Marrakech is famed for its Souq. At home we have markets, but they don’t compare to this knotted tangle of streets, lined by tiny businesses that will have been trading in its shady corners since the Normans invaded Britain. It’s many travellers’ sole reason for coming to Marrakech.

After an early briefing we split into groups and headed into the Medina, the old city still ringed by an unbroken 16km of thick red walls. Everything in Marrakech is red. Either because it’s so old it was built of the local red mud, or because it’s been painted that way to match the rest of the city.

The wide rose-trimmed roads disappeared, to be replaced by tighter, narrower paths that opened up onto squares. We passed the great mosque, the oldest and tallest building in the city, and pulled up at the end of an alley lined by small shops. Idle men sat in the doorways, sheltering from the heat, and bony cats slinked along in the shadows, calling out for food.

Azim, our guide, explained that he would be taking us through the Souq, and to be careful with our cameras; not because they might be stolen - this is a very safe city, and it felt it - but because we could offend people if they popped up in our pictures. Try to avoid taking pictures of women, he said. And the old.

So we set out down a narrow alley barely wide enough for three to walk side by side, jumping out of the way of the motorbikes that cut through the tide of pedestrians. A small truck chanced its luck and pushed down behind them, forcing us all to squeeze into nooks in the wall or slip through an opening onto a small construction site where dusty workers were shovelling red earth into wooden carts strapped to the backs of a small troop of donkeys.

Watch out for bikes in the Souq

The deeper we got into the Souq, the more striking it became. It’s a boggling collection of tiny businesses, clustered together in groups. A whole alley of metalworkers; next door, a row of lantern makers, slaving over furnaces with primitive instruments in the scorching heat of the day. Turn a corner and it’s hand-made shoes as far as you can see. Around another, chickens by the thousand, unbroken strings of fruit and nut stalls, chameleons and terrapins, countless herbalists, and woodworkers beyond number.

We stopped by one of these woodworkers’ shops and he carved amulets for each of us with his feet, using his hands to run a bow back and forth to spin his manual spindle. No electrical tools here; instead he made boxes and kebab skewers the same way they would have done 500 years ago.

Metalworkers’ shops in the Souq

It was impossible to get a handle on how large the Souq might be, and I suspect it may be a little smaller than it felt, but we walked around it for a good two hours and I didn’t spot the same thing twice. When we eventually stepped out of its shady lanes, slashed by strips of sun that cut their way through the slatted wood roofs, we were in the enormous central square that at night is turned into a food market of epic proportions. Here, in the full heat of midday, traders laid out their wares on rugs and sat by them without any shade.

A street dentist proudly displayed his collection of ugly tools for pulling teeth, without either anaesthetic or a dental chair. Snake charmers played raspy tunes to their mesmerised cobras, while others kept monkeys on the ends of strings. One stall, beside a vendor of hairy animal parts, had a small train track set out on the ground. It was aqua blue, like the Thomas the Tank Engine sets you can get back home. Here, though, rather than Thomas, Henry and George, there was Osama bin Laden on a horse, pursued by an American in a tank that could never quite catch up with him.

We cut across the square, past caged chinchillas and meat-heavy food stalls that only hinted at what would become of the square at night. Azim (who has taken to calling us Friends of Mohammed as it’s easier than remembering our names) took us back there after sundown, and it was ever more frenetic.

We approached from the mosque, past the line of stinking horses queued up to wait for passengers, and could see the light of a thousand stalls set up on the square. Their bare electric bulbs burned yellow in the smoke and steam that hung in the air, and it seemed that the whole of Marrakech had come out to eat. Azim assured us that it was like this every night, and not a show for tourists. It was, he reminded us, a Unesco World Heritage Site, like the hilltop view down the Danube of Buda and Pest, or Porto’s Ribera.

As we moved closer, figures appeared from the smoke: two men boxing for small coins, thrown to them by the encircling crowd; men carrying snakes; a small girl tugging on my t-shirt so that I might buy the two pocket packs of tissues she held up. Beyond a ring of bottles the passers-by were trying to hook with looped string in the hope of winning a prize were the food stalls. Here sat cows’ severed heads, ready to be sliced and fired and served up to eat; enormous piles of 100 eggs or more, hard boiled and ready to peel; a ton of oranges for juicing; nuts to be cracked; piles and piles of snails to boil. A doctor sat at a battered table with three books, barely holding themselves together, as if to prove that if he didn’t know what ailed you, at least he knew where to look it up.

The ultimate street food: the night market in Marrakech

Nuts and fruit on sale in the main square

It was all accompanied by the excited chatter of locals out for food, the crackle of hot fat, and the bells of a man who leapt around among the crowd, ringing every time he spotted you taking a picture, to warn the stall holders that they were the target of your lens.

We worked our way through the square and out into the alleys behind it and into a riyad for dinner. Riyads are old houses, with all the rooms coming off a central courtyard that is open to the sky to keep it cool. You can afford to do that in a country with only 25 days rain every year. We had drinks on the roof, looking out over the city, and then descended two floors to eat curry and drink sickly sweet mint tea as belly dancers and local singers kept us entertained.

A noisy, exciting day.

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africa, marrakech, morocco

Uma Thurman was on our plane. I had never imagined she would fly budget. Anyhow, there she was occupying the front two rows, with the aircrew fawning over her all the way from London to Marrakech, and taking photos with their mobile phones, which clearly weren’t turned off.

The first we saw of Morocco was the northern tip, framed in the same oval window as the tip of Gibraltar. It’s only when you see them from above that you realise how narrow the Straits are, and why so many wannabe refugees try to swim their way across.

South of the Straits was Africa, and this was to be my first time on the continent. First impressions were good. Any country that lets cats run freely around a runway can’t be all bad, and if they can stroll casually through passport control and rub around your feet as your bags are scanned, all the better.

We’d arrived 90 minutes late, the pilot blaming it on the airline being ‘disorganised’ - refreshingly honest - and stepped out into the middle of a Marrakech rush hour. The roads that cut through the boxy pink buildings were choked with raspy scooters and bikes. At one set of lights alone more than 100 streaked by, and between them there were only two crash helmets. One bike carried two people; the first laid out on his back, with his head on the handlebars, back on the tank and legs across the pillion. He was the passenger. The driver sat on his knees, his legs straddling his companion’s thighs to reach the stirrups, and one hand on either side of his ears to control the throttle, brakes and front wheel. It would have been impressive in a circus. On a wide main road it was surely suicide.

The roads were lined with roses, which are a major export crop. Morocco sends 12 million blooms to Europe each year, most of which probably end up being carted around pubs in buckets and sold singly at the end of a drunken night out.

Beyond them it was largely red dusty waste, strewn with rubble and rocks. We turned at a corner where camel drivers stood with their animals and pulled in at the hotel that would be home for the next two nights, until we headed up into the mountains for a night in Bedouin tents. It was then that we got our first taste of the sickly mint tea served from silver pots in small gold-rimmed glasses to aid our digestion. It was like liquid chewing gum.

We didn’t know it then, but clearly the Moroccans have a very sweet tooth and we’d be served this almost undrinkable drink six times a day. The fruit drink we had at dinner (where, surprisingly for a Muslim country, the buffet included Parma ham) tasted like it had been blended with a kilo of sugar. The rims of the glasses were coated with it. Every meal was followed by small rosewater biscuits. Breakfast always included a healthy selection of sticky rolls.

Jalal said this was fairly typical for an Arab country, and certainly it was something we got used to over the next four days, as you approached every dish expecting that it would be either heavily salted or incredibly sweet.

Or that there would be a slice of meat hiding under some innocent looking vegetables to trick the travelling vegetarian.

None of us stayed up so late, and with a few exceptions we were back in our rooms by midnight, ready for an early start the next morning. The middle of the day is so hot that our meetings have been timed for early morning and early evening, with the middle of the day left free for exploring the Souq, or heading out across country in chunky 4×4s.

As I slipped into bed and looked up at the ceiling I spotted a little plate in one corner and got out for a closer look. It was pointing east, towards Mecca. I guess that, like the sweet food and drinks and the lack of any portraits on the walls, is another thing we’ll see more of over the next four days.

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morocco, marrakech, africa

Well there’s a surprise. The meticulously-planned works that have kept Liverpool Street station closed since 23rd December have over-run. The bridge they were removing has gone, and the scheduled upgrades to a handful of stations have been completed, but now they have problems with the overhead lines, and the station is stranded, cut off from the rest of the network.

Advice from the rail company is not to travel until they’ve got it fixed, which is now not expected to happen until tomorrow afternoon at the earliest. Advice from commuter groups is to demand a refund. This is doubly embarrassing coming on the day the rail companies rolled out price increases of up to 11% - twice the rate of inflation - across the national network.

So it’s a day of working from home, which is far from ideal after two weeks off. Let’s hope tomorrow’s predicted snow and negative temperatures don’t delay the fixes any longer.

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Well isn’t that nice. I’ve barely dealt with Virgin Media this year, yet they still sent me a biscuit so impressive that it was blogworthy. It came in a sturdy cardboard box that, when you slipped off the lid, let out an rich intoxicating aroma of expensive chocolate biscuitery.

Unfortunately the actual eating experience didn’t live up to the promise of its smell, as the biscuit itself was rather soft (a little stale, perhaps?) and the icing quite brittle, but as the Virgin people won’t have baked it themselves that’s not their fault. It’s also still by far the most impressive edible yet received this Christmas

Monday night, the PC Pro Awards at the Science Museum, and a good and boozy time was had by all.

It was so hot. I think they’d turned on all the science or something. But the food was good, the drink was plentiful, and I managed to get up on stage and accept an award on Apple’s behalf without tripping up or dropping it, despite the fact it weighed about as much as a breeze block.

Potunkey and Bayon, just before it kicked off

Clockwide from top left: Dharmesh, Me, Ross, Potunkey

Lots more pictures here.

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pcpro, science museum, awards

Maxine, the Awards’ award

Last night was the Awards. It always coincides with the Expo, so I spent the morning stuffing bags, slipping discount cards into magazines and eating Kettle Chips. At two we took a taxi to the Hurlingham Club to rehearse, and put programmes on the tables and bags of space dust under the tables.

I actually quite enjoy all that, despite it annoying the serving staff as we slip shot glasses between the carefully measured-out wine glasses, and menus into the napkins. You don’t need to think about things, and once you get into a bit of a rhythm the afternoon fairly flies by. The rehearsal was over before we knew it, the taxi was there and we were swished off to the hotel for too-short showers before heading back for the night proper.

So how well did it go? Very well, indeed. We dispensed with the autocue this time around, and I managed to get through my lines with only one trip-up. We had text-in competitions, which worked first time around, the food was good and the entertainment was excellent. Terry Alderton did the comedy and handed out the awards, and the Three Waiters had everyone waving their serviettes in the air above their heads as we ate dinner.

It was, I think, the best Awards of the five I’ve done with MacUser (and I thought I’d only done four until about an hour before we kicked off), which makes topping it next year an interesting poser indeed…

Claire and Westy demo the brand

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macuser

The Eiffel Tower

Apple seems to take the Paris show far more seriously than London. I remember last year how there were Apple people here prowling the smaller stands to see what people were talking about. This year they’re even patrolling the press room. Admittedly not closely enough to see what you’re writing, but it’s interesting to see them there.

Unrelated to that, I also got offered £100 cash to attend a briefing today, taking place next month. That has to be ethically questionable. Fortunately it’s not core to what we cover, so it’s quite justifiable to turn it down on the grounds of relevance, rather than pointing out to the would-be briber than cash offers can only bring impartiality into question.

Paris has turned quite chilly, and I’ve pulled out the jumper I almost didn’t pack. I walked up to the Butte past M Collignon’s grocery to look out across the city, and acted as interpreter between a couple of Americans and their waiter. They were grumbling about the quality of their food, even though she was only having onion soup with chips, perhaps for dipping.

They did thank me, but they were intensely irritating so I had to leave, and ended up riding the metro down to Trocadero to try and take some pictures of the tower for something Al is working on back in the office. Unfortunately the keyring sellers were so proficient at walking into the shot that I couldn’t get the kind of pictures I needed and the image above, while entirely unsuitable, is the best of the bunch.

September means Paris in this industry, so here I am again, testing my rather dodgy French on the native speakers. They seem to be largely understanding what I’m on about, which is encouraging.

I’m staying in the 8th, which turns out to be perfectly placed for just about everything. Easy to get down to the Expo, easy to find food, well-placed for a walk at the end of the day. Certainly better than Bastille, where we stayed two years ago, and wherever it was we were last year, when we had to change trains four times to get to the show.

That walk eventually took me as far as City Hall, St Michel and Cite, where they’ve finally finished cleaning the towers of Notre Dame after about five years in patchy scaffolding. It’s a brilliant light cream now, and was very much worth the effort.

I’ve been to more than my fair share of launches over the last 12 years. Some lavish (first-class flights, a week in Japan, and dinner with a geisha); some not so (four journalists and two dozen product pushers at the London Dungeon - somewhere you don’t even want to head on a day out, never mind for work). There are few companies, though, who can put on a low-budget event in a nondescript location and have everyone - everyone - turn out to hear what they have to say.

At the moment I can think of only one. Apple.

Yesterday’s iPhone launch took place at the Apple Store on Regent Street. A shop. No being flown off somewhere exotic. It was as low-key as any Steve Jobs keynote, with just him and the CEO of O2 sitting on stools at the front of the room. No intro, either - Jobs just walked in, wearing his trademark black top and blue jeans, and started talking.

And no real news, either. That O2 had bagged the iPhone was the worst-kept secret in IT. All we really needed to know was the launch date and price, and we could have got that by email.

Yet everyone - everyone - was there. All the national newspapers. All the magazines and websites, no matter how tenuous their connection to all things Apple. Ranks and ranks of TV cameras, and even outside broadcast trucks so they could report back live to the studio that yes, as everyone knew, the iPhone is coming to the UK, and actually it’s not all that expensive.

There were even members of the general public outside the store (closed for the morning) pressing their cameras up to the windows to take pictures of us inside.

That Apple has achieved this is impressive and laudable, but I’d be surprised if anyone - even Apple itself - could really say why or how it’s happened. The company isn’t known for courting the press, and indeed it often seems that its interest is in maintaining a healthy distance than it is in keeping chummy.

For the moment, though, it makes it an exciting time to be working for a magazine whose main focus is that company’s products and customers, but the concern is whether Apple can maintain the momentum. Apple is undergoing a renaissance. These are its modern glory days, its second coming, but having seen the great players like Palm and Creative lose their one-time magnetic appeal, you have to wonder when - or if - the same thing will ever happen to Apple.

Under Jobs I doubt it will.

Two weeks. Unless I’ve been travelling, I think that’s about the longest it’s ever been since blog posts on here.

It’s been a frantic fortnight, though, with busy days at work, and every evening taken up either with writing or sorting out the house.

Things are moving along nicely there now. The bathroom is finished (bar the floor), the kitchen is almost done, and the out-house is full of cabinets for the second kitchen, which still need fitting. After that, the kitchen and bathroom floors need doing and the loft needs boarding, and then it’s pretty much done.

It’s taken six months, and there are still some little extras that need doing, like installing water buts, moving a fence and building a shed, but there all outdoorsy and can wait.

The garden is going great guns, and so far we’ve had about £55 of veg from it. The broccoli is far greener and more vivid than anything you see in the shops - even when you’ve cooked it, which is good, as it’s also quite a haven for caterpillars, and often you don’t see them until you’ve already cooked it, got it on your plate and speared it with a fork, no matter how carefully you clean them.

But we’re still having fun. Yesterday we headed out to Highwood to see the deer, and although we didn’t catch a large deer like the first time I went and found myself surrounded by 40 or more, we did manage to get pictures of a monther and father pair with a youngster leaping through the crops.

And today we’re heading off to Dunsfold for Wings and Wheels, which will no doubt be another photo opp. Tomorrow - who knows. We’re planning on Lowestoft and may end up at the power boat racing, so I can see this weekend being a good one for stretching the camera’s legs.