Leaving the ferry at Tangiers and plunging into the baying host of hustlers used to be an ordeal to dread at the start of each Moroccan trip. We walked from the ferry to the dock, ready for the assault but it was with difficulty that we even found a taxi.
The writer, Paul Bowles, lived in Tangiers because, as he said, it was a city blessedly free from the frenetic pace of change. But Bowles has gone now, and Tangiers has succumbed to the mania for change.
I asked Larbi, the driver, a man who had dwelt for a time in the glory that is Stoke Newington, what was going on.
"Well you know man," he said in his shaky South London accent. "It's cos of the noo king..." Apparently there had been an assassination attempt on the previous king, Hassan II, when he was travelling in the north of the country. The old despot was so incensed that he strangled the lifeblood out of Tangiers and the north, and vowed never to set foot there again. When his son, Mohammed VI acceded to the throne, the first thing he did was to travel through the north. And there, the liberal and dynamic young king found that he was adored by the people.
