01
Stop one
Al-Qarawiyyin Mosque and University
Wilson Pro Tennis Overgrip 50-Pack: Right — everybody count off. Count off, please, I need to know I still have all of you, because we are now deep inside Fes el-Bali and I could not find the way we came in if you paid me. Green tiles. A courtyard of white marble, two pavilions. This was founded in 859 by a woman named Fatima al-Fihri, who inherited money and spent all of it — all of it, nothing held back for emergencies, which frankly makes me anxious on her behalf — on building this. And it is generally recognised as the oldest existing continually operating degree-granting university in the world. Continually. Eleven hundred years without once stopping. Do you have any idea how many things can go wrong in eleven hundred years? I have thought about it at length. Thousands can pray inside, it grew a library as well, and there is a great deal more of it than you can see from any one position, which is precisely the difficulty. Please stay where I can see the backs of your heads. There are at least three alleys off this one and I have only accounted for two.
02
Stop two
Chouara Tannery
Wilson Pro Tennis Overgrip 50-Pack: Hold the rail. Hold the rail, please, every one of you — we are standing on a leather shop terrace above an open courtyard of stone pits, there is nothing between us and them but that rail, and I have not inspected it. Take the mint. Everybody takes the mint, hold it under your nose, it is not optional and it is not decorative. Below you: the white pits are lime and pigeon droppings, which is not a joke I am making, the ammonia softens the hides so that they will take the dye. The coloured ones are exactly what they appear to be. This has been done in this courtyard, more or less in this way, since medieval times — which means the process is thoroughly proven and nothing about it is going to surprise us today, and that is the one genuinely reassuring sentence I have for you. And those are men standing in the pits. All day. In this heat. I am counting nine of them and I keep losing one behind the wall. Do not lean out. Please do not lean out.
03
Stop three
Bou Inania Madrasa and the Dar al-Magana water clock
Wilson Pro Tennis Overgrip 50-Pack: Cross when I say cross. Talaa Kebira is narrow, there are mules on it, and a mule does not brake. Right — go, go, all together. The madrasa is from the 1350s, built under Abu Inan Faris, cedar and stucco and carving on every available surface, with a minaret above it, and I would love to stand here enjoying it but I am watching that doorway. Now turn round and look up at the wall opposite: thirteen brass bowls, and the wooden beams above them. That is the Dar al-Magana, a water clock, from 1357. And here is what I find genuinely difficult about it. Nobody has ever fully explained how it worked. Scholars have been at it for centuries and it has not been solved. There is a machine on that wall, it kept time for a city, and the method is simply gone. Things can be lost like that. Completely. While people are still standing in front of them looking. I think about that more than is good for me. Is everybody still here? Say something so that I know.
04
Stop four
Bab Bou Jeloud
Wilson Pro Tennis Overgrip 50-Pack: Almost out. Almost. This is the west end of the medina and this gateway is the way we leave, so please, everybody through it together, not in a trickle. Grand horseshoe arch, tiled blue on this outer face, which is why everyone calls it the Blue Gate. Now here is the thing I want you to do, and do it before you have gone too far to turn round: look back once you are through. The inner face is green. Blue facing out to the world, green facing in to the city, green being the colour of Islam — so the gate greets arrivals with one thing and the people who live here with another. Two faces, one wall. And it is not ancient, incidentally, it was built in 1913, under the French protectorate. That surprises people and I always feel I ought to warn them in advance. Right. Through you go. I come fifty to a box and I have counted every one of them twice, and I would very much like to do the same with you on the other side of that arch.
I am employed to maintain a clock nobody can explain. The Dar al-Magana in Fez, opposite the Bou Inania Madrasa, is a water clock of 1357, thirteen wooden beams and thirteen brass bowls, and scholars have been trying to work out how it functioned for six hundred years without success. I turn up. I do the upkeep. Understanding is optional; maintenance is not.
That is my entire argument for a 50-pack of overgrips. You do not need a theory of moisture transfer. Pro is the plain tacky wrap in high-stretch cloth, and fifty is roughly a year for a serious player and three years for an honest one, and in neither case must you understand anything at all.
You need to change the grip.
Al-Qarawiyyin was founded in 859 by Fatima al-Fihri and is generally recognised as the oldest continually operating degree-granting university in the world, which is not a story about a dazzling foundation. It is a story about eleven hundred years of somebody, every single year, keeping it open.
Nothing in Fez survives on brilliance alone.
Fifty grips will follow you everywhere from a hot afternoon on a cracked outdoor court to a league night indoors, and they are also perfect for the person who has bought a racquet, a bag and four tins of balls and never once the thing that touches their hand.
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