately just about everyone in the western world seemed to have
already come up with the same idea. Prices for riads, courtyard houses in the
medina, were soaring, with the influx of the Euro-jetset. Someone suggested
to go house hunting in Fs. So I did, and I found a crumbing merchants
house there. Colossal in size, it was owned by seven ghoulish brothers, each
one more greedy than the last.
In Morocco, before you even get to the matter of the sale, you often
have to coax the owner to sell. I sat with them for hours, coaxing, cajoling,
begging them to allow me to buy their home. They spat out as fantasy price

and narrowed their eyes greedily. I leapt up and ran out shouting. In that
moment I broke the first rule of the Arab world: never lose your cool.
Eventually, we were offered a wonderful sprawling home in the coastal
town of Casablanca. It was called Dar Khalifa, meaning The Caliphs
House. All I knew about the city, I had learned in the film. I expected it to
be a showcase of the mysterious East, half-expecting Bogart and Bergman
and be living it up at Ricks Caf Americain. But instead I found a Frenchbuilt city with fabulous Art Deco buildings and palm-lined boulevards. I fell
instantly in love with it, and with the fact that there are no tourists at all.
On the night that I took possession of the great notched iron key to the
Caliphs House door, suicide bombs went off across Casablanca. I cursed
myself for courting danger so openly, and feared for what my wife would
think watching the news at home. It was a terrible moment. A few weeks
later she gave birth to our little son, and we moved to Morocco. My wife
was so resistant to the plan that I had to paint a sumptuous image of life
steeped in true luxury.
My father, who was from Afghanistan, could never take my sisters and
me to his ancestral home in the Hindu Kush. It was always too dangerous.
So, often in our childhood, the family station-wagon would be laden with
vinyl suitcases, and we would all be tempted inside. With our gardener at the
wheel, we would drive south from the verdant county of Kent, through
France, Spain, and would take the ferry over to Tangier.
The journeys were a chance for my father to reveal fragments of his
homeland. As he would frequently point out, the cultures of Morocco and
Afghanistan are remarkably similar mountainous landscapes, Islamic
customs, and fiercely proud tribal clans.

When we bought the Caliphs House, I though wed be finished with

all the work in about three months. But at the start I had no concept of North
African time. With no power tools or specialised equipment, work
progresses very slowly indeed. And as for money renovate a large house
anywhere and you exceed original budgets many times over.
I was forced to take out bank huge loans to pay the bills which were
stacked two feet high on my desk. Having had no previous experience in
renovating a large house, I found it extremely hard to see the big picture. I
would go around buying last minute details, when I should have been
concentrating on the structure of the project, and all the tedious stuff like
water and wiring that no one ever sees.
Buy a house in a foreign country and, it seems, that anything which can
go wrong usually does. Our experience was no exception. The first weeks
and months were beyond miserable. There was no electricity, water or
furniture, and there were so many rats that our shoes were eaten in the night.
We found several dead decapitated cats in the garden, supposedly left by
someone who didnt want us to live at the Caliphs House.
Then there were locusts, followed by a swarm of ferocious bees. After
that a workman fell through a glass roof, and hordes of police tried to break
down the front door. If in England you found a troupe of bobbies trying to
batter their way into your home, you would probably ask them why they
were there. But in Morocco the police are kept out at all costs. I quizzed one
of the guardians why we were the focus of such police attention. Because
the architect doesnt have permission to do the work, he said. Doesnt he?
No of course he doesnt. In Morocco no one ever gets permission.
The architect brought a trailer full of the wildest men I had ever seen.
They had unusually-developed shoulder muscles and were armed with

sledge hammers. In a very short while they managed to smash down a large
number of walls, ripping out wiring and water pipes as they went. Then they
ran off and the rain began. Weeks followed in which the architect was an
infrequent visitor.
The reason for this was that, as I later found out, I had broken the
second rule of the Arab world paying in advance. On those long
windswept nights, I would huddle in a blanket on a green plastic garden
chair and congratulate myself for having broken free from the cycle of
school fees, zombie-commuting and triangular chicken tikka sandwiches.
My friends in London, I would tell myself over and over, werent having
nearly as much fun.
Eventually the architects building team arrived. They spent most of
their time camped in our unfinished sitting-room brewing up enormous pots
of chicken stew. When they did do any work it was during the short time in
between their feasts and long naps. The construction phase was completed at
a snail's pace. After that we moved on to laying the floors with handmade
terracotta tiles called bejmat, and coating the walls in tadelakt, a Moroccan
form of Venetian plaster, made from eggs, lime, and marble dust. The
architect brought a team whose work was so atrocious that I fired them all in
a fit of fury. It meant sacrificing all the money I had paid to the architect in
advance.
There was no choice but to locate and then to deal directly with the
moulems, the master craftsmen. Morocco has an astonishing number of
cowboy craftsmen. For every thousand there are one or two true masters
who have learned their skills by long apprenticeship. Moualem Aziz was one
of them. A great barrel of a man, his bulk poised above nimble feet, he was
in charge of the floors. Over months, his team brought magic to the Caliphs

House. The only time he was caught out was laying a complex pattern of
glazed tiles in the childrens nursery. On reaching the final row they saw
they had misjudged the shape of the room. Without so much as a murmur
they lifted the entire floor, rotated it through five degrees, and laid it again.
Two and a half years after moving to Morocco, the house is restored to
its former glory. I watch my little son and daughter in the courtyards,
playing at the fountains, prodding their tortoises across the lawn. I
understand now that the difference between absolute failure and total
success is less than a hairs breadth. And I see that success is about
endurance. Keep standing and you will get to the end. But most of all I see
that a life without steep learning curves is no life at all.