I also took hundreds of photographs, but was wary of treating the place and the people who lived there as if they were actors in a theme park. I was a visitor, but did not want to be a tourist. I was so pleased to be staying in a small Riadh, where we talked every evening to the family who ran it and lived and worked there.

One day we were exploring the Kasbah when we came across a tiny shop where an artist was painting and selling his works. He looked a little older that us, a stately man with grey hair and beard, a white turban and wearing a plain red brown djellaba, the colour of the city. I was fascinated by his paintings. They were what people call naive – painted in a direct way, with a confidence in what he was painting and why he was painting it. They did not come out of a western art school education – where everything is filtered through the intellect, but came from his own tradition and culture. Many of his small paintings were of flowers. On many he painted the Arabic alphabet on the reverse. They were painted on what looked like wooden shingles – oblongs of wood shaped and smoothed at the sides. His method was also direct and simple. He painted a background colour, and when that was dry, a design or an image. I loved the way he was painting, with the same attitude as if he were cooking a meal, or weaving a basket. It was as if there were a direct connection between his heart and the end of his paintbrush. Perhaps he was full of inner conflicts – but if he was there were no obvious outer signs. I almost envied him, wishing that I could just paint – rather than spend so much time thinking about painting and putting my self at a distance from my work.

I really wanted to tell him that I was a painter too, and wished that I could talk to him about his paintings, but we could not speak Arabic, and he did not speak either French or English. I would love to have a photograph of him, but I did not want to ask him and turn myself into even more of a tourist than I already was – and put even more distance between us and him. We bought two pictures. One is of a Hand of Fatima in red and black (I recognised it from a book I had bought) the other a blue djinn with three eyes, and a protective triangular eye in the corner – presumably in case the djinn might cause trouble. They cost about four pounds each.