Two Chaps Talking

Dear Boy,

When counselling younger chaps I often look to the works of Lord Baden
Powell as something of an expert. Relief, as he is reputed to have discovered,
can always be found in 'Scouting
for Boys'.

“Don’t be disgraced like the young Romans, who lost the
Empire of their forefathers by being wishy-washy slackers without any
go or patriotism in them”.

There. What more could you ask? More of the woggle-abusing pederast anon.

I write from, believe it or not, the monastic seclusion of a riad
in Marrakech. I must correct myself there. It would be monastic but for
the echoing sound of the couple across the courtyard humping themselves
into pelvic trauma.

It’s a strange arrangement. She’s one of those PR-issue blondes
who’s clearly married cash, he’s far too good looking and
self regarding to be anything other than a gym instructor and they are
accompanied on their inter-intercourse excursions by a mousey Irish girl
in an ill-advised floral dress. The blonde keeps phoning home for intense
chats while pretty boy is sent to sun himself on the roof. I deduce that
the man who pays the bill is back at the old homestead, happy in the belief
that his beloved is touring ruins with her mate from work.

The delightful staff creep quietly about the place on slippered feet
and speak in low tones, fully aware how sound carries in these old places.
Our couple shed their chaperone twice a day to bang obliviously and to
the amusement of all.

This is one of those terrific ‘Hip Hotels’ places which can
always be identified by three factors; candles everywhere, rose petals
floating on every available surface and the soundtrack. For the past ten
years the soundtrack in every boutique hotel has been the same three CDs
of Bhudda Bar/Enyaesque Eurochill. Some relaxing and clearly identifiable
track - the Gymnopedies, Madame Butterfly, plainchant or some pleasantly
melancholic Billie Holliday is remixed by Parisian called something like
DJ Chilla to a subliminal house beat found, after extensive research to
evoke feelings of mild euphoria in Rhesus monkeys.

Last night, in a similarly styled restaurant I heard a new one that I
simply must have. Ever since Serge Gainsbourg did his strange interpretation
of an elderly gentleman doing something unclean with his pubescent niece
there has been a French musical genre that involves a breathy young chanteuse
doing old standards as if being rhythmically rogered. Last night’s
sounded similar. A bit of tinkly piano followed by a few lubricating warm
up sighs and then….

“We’re only mekking plan fo Nigel,(pant, pant)

We onli wan wass bess for ‘im…"

As I choked on my couscous this segued seamlessly into…

“Zis is not a lurv song…"(pant pant)

…before climaxing in a positively headboard chewing version of…

“ A wan to ‘ol you, wan to ‘ol you tight,

Get teenage kicks all sroo ze night." (moan, shriek)

Technically, John Peel may not actually be in his grave yet. Wherever
he is, he’s spinning.

Marrakech is, frankly, weird. I guess the original design of stealth
houses in a defensible Medina surrounded by ramparts and a million square
miles of desert must have had something to do with not wanting anyone
else to get their hands on your goods, chattels or womenfolk and was thus
entirely laudable. Now, these riads or garden-houses or conceal
beautiful hotels or restaurants. With no exterior windows they are entirely
invisible but for an armoured door down some tiny alley. Bugger defensibility,
a rival tribe could have occupied the city and been living next door for
six years and they’d never know you existed.

Between these lambent drops of tranquil elegance is a dusty expanse of
picturesque squalor.

Sadly the only treasures the riads protect today are wealthy French people
and Brits of the wrong sort (Why is it that an Englishman can only do
something romantic if it is illicit?) This, of course, causes tremendous
clashes of culture - This morning I saw a fashionable Frenchwoman leaving
our little enclave dressed in pink sheepskin boots. Not only was the temperature
outside enough to cause instant heatstroke but the streets are ankle deep
in human effluent and sheep blood. What is going on in her head?

Fortunately, the French men have universally adopted a more practical
look. Working from the ground up - Paris-Dakar branded hiking boots, egregiously
pocketty trousers with elasticated ankles, a carefully soiled drill workshirt,
a complex jerkin featuring sufficient pockets for a Paparazzo
on a fly-fishing holiday and a large scarf, like a pashmina but in a far
butcher fabric, the whole in varying tones of sludge. I think the impression
is supposed to be of an adventurous social anthropologist - a brilliant
and highly respected academic almost in spite of his unbelievable good
looks. Unfortunately they are French and thus look like overdressed twats.

The Englishmen tend to favour light linen shirts, trousers and jackets
worn with either ghastly leather flipflops or sockless deckshoes. The
ensemble is intended to evoke the ‘Sheltering Sky’ but ends
up looking more like a hot night in an advertising agency circa 1982.
Their wives, partners or paramours wear layers of shawls, pashminas, kikoi
and sarongs the cumulative effect of which is to mercifully hide their
figures while occasionally being mistaken for a haberdasher’s stall
in the Souk.

And so, as the sun sinks low over the Djemma el Fnaaa, the muezzin
give it their all and the staff bend themselves to another reeking tajine,
I find myself lost in contemplation and short of a cocktail. For an Englishman
at a loose end in Marrakech the solution has always been Scouting for
Boys.

We all know that BP had strong feelings about twanging the wire but few
have actually bothered to seek out his actual words. I, naturally, have.
Here therefore, for the general good of humanity, they are….

“You all know what it is to have at times a pleasant feeling
in your private parts, and there comes an inclination to work it up
with your hand or otherwise… The practice is called ‘self-abuse’.
And the result of self-abuse is always – mind you, always –
that the boy after a time becomes weak and nervous and shy, he gets
headaches and probably palpitations of the heart, and if he carries
it on too far he very often goes out of his mind and becomes an idiot.”

You see, now I’m starting to wish I hadn’t laughed at their
dibbing and dobbing. Clearly they knew something I didn’t. Instead
of spending weekends in tents with boys working on my knots, I obviously
wasted my vital energies in working it up. And it gets worse…

“A very large number of the lunatics in our asylums have made
themselves ill by indulging in this vice although at one time they were
sensible cheery boys like any one of you.”

I was that cheery boy! Now look at me – hollow eyes, sunken chest,
three-inch lateral scoliosis in L2-5, asthma and a near permanent hangover.
If you think that’s bad, you should see the picture in my attic
- tertiary syphilis and a single nostril. Perhaps, though, it’s
not too late to stop the rot. BP has advice…

“Just wash your parts in cold water and cool them down. Wet dreams
come from it especially after eating rich food or too much meat, or
from sleeping with too warm a blanket over you or in too soft a bed
or from sleeping on your back. Therefore avoid all these.”

Mind you, if he’d had the occasional wank he might have been better
at punctuation.

Salaam Alaikum

T