Well, a couple of days on and “Lyle” has now been officially downgraded from initial status of ‘complete and utter fuckwit’ to more of an ‘all-round general tosspot’. I was really taken aback to find out the guy had never actually been to Morocco before, and (wholly unsurprisingly at this point) displayed a jarring lack of planning, forethought, or any kind of apparent effort to attain any prior local knowledge whatsoever beforehand, such as bothering to learn even the barest of bones in French or Arabic before coming out. I even had to fill him in on the whole Carrefour / alcohol situation myself – much to the group’s collective gratitude and delight, it has to be said though! The words “blind leading the blind” clearly apply here, sauf que je voix évidemment mieux que lui.

Still, he managed to acquit himself acceptably over the course of the day, I suppose – he’s just, charitably speaking, not my personal cup of tea, shall we say. He clearly subscribes to the current TOWIE idyll of masculinity (i.e. bulging pecks, groomed to within an inch of his life, no stranger to the sunbed, a dazzling set of “Turkish teeth”, not much going on between the ears, etc.); is prone to flagrant preening, peacocking and man spreading; and displays a very much “in-your-face” penchant for sporting overly revealing shorts. In short, a guy much more suited to the role of Ibiza holiday rep than cultural coordinator (as evidenced by his quite literally painful attempts at minibus karaoke on the way to Agafay*), and with that kind of overly confident, self-aggrandising, cock-of-the-walk personality type, quite frankly I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he pops up on Love Island or some such one of these days soon either…

As for the rest of the group, they’ve been pretty cool so far – everyone getting on well and no complaints, so all good on that front!

As of now, we’re just getting ourselves up after an overnight stay at the Emeraude Luxury Camp in the Agafay desert – a place that was decidedly less luxury than the website suggests (e.g. shitty wifi, very mediocre service, no hot water, etc.), but did have lovely glamping style tents and a beautiful desert swimming pool, which was just what the doctor ordered by the time we rocked up at about 4pm yesterday. I’d only actually managed to sleep two hours the night before (mainly due to being hyped up to start the trip, the hotel being really noisy, and my overactive brain feverishly plotting vengeance on Lyle in the form of a visceral yet icily professional complaint letter to the tour provider^), so chose to chill by the pool for a bit here, while others in the group went camel riding (been there down that on previous trips) or quad biking (probably fun, but I was just too knackered, sweaty and heat exhausted by this point to bother (it’s been 38° today, and the minibus getting here had literally zero aircon to boot…).

A cold dip, a beer and some good food (a truly delicious beef tagine) soon had me to rights again though, meaning I could go on to spend an evening round the campfire with the group, before finally hitting the hay for a much-needed night’s sleep.

And that’s it till next time…

* Video evidence available for anyone who would like to privately die a little bit inside.

^ In the cold light of day, I figured venting my spleen about him on here would suffice.