Okay so I’m back from spending a bit of time bobbing around from island to island in the Atlantic Ocean and what could be more hip and cutting edge than being taken on a cruise? oh yes! Complete with both Queen and Andrew Lloyd Webber tribute nights (makes various metal gestures and does that whole, rather boorish, Gene Simmons tongue thing). Despite doing the whole smart casual dress code thang* and heroically failing not to eat and drink too much I had a grand old-time.
But, I hear you ask, ‘how rock and roll was it, thou exalted high potentate of love?’ well, apart from some good listening time and reading Steve Jones’ biography Lonely Boy, not vastly. Oh, apart from getting to meet Jimi Hendrix that is. Yup, you heard me.
I got to set foot in Africa for the first time too, which I am chuffed about**. First stop was the casbah, the fortress up on the hill above the port where we were rightly seized upon as the walking wallets we were, comparatively, by all manner of local hustlers desperate to sell us leather bands, jewellery and charging us to take photographs of us next to camels. After fending off all comers with a firm ‘Non merci, monsieur’ I strode off to the ruins with my daughter, to return a few minutes later to my wife having paid a certain amount of Euros to have my son’s picture taken next to a kid^ which had been thrust at him. The goat was, as my wife was very bemused to find out, called Jimi Hendrix!
All together now, Hey goat …
750 Down (still).
PS: Jimi stayed at Essaouira for about a week in 1969 – enterprising folk have made a small cottage industry out of it ever since – this was a very good article about it here.
*which made me look even sexier than normal, by my own reckoning.
**at Agadir, which was pretty charmless I’m afraid, but you can hardly blame somewhere that was effectively razed to the ground by an earthquake in 1960 for not being architecturally interesting.
^of the goat variety.