“…Fifty Dirham, for a pencil?” I ask, incredulously.
The proprietor shrugs and turns back to the soccer game.
“You want kebab instead?…”
I’ve got a nice idea for a story. I reach for my notebook and pencil to jot it down. No pencil. I’ve lost it somewhere.
I head for the market. Chefchaouen is a small town. There are five or six shops. None of them sells pencils.
Passing a kebab shop. There’s a basket of pens beside the till. There’s a pencil in there! It’s yellow, stumpy, and pockmarked with the imprints of the kebab chef’s teeth, but, it is a pencil.
“Hi”, I say to the surly looking guy behind the counter.
He’s watching the soccer on TV, but he glances up at me and raises his eyebrows questioningly.
“What you want? Kebab? Sandwich?”
“Er, no… how much for this pencil..?”
The proprieter looks at the pencil. He looks at me. He strolls across to the till, picks up the
pencil in his thick hairy fingers and holds it close to his face, examining it keenly. He replaces the pencil in the basketwipes his hands on his apron, and looks me in the eye.
“Pencil, fifty Dirham.”
The most expensive item on the menu is the “super kebab meal”: kebab sandwich, chips, and a can of generic Moroccan cola, forty five Dirham.
“Fifty Dirham, for a pencil?” I ask, incredulously.
The proprietor shrugs and turns back to the soccer game.
“You want kebab instead?”
In my brain, the clever opening sentences, the snappy phrases, the story structure, they’re fading, melting, slipping away. I have to get this idea onto paper ASAP.
“OK, look, I need the pencil. I’ll give you twenty five Dirham.”
“Pencil is fifty Dirham.”
“Thirty!”
“Forty five!”
“Forty! But I want chips with it!”
“OK. Small chips.”
I hand over forty Dirham – about four Euro – and grab the pencil out of the basket. I sit at one of the greasy plastic tables and make feverish notes and eat my chips. Once I have written it down, the idea doesn’t seem so clever or interesting after all. But the chips are surprisingly good, and the kebab guy throws in a free sachet of ketchup.
>> Low budget travel tips.
>> More stories about my absurd behaviour in Africa.
