Writing this from the El Minzah Hotel’s 1930s Moorish Wifi. Fezzes everywhere. And yes, I did have to look up the plural of ‘fez’.

Mr MacGowan is still here. The El Minzah is very Moorish.

I bet I’m not the first to make that joke, but I don’t care, frankly.

Here’s this month’s details for B&D:

THE BEAUTIFUL & DAMNED – FEBRUARY EDITION
Date: Thursday 22nd February
Times: 9pm to 12.30am.
Venue: The Boogaloo, 312 Archway Road, London N6 5AT, UK. 020 8340 2928.
Tube: Highgate (Northern Line). Buses: 43, 134, 263.
Price: Free entry, but patrons are strongly encouraged to dress Timelessly Stylish.

More info on the News page.

A number of friends and fellow online diarists I enjoy use the Livejournal system to host their entries. I’d love to know what they’re up to this week, but weirdly the Moroccan government blocks the entire LJ system from the nation’s net. The other big blogging site, Blogger, remains untouched, so surely it can’t be deliberate. Anyone wanting to say something against the government can just get a Blogger account instead.

Seems rather harsh on the entire LiveJournal world. It’s not always photos of cats and talking about Harry Potter.

O LiveJournal people: I do hope you haven’t been wiped out by bird flu. And if you have readers in Morocco, or rather if you want to have readers in Morocco, you should bear this in mind.

Update: one way of getting around this block is by going to www.mathcookbook.net There they are! After a fashion.

Â

Â

The El Minzah Wine Bar, Tangier, early hours of Sunday February 4th 2007.

The bar is meant to close at midnight. However, Mr MacGowan’s status as an international musician of repute ensures we’re allowed a generous extra three hours. The wall is akin to some of those theatre bars around Covent Garden; full of framed signed photos of vaguely known persons who’ve visited the place. But the El Minzah’s diet is far more varied. Paul Bowles, several times. Jean Genet. Richard Harris. Steven Berkoff. Winston Churchill. The actress Julia Stiles. John Malkovich. So we agree to send the staff a signed photo of Mr MacG for their collection. It’s the least you can do for a Tangier lock-in. And to be fair, he is a good name for the wall of a foreign bar. The Richard Harris photo really swung this thought: Opulence and Decadence.

Having trouble getting my iBook online in the hotel. The El Minzah’s wifi is erratic: it gives perfect internet when I log on, but then after few minutes the Net is gone, even though the Airport connection itself is intact. The staff aren’t sure why, and I can’t explain myself too well in what can only be described as Pigeon Whatever. On top of which, I don’t speak Computer very fluently either. So nothing progresses there.

I resort to plugging in the laptop to my room’s phone socket, and search for a free local dial-up ISP. No joy, so I have to resort to a pricy call to some European dial-up service. The Moroccan ISPs I find either have changed their numbers, or don’t accept Macs. Or something. The sad thing is, I’m really not sure. Unlike what my neighbour said the day after I appeared on a TV programme about the Internet, I’m not really into computers. I’m like one of those car drivers who need to call the AA for the slightest malfunction. The computer is a tool: I don’t need to know how it works any more than a TV addict needs to know the history of the cathode ray.

I have heard that more modern travellers have no problem with this sort of thing. Rhodri Marsden kindly talked me through how to get online in some foreign desert via Bluetooth and my mobile. The only problem is, my mobile isn’t Bluetooth. In fact, I’m still not sure what a Bluetooth actually is. A slightly downsized pirate? Bluebeard’s stunt double? And this is where the more gadget-heavy, youth-clinging readers sit back and laugh a superior laugh.

Well, so be it. I provide a public service. Always good to be a writer who knows less than the reader. I do hate the omniscient God-like image of the narrator. Who the hell does a third party storyteller think he is? All narrators are at best, control freaks. At worse, blasphemers. Or do I mean that the other way round?

Unreliable narrators are the only ones you can really trust.

Am back in Tangier as the travelling companion of Mr MacGowan. Here for a week. This time, we’re in the El Minzah hotel, which is more Graham Greene than Bill Burroughs. The rooms cost a pricy £100 a night, but it’s a plush 1930s affair with immaculate terraces, courtyards, swimming pool, sea views, free wifi (though I have to bring my laptop to the ‘Business Room’ on the first floor), staff in fetching fez-topped uniforms, belly dancers in the restaurant, large gardens and indoor fountains, all tasteful rather than tacky.

I’m not sure if it’s worth staying here at the El Minzah for the full week. I fear a number of ‘deductions’ will be added to the final bill, find some of the staff a little officious and unfriendly, and am all too aware that I must often come across as an idiot monoglottal English tourist asking to be milked for his money (or rather, my host Mr MacGowan’s money).

Though that’s the suspicion brought on, probably unfairly, by the infamous ‘faux guides’ who approach you on the streets. Even men marked with laminated ‘Offical Tourist Guide’ badges who insist they’re not hustlers steer you to another man who will get you a taxi, then to a taxi driver, then to a third man who says he is your Official Guide for… for walking you from the taxi to the hotel, and so on. A man who walked us from the ferry to the taxi asked for 50 euros (£33) as I rummaged through my wallet. What on earth did he expect me to say in return? I gave him 10, he asked for 15. And got it. £10 for five minutes’ work. Well, I was really paying him £10 to leave me alone.

And this was a man with a laminated Official Tourist Guide badge. I’m getting better at smiling and saying ‘sorry, no’. I’ve been here before: I should know what to expect. But when you’ve just walked off a ferry after two hours of being thrown about on the sea, you do feel rather fragile and off your guard.
Maybe some of these gentlemen are indeed Official Guides. But I just want to be left alone until I actually need help.

The ferry crossing from Algeciras was an unusually rough ride. We were caught in a storm, and the horizon line through the windows dipped in and out of view with nauseous rapidity. During the journey, you have to get your passport stamped by a police officer, who commandeers a table in the corner of the cafe. The pitching and tossing of the ship didn’t bother him in the slightest, calmly working away and stamping the pages while his queue of passengers held onto columns and rails for dear life.
“More like the Irish Sea than the Med” says Mr MacG.

I learn a new term from Dad, who’s experienced power failures in Suffolk due to high winds. The term is ‘brownout’, as opposed to blackout. This is when there’s a dimming or partial power cut to a building or locality. As favoured by futurological writers like Herman Kahn and Alvin Toppler, when they predicted 21st century difficulties. Now in regular use, like Mr Reid’s ‘not fit for purpose’.

Have been told off for dwelling on Big Brother so much. In fact, it’s gotten worse. Have now started to watch ‘Shipwrecked’, another reality show purely created in order to watch young people in swimwear as they argue on a desert island.

Am off to stay with Dad in Suffolk for a few days, which will be a trashy TV free zone. He doesn’t ban it. It’s just that I would feel more ashamed if I watched it there. This can only be a good thing.

Sunday: meet friends in The Flask in Highgate. Used to be a student-heavy pub, now is absolutely packed with polite middle class types. I slightly grumble at this to David B, who retorts ‘would you prefer loud middle class types? What do you want from a pub?’. I suppose ultimately what I want is a room that’s barely attended, featuring only people I have personally vetted on the way in.

Home Minister John Reid wants to split the Home Office into the Ministry for Security and the Ministry for Justice. What’s even more Orwellian is the sinister phrase he uses to describe the Home Office as it stands, which like ‘inappropriate’ has started to creep into everyday authoritarian language. “Not fit for purpose.”

Talking of not fit for purpose, yet more Jade Goody thoughts.

Davina McCall’s schoolteacher-like question to Jade Goody on her crowd-less eviction from the Big Brother House: “What have you learned from your experience in the BB house?”

Like a lot of measures from the programme makers, this is to my mind rather disingenuous. If they really wanted their human lab rats to actually learn anything, they should let them have easy access to reference books: dictionaries, encyclopaedias. Even the residents of prisons and rehab clinics are allowed books; it’s just the BB house that bans them. Presumably because they might stop threatening each other and sit around talking about novels. Less engrossing TV, perhaps, but then books have helped to reinvent Richard & Judy. Why not BB, given the show now badly needs a major rethink itself?

Implementing a modest Big Brother library and book group would be my suggestion. Then the UK housemates who can’t pronounce ‘influential’ or ’embryo’ or have any idea where Suffolk is could rectify these shocking shortcomings, and not just feel comfort in remaining ignorant.

Unlike many columnists and pundits, I don’t want Jade Goody to have her career ruined. I want her to spend some of her fortune enhancing her mind the way she’s enhanced her chest. She could have the best teachers in the country. If, like everything else she does, this top-rate private tutorship would have to be covered in the public eye, then why not start a new series called Educating Jade? Finally, a makeover show that didn’t induce suicide. No doubt the producers would insist on the usual Trinny-and-Susannah format of two bossy teachers tearing a strip off her, but so be it. Get me Endemol!

Severe storms hit the UK: God is clearly a Big Brother viewer.

In Highgate, I find out what a cyclone sounds like first-hand. And yes, I do think about The Wizard Of Oz.

The snowballing international media fuss around alleged racism in the UK’s Celebrity Big Brother is all as unlikely as, say, disproportionate fuss over a Danish newspaper cartoon.

Even The Independent has turned its head away from Iraq and toward a lowbrow Channel 4 reality show about women in a house in Elstree shouting over Oxo cubes. The one attacked, Shilpa Shetty, is a well-spoken Bollywood film star. The one doing the attacking, Jade Goody, is a British reality TV star of noted limited vocabulary. Modern role models, the pair of them.

Big Brother made Jade Goody a celebrity, so if as rumoured this is the end for both her and the programme that spawned her, at least it makes it all tidy and poetic.

From The Sun, turning on their own creation with their usual restraint:

HERE’S your chance to prove Britain is not a nation of racists — by voting Jade Goody out of the Celebrity Big Brother house.

From The Independent, reporting from India:

In effect, Goody and her friends are trampling on poverty-stricken Indians’ dreams. What Goody et al are saying to Indians is that no matter how rich and successful they become, they can still be called a ‘dog’ by a white person.

Claudia Webbe, executive member of the National Assembly Against Racism:

The current CBB story reflects the very core of the Black experience in Britain that we have deep race and racism problems resting firmly in our institutions and at the heart of some of our neighbourhoods. In my view it is the same type of racism that led to the murder of Stephen Lawrence.

Paul Morley on Big Brother’s Little Brother:

Jade Goody might be the cause of the next nuclear war.

If you’d told me five years ago that the singer with S Club 7 would one day have effigies of herself burned upon the streets of India, I’d have found it difficult to believe. Though at least the method of protest is apt, given all Jo O’Meara seems to do is smoke and consume.

Ms Goody’s lower class, poorly educated background is no excuse. These days she is a millionaire, with a career as a favourite with readers of gossip magazines. She appears in those magazines; that’s what she does. It’s rumoured that her CBB appearance comes with a six-figure fee. All that money, yet she spends it on improving her breasts, not improving her attitude, temperament, or education.

Along with Chantelle Houghton, BB is part of the current magazine and TV trend to reward young women for being lovably dim. It’s very easy to have a go at such figures, but they seem like fun, friendly company, perfectly aware of their intellectual shortcomings, and harmlessly unpretentious in a culture of backbiting cynicism, cruelty and sarcasm. One can understand their popularity. But now Ms Goody has been shown on TV being far from lovable, it’s hard to see what redeeming qualities she has left.

So today there’s a campaign of bullying the bully, ganging up on those that have ganged up. Today’s Sun has photos of Ms G as The Face Of Hate. The ghastly Edwina Currie goes on Question Time and helpfully labels Ms G and her sidekicks (S Club 7 singer Jo O’Meara and glamour model Danielle Lloyd) as ‘slags’. The Question Time audience applauds this comment, while fellow panellist Shami Chakrabarti is appalled and tries to get the crowd to desist. I admire Ms Chakrabarti: a civil rights campaigner with a Talulah Gosh hairdo. But believing in redemption and re-education is never entertaining. Ms Currie gets the applause. Hatred must be met with hatred.

Unwittingly, BB has reverted from a trashy annual TV show parading breast-enhanced flibbertigibbets and shrieking exhibitionists to its original purpose: an experiment, a test bed of attitudes and colliding worlds. It’s going to a place previously uncharted: too much reality for a reality TV show. I am naturally hooked.

The trial of the alleged London bombers reveals they bought huge amounts of hydrogen peroxide from hairdressing wholesalers like Sally’s (as I’ve done in the past), in order to concoct the devices.

I’m slightly disappointed that not one of them had a go at a Dickon Edwards look on the big day. At least it would have made the inevitable mug shots more unexpected.

The film Babel is just about to come out over here, but has done the rounds in North America, along with Notes On A Scandal, the other big Cate Blanchett film. One thinks fair enough regarding Babel, as it’s essentially a US production, but Notes On A Scandal is such a British movie- and specifically a North London movie – that it does seem odd that America gets to watch it months before the UK.

You say Babble, I say Bay-ball, let’s call the whole thing… a pretty good film. It’s the latest by Mr Inarritu, the director of Amores Perros and 21 Grams, who likes to cram into one melee a group of stories which would make perfectly good movies in their own right. Rather good value for an evening. Buy one Inarritu film, get three or four stories, and have fun working out the chronology and connection of each scene. I adored 21 Grams, likening it to an episode of Casualty re-edited by a madman. Babel is pretty much the same sort of thing, but less aimed at people with Attention Deficit Disorder. The intertwined melodramas are given longer segments at a time, and are spread around different countries and different languages, hence the title.

Mr I likes to see people having a really rotten time, though in a rather masterly and stately way. There’s a scene early on which really jolts the viewer out of their seat. It’s a single line of dialogue between two bored shepherd boys on a Moroccan mountain, who are trying out a new rifle with a spot of target practice.

‘Bet you can’t hit that rock.”

Bang.

“Bet you can’t hit that other rock.”

Bang.

“Bet you can’t hit that bus full of tourists.’

The director is in complete charge of his style and universe. He just doesn’t seem to like people very much. There’s no such thing as good or bad in Inarritu’s world, just bad luck, mistaken assumptions and heavy-handed authorities.

Poor Ms Blanchett has enough of a rotten time in Notes On A Scandal, finding her life at the mercy of the madder yet wiser Ms Dench. But this is a picnic compared to her role in Babel. After one scene rowing with Mr Pitt, presumably because he looks a bit tired and old and thus we want our money back, she spends most of the film’s duration bleeding to death in an American accent, a fate last endured by Tim Roth in Reservoir Dogs.

The connection that links a lonely deaf-mute schoolgirl outdoing Lost In Translation in Tokyo with the rest of the stories is a bit unlikely and forced, but that’s a very minor reservation. A more personal complaint is that Mr Inarritu likes to present the English middle classes as cardboard and selfish irritations for others to react against.

Michael Maloney, the hopping love interest in Truly Madly Deeply, is the headmaster in Notes On A Scandal charged with dealing with two troublesome women on his staff. In Babel, he’s a fellow tourist more concerned with fleeing in the bus than with preventing Ms Blanchett from dying in a corner of a foreign field. Oddly, his own accent sounds jarring in the story, perhaps because his actions are unrealistic. No one is THAT inhumane, not even the English.

It was the same with Charlotte Gainsbourg’s London character in 21 Grams. She was desperate to get pregnant with the dying Sean Penn’s child, even though their marriage had died some time before. Again, her accent seemed as curiously uncertain as her selfish and unsympathetic actions. I can’t help thinking the director has some kind of personal grudge against the English.

These flaws aside, Babel is worth all the acclaim it’s attracted, full of original and gripping scenes. You really feel drawn into each of the myriad worlds: in the car driven by Gael Garcia Bernal’s hot-headed Mexican as suspicious border guards shine their torches through the windows; sharing the shock of a small American boy as Mr Bernal demonstrates a party trick involving unkindness to a chicken; on a Moroccan floor miles from a hospital as Ms Blanchett undergoes emergency surgery without anaesthetic; in the Tokyo nightclub with the lovelorn schoolgirl, hearing at turns both the blaring music and her own silence; dodging police bullets with the mortified, terrified shepherd boys as they run for cover on the mountain. No choice whether to sympathise or not: you are there in every moment.

The next natural step is for Mr Ianarritu to adapt some stories from Los Bros Hernandez’s Love & Rockets graphic novels. They’re the nearest comparable works, and I can’t be the first to say so.