thinking of writing about the hotel perhaps...

I had a hotel in Africa, in the mud city of Djenne by the Bani, a tributary to the Niger, the life blood of Mali.

When I think of that time now, sitting in my Notting Hill flat with the November rains battering my window panes those days have taken on something fantastical, it is as if it never really happened. Yet it did. This entity called Hotel Djenne Djenno came together out of nothing, it existed for twelve years and then it ceased to exist. And within that time and within those mudwalls which encircled the hotel a whole new world was born. From within that little world it is possible to extract a million stories if one is only able to choose the right combinations. It is the storyteller’s job to choose those combinations, and I know I must now try. I owe it to this ‘thing’ which was my hotel and to all those that worked with me and I owe it just to the fact that it actually worked!

My hotel is like a friend or a beloved that has passed away. It is virtually impossible to conceive that they are gone. How could something so real and tangible be just gone? Where did it go? Does it exist somewhere in another world? Is there some sort of heaven for hotels or places? Maybe it exists as long as someone still remembers it?
The last days when the mattresses and the ceiling fans and the chairs from the bar were being removed, piled up on the donkey carts and disappearing down the dirt track the hotel was in its death throes, it was like seing the last breaths of someone beloved, almost like sitting by my Keita’s bed as he left me... but I am getting ahead of myself. Where was I ? Should I start at the beginning?