Sometimes before September 2007; The Prologue 1:

Hi Finn,

I think I’ve tried to write this to you several times but for all of many reasons it didn’t happen, so best to start over ......

For your information, this is you..and this is also my favourite picture of you,

This is a picture of your mum and I (right).

You’ll get introduced to many and different people as we wend our way through this adventure and I’ll try to make sure that I don’t leave too much or too many of them out.

Pic of Fez medina below(..Umm doesn't seem that great, but it has depth!)

Well as you may or may not be aware, you, your mum (Beccie) and I (Paul), your dad, are currently living in Fez, an ancient city in Morocco (it’s Fez’s 1200th birthday this year!), which is a wonderful, and diverse country in North Africa. As a group, we’ve been here for about 3 - 4 months and given that you are only 7 months old now, you’ve spent a significant part of your life here already. I hope you are and will continue to like it, I think you will.

Or maybe you're not that sure...certainly we've had more than a few doubts...but as you'll see, once we started, for better or worse, there was little chance to turn back!

Anyway, I wanted to make sure that you got a glimpse at what was happening and how it was all developing whilst you were busy growing up....well actually currently you seem to be most busy eating....it’s often Food O’ Clock for you, shitting (scuse the language, but you’ll get used to that... we have!), and sleeping.

Though it must be said that you do a whole lot more playing and talking (you’re quite a ranter...I think you get that from your mum...”dadadadadadada”, is a current favourite of yours, and these days frequently said whilst spinning your head from side to side. I’d say that illustrates your desire for alternative sensory experiences...but depending on how you turn out, it may be seen as the early onset of a Carriesque, dark side..we’ll see!).

A word of advice, given the extraordinary feat it is giving birth and the fact that your mum has devoted the largest part of the past 7 months to ensuring that all goes well with you, try giving “mamamamamamamama” a go as soon as.

She’ll appreciate that and you’ll soon learn that that is a good thing, if you want to avoid this!

You see it's important to keep your mum happy, and avoid "the look" or "the finger"...you'll learn, but remember I'm here to help, tho I'm learning too!

So back to original question, what am I doing here, writing this?

The idea is to ensure that you get to understand what we are doing, as it happens. That is not only the project, but us as a new family, newly moved to Fez, all of us doing things that we’ve never done before and trying our best to make it all work. This’ll be a record for you, and I suppose for us, but given that you probably won’t remember too much for the first few years, I don’t want you to miss it all as, it’s quite exciting really.

You may have realised that your mum is also writing something for you, and this should provide you with an important early lesson; there is always more than one side to a story, and generally in our case, your mum thinks that hers is more right than others....which is sometimes true, but not always...and less frequently than she would like to think...just so that you know.

Why Morocco? ( I hear you asking?)

Good question. In truth it started with a trip.....

So here’s a bit of background. Your mum and I knew each other for many years in London and wanted to get to know each other better. However, as luck would have it, we didn’t manage to do anything about it, either because I was too shy to ask her out or because she was “unavailable”.

There was also the added obstacle that for the majority of the time that I knew her I worked in Africa for INGOs (International Non Governmental Organisations... they’re organisations that help people who are generally having a very difficult time of it). This was great for me in that i got to work in some amazing places (Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, DR Congo, Mozambique and Zanzibar...I hope you’ll get a chance to see many of these and more yourself), but it did nothing for me and your mum getting “it” together.

Anyway, Beccie eventually came over to my 40th birthday in Zanzibar with a group of friends that I hope you now know, and there, under the moon lit sky, on a white sanded Indian Ocean beach, just after New Years had been toasted, (and I’d managed to break several ribs in a near death experience, 30 minutes before midnight...but more of that another day) I asked your mum if she would go out with me...

And she said NO!

Well obviously I eventually ground her down (like I they say, location matters in many things! And there’s nothing like an Indian Ocean island to gain you a significant advantage in the romance stakes) with assurances that I was now coming to the end of my days working abroad and had every intention of settling down...(whatever that means!)

Unfortunately however I had also planned, just before “ settling down”, to give myself a present after 10 years of doing good deeds in many of Africas’ badlands, and that was to drive back to the UK from Zanzibar with a Landrover.

Although she was initially very unsure, I again managed to pursuade your mum to come with me and thus together we bought Habiby, our trusty 1994 red Landy, who took us on a trip round West Africa, starting and ending in Morocco.

To be honest I don’t think Beccie was too impressed with Morocco initially. We drove through in November in search of some heat, and it just so happened that it was the coldest winter in decades.

As well as finding ourselves in some most unusual situations,
such as being forced off the road by a plague of locusts that literally blackened out the sky for ten days, or staying with nomadic families or being engulfed by sand storms...come to think about it, hardly the sort of trip your mother would get off on..bit boys own for her liking..oh well.











Thus we froze our way to the sahara, which I think masked many of the wonders of Morocco. As for Fez, i think probably our first memory of the place was shivering ourselves to sleep in the (closed) camping site, above our trusty Landy...neither of us were particularly impressed.

But, 10 months later after a trip across through west Africa as far as Benin and back, on our return to morocco, both of us found ourselves giving it a very long look and thinking what a great place it was.

We lived for a short while in Mytholmroyd in Yorkshire, where, whilst it was truely beautiful but too wet for us, and as I tried in vain to settle in UK, the charms of Morocco began to glow in our memories.

This (there) is your mum enjoying one of the few days of sunshine we had in Mytholmroyd over almost two years!

In addition to our trying to decide where and what to do, we found out that you were comming in to our lives and suddenly our choices were altered. I’d been trying to lobby for a move back to AID work, but with the need to ensure that you grew up somewhere safe and healthy, we again turned towards Morocco as an option.

You're in here son!

Obviously you being born was The Major Event of our year..maybe longer. I don’t really know how to describe it again, so here’s how I described you in a first e mail to friends after your birth....

August 18th 2007

“At last I've managed to get out a mail and some shots of our son, who has spent the week being named, and has as such gone through Tom, Stan, Fynly and is currently Dylan. I think that our favourite is Fynley, but whoever he becomes, at least we can be sure that we've help him start life with a major self identity problem!

However, between you (very plural) and I, we've started calling Miserable Git, given his propensity to grumble and cry. To be honest if anyone asked what's he like? I could only respond by saying that he's either sleeping, eating, shitting or crying (very loudly...where did he get those vocal cords from!!!), with the odd island of calm wide eyed reflection in a sea or screaming turmoil.....yeah, they're great fun kids!

It's seems ages ago now, but just for the record, Beccie started contractions just after midnight and we went to the hospital at 03.30 on Saturday 18th. The hospital was great, not too medically lead, just Beccie, a midwife and me in the delivery room and then he was born with Beccie pushing with one leg against the midwife and the other against me.

It is really an amazing sight to see a child born, and now I've fallen completely in love with him. Neither of us have really slept yet, but it's great anyway...well maybe greater for me, not only didn't I have to go through child birth, (which despite what it looks like in the movies, is bloody painful...shitting a rugby ball comes to mind!!) but I don't have to feed him either, which Beccie describes as like having clamps on her nipples!!

So I get to change nappies, do the cooking and cleaning and tell everyone how much I love them and how well they're doing. This makes no difference to junior, and Beccie knows that she's got the rough end of the stick...seeing this, I've a sneaking suspicion that god must be a bloke!

I think the hardest bit for Beccie was the pushing at the end which lasted two hours and was clearly very hard work. She felt unprepared for the intensity of that, so be warned any of you considering.

Life currently seems to revolve around feeding times, and we're both getting used to that taughtness behind the eyes that I associate with recreational hedonistic excess, but which now currently signifies that I'm taking my responsibilities of parenting in the early hours seriously.

But, he's great, but greater when he's not screaming...which means he's got loads of room for personal development...just like his dad.

Scuse the fotos being so big...I haven't managed to shrink them. And hopefully Miserable Git...or whatever else we've titled him as, will be able to properly introduce himself to you all soon.

Till then, it's time for a quick couple of hours snooze before it's time to get up again.”

After that we decided to have a look at buying a place in Morocco...why the hell not!

Now Finn, just incase you're ever wondering what giving birth was like for your mum, have a look at this (left). What ever, always remember...love your mumxx