Sheep slaughter, food and festivities in Fes’s medina – my column in today’s Independent looks at life in Morocco’s religious heart in the build up to Eid al-Adha, the Muslim festival of sacrifice.

Photo also by yours truly. For more on food in Fes, and some of the photos that will feature in the new Cafe Clock cookery book, see my last post: Fine Fes Food.

Full text below.

On the road: Butchery and beauty in a Moroccan medina

By Julius Honnor in Fez

Saturday, 12 December 2009

On the journey to Bab Boujeloud, Fez, the taxi driver proudly points out McDonald’s to me. But I’m here to take photos for Café Clock’s new cookery book: camel burgers rather than Big Macs. It is suggested that I might want to go to the abattoir to take pictures of the last camel slaughter before Eid al-Adha, the Muslim festival of sacrifice. I turn down the opportunity.

It’s hard, however, to escape a rather visceral connection to slaughter in Fez’s beautiful medina. It is traditional that every family should have a sheep for the festival, kept at home and then butchered. There are sheep in carts, sheep being dragged by their horns, sheep on people’s backs, a sheep that emerges from the boot of a Mercedes. This is Morocco’s most religious city, and they commemorate Abraham’s willingness to kill his son with gusto.

Excited kids skip down the road in front of their very temporary pet, and straw sellers set up shop on the side of the road.

I am taken to see the sheep market, where sad-looking, bedraggled creatures huddle at the back of dirty pens, their heads hung low. This is a world without freezer cabinets and shrink-wrapping, where meat comes on things that bleat or flap. The connection to the live creature is inescapable: chickens have their necks wrung while you wait, and a dull-eyed camel’s head hangs outside the butcher. Halfway down Talaa Kebira, another sheep is parked, tied to a breezeblock while its new owner gets a haircut.

On the roof terrace of the café, stars shine bright, largely untroubled by light pollution. Roast-chestnut fug drifts up from the street below and the low murmur from the café is pinpricked by the plaintive bleats of sheep. At 8.45pm, it is still warm enough to sit outside. Someone is playing Bobby McFerrin on their phone: “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”. A message to the sheep, perhaps. I order the vegetable soup.

Footprint’s Morocco Handbook is available now (£14.99)

Many of the raw charts on which weather forecasters base their predictions are freely available on the internet, notably on German site www.wetterzentrale.de The site is badly formatted for iPhones, however, so I’ve written a free web app that provides easy access to some of the most prominent meteorological models for the UK. Five sections have the GFS ensembles, ECM charts, UKMO charts, the edited UKMO (so-called “fax”) charts and the GFS charts. The images follow on one from the other and automatically resize when you turn the screen to landscape.

Visit the link below in your iPhone – the app will run in your mobile Safari browser but, for the best experience, go to “add to homescreen” – this will add a nice little icon and run fullscreen.

As the app has to download lots of images it takes 10 seconds or so to load on a good wifi connection; more on 3G.

The app uses the excellent jQTouch, a jQuery plugin for mobile web development on the iPhone.

Let me know what you think (and if you have any good ideas for a name or further development) in the comments below.

My photos include dishes, staff, customers and some food stalls around the medina. There’s also a severed camel’s head (hung outside the butcher to advertise fresh camel meat) and various sheep being dragged home for Eid al Adha. It was suggested that I might go watch the slaughter of a camel, but I chickened out of that.

 

I went to the book launch at the Hub, and his enthusiasm and optimism is contagious, though I fear that the scale of what he had to do may deter as many people as it encourages.

An international collection of images for your screen backgrounds, enabling you to stare at a wall all day. To ward off boredom you can even change walls and have a different one every month. The thumbnails link to 1680×1100 pixel jpeg images, which should be big enough for most screens. The wallpapers, photos I took of walls in Morocco, Cuba, Croatia, Italy and Hungary, are free for personal use.

The design builds on the WPESP Wordpress portfolio framework, which I’ve adapted to include custom fields for each piece, that he can fill in when he uploads new images. It also uses jQuery for the portfolio carousel on the homepage and an improved version of the TimThumb script to build different image sizes on the fly.

It also includes an Amazon-powered shop, through which visitors can buy his book.