Outside, the streets were full of people eating, drinking, shopping and shouting. Enormous families roamed the streets in gangs, soaking up the atmosphere; the pavements were full of tables and chairs from the cafés, all facing out on to the street to enable customers to watch the thronging masses as they crepitated past; Moroccan men with dark eyes and unfortunate moustaches sipped their coffees and surveyed the parade with apparent suspicion; and we walked on through it all with the sense of elation that comes from knowing a foreign city well.

We stopped at a café halfway down Mohammed V and squeezed behind an unbalanced metal table for a restorative coffee and a mille-feuilles. After we had calmed down a little, we decided it might be a good idea to touch base with home, and we walked back up the road to some phone boxes to call our parents. Calling England from Morocco was always a slightly confused experience, the line often having a few seconds' delay on it so that you spent most of the conversation saying, 'Well I-no, sorry, you-what?-sorry, go on-what?' and so on until the money runs out.

This was what happened now, and it did little to alleviate my stressed mood, but I conveyed the necessary information and hung up feeling homesick and unfairly irritated at this strange, disorganised country. As I stood back to let Simon call, we were approached by a weird odoriferous character with staring eyes and distressed, dirty clothes, who was clutching a grubby polythene bag inflated slightly with what I presumed to be air. Stopping in front of me with an unfocused grin, he lifted the bag to his mouth and breathed in deeply. I don't know what kinds of gases or fumes were in there, but as he inhaled he clenched his eyes shut, and then, holding his breath, flung his eyelids back into a dramatic white-eyed stare, and started shaking violently all over as he released his breath sporadically through pursed lips. Seeing me, he leaned forward and grabbed my arm, and, opening his mouth wide, exhaled massively into my startled face. Fixed with a kind of morbid fascination at the sight of his clammy, red tongue, I tried hard not to breathe in and tentatively prodded the preoccupied Simon to draw his attention to our new acquaintance and suggest that we might like to go away now.