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I’m headed toward the barn to check on my newly purchased Swedish sheep. My baby Roslags are huddled under the persimmon tree; it’s their first night in the ghetto and they’re afraid the goats and the pigs are going to jack them.

Stevie, a hardcore gangster as ruthless as the free market and unemotional as a Vulcan with Asperger’s, has a tear running down one cheek.

I always liked the sound of seat belts unbuckling. That emancipating click and whir of the belt recoiling to wherever it goes never ceases to give me pleasure.

You cannot walk the streets of Casablanca with fair skin.

Or, at least, you can, but only if you're prepared to do it at the head of a crowd of fifty scampering children, who call, and shout, and point, and laugh, and try to sell you American dollars, good price, best price, and hashish likewise.

If you're a tourist with fair skin, you take this as it comes. Obviously. You smile back, and shake your head, and say la, shokran - which causes even more laughter, and shouting, and pointing, which in turn causes another fifty children to come and follow your pied pipe, all of whom, strangely, have also got the best price for American dollars, and, generally, you do your best to enjoy the experience. After all, you're a visitor, you look strange and exotic, you're probably wearing shorts and a ridiculous Hawaiian shirt, so why the hell shouldn't they point at you? Why shouldn't a fifty yard journey to the tobacconist take three-quarters of an hour and stop traffic in all directions, and just about make the late editions of the Moroccan evening papers. This is why you went abroad, after all. To be abroad.

That's if you're a tourist.

If, on the other hand, you went abroad to take over an american consulate building with automatic weapons, so that you could hold the consul and his staff to ransom, demand ten million dollars and the immediate release of two hundred and thirty prisoners of conscience, and then leave by private jet having mined the building with sixty kilos of C4 explosives - if that's what you nearly put in the Purpose Of Visit box on the immigration form but didn't because you're a highly-trained professional who doesn't make slips like that - then frankly you can do without the staring and pointing stuff from kids on the street.