I’m guessing that children are the most popular subject for pictures Gawd love ‘em. Yet still it’s rare that I see portraits or action shots that get to the heart of the wee beasties. There Is an awful lot of vibrant yet anodyne shots that look like Persil ads and the high street photographers, on the whole, perpetuate this shiny lifestyle look. The advent of mobile phones as cameras has done little to improve quality control and while I’m all for spontaneity, my tip is to slow down and be prepared for the spontaneous to occur. As Cartier Bresson said, ‘the more I practice the luckier I seem to get.’ On top of all this we all want our kids to look happy in pictures (so that they can’t later sue us for their therapy bills?) There must be piles to the moon of fake smiles and awkward grimaces attempting fake smiles. Anyone who likes a good movie will know that cheeriness and smiling is less poignant, somehow less deep, than the pensive and more emotional. Capturing those moments of struggle, reflection or simply day to day being is more likely to result in timeless, classic shots that the kids will want to keep and show.

If there is a secret to wonderful images of children, your own or borrowed ones, I would say it is to really pay attention, look and listen, notice how and who they are right now. It’s hard not to be impressed whether they are babies or trying the outskirts of adulthood for the first time. I love it when I revisit that abject wonder of look, we made a person. If this is all sounding a bit serious, remember too to have fun. I’m not banning smiles, just pretend ones. Children love attention and will perform if they feel they have a good audience, good for lively shots and the candids of pausing.

Monochrome is superb for preserving the fleeting stages of growing up. My offspring range from ten to 26, and yes, I don’t look old enough. I have always photographed them with natural light, lens aperture wide open for a lovely shallow focus, often while they are absorbed or unaware. Sometimes in their teenage years I get a fine shot of a spread hand, (or worse, a lone finger) which means: DON’T TAKE MY PICTURE! I persevere, looking to find who is inside the cherubic face, watching their personalities develop and express, chronicling the biggest journey of all.

With the multi-faith mix demanding no beef or pork, the Lahore truckers’ favourite curry, cooked up in a hubcap (very spicy with chicken or lamb on the bone) is credited as the forefather of the Balti, according to veteran chef Mohammed Asram at the Al Frash Restaurant on Ladypool Road.  ‘The bone gives flavour and we know what we are eating!’  The famous, deliciously spicy Balti is a uniquely Birmingham invention (the fast-heating pressed steel bowl was originally made only here).

With no messy bones for the indigenous Brummies, Balti is chunked fillet meat,  fast cooked (often bursting into flames) on the hob in a base of onions or tomatoes, ginger and  garlic puree, fenugreek, garam masala  (literally ‘hot mixture’) and vegetable oil. It is served sizzling in the Balti Bowl, and always mopped up with naan (flat bread), ‘rice with balti is sacrilege,’ claims Mohammed.

The speedy dish with its fresh, healthy ingredients went down well with the hungry locals whilst the unlicensed premises meant that punters were free to bring their own wine and the Balti Houses became a landmark feature of Sparkbrook.

Over time, visitors and locals alike have developed a more cosmopolitan palette, so a few of the culinary Sparkbrook natives have dared to move on from the Birmingham balti house tradition, preferring instead an authentic Pakistani cuisine. Nowhere is this more evident than up on Stratford Road in what was the once fearsome Antlelope pub ‘that even the navvies would avoid,’ according to Colin the Cabbie. Eight months ago, it became the alcohol-free Hajees Spices, with leopard print seats, original oak panelling, immense murals and authentic flock wallpaper. It is a place for the young, twenty-something parties and Anglo/Pakistani couples bring the restaurant to life as evening falls. The menu invites you to eat Maghz (sheep brains – not as tasty as it sounds) and Paya (lamb trotters in oil); traditional delicacies from the Punjabi region of Pakistan, and according to the chef, Mustapha, strictly for the locals! For the less brave there is hearty Lahori Kahara Ghosht (balti-style chicken) served in a karahi (like an oversize earthenware balti dish)which fuses the new owners heritage with the best of Asian Birmingham.

Meanwhile, the recently refurbished Al Faisals sits at the heart of the triangle (on Stony Lane), amongst the semi-derelict shopfronts and the builders’ vans that litter the area. It is a thoroughly modern affair, replete with acres of glass and trendy art. Business lunches run alongside family diners during the week. ‘The Art of Kashmiri Cooking’ is emblazoned across its slick black menus; a proud and confident slogan. Omar, the grandson of the 1980 founder, brings me his personal favourite, a plate of tandoori-orange spiced lamb chops that are intensely tasty, caked in an explosive, mouth watering salty, charcoal marinade. I tuck in, holding on by the foil-clad bone. They are literally mouth-watering like a delicate, version of the street food one might enjoy on a kerbside as the rickshaws scurry by. Amongst giant flatbreads (naan and paratha), an overflowing platter of freshly prepared salad and home bottled mango lassie, they serve lamb or chicken curry on the bone, the scent of turmeric, cumin and coriander rising with the steam from the modern white china. Omar is justifiably proud of his grand Anglo/Pakistani restaurant. ‘I like to welcome the gourmet lovers and still feed my loyal customers,’ he smiles.

Sparkbrook has come a long way from its humble roots; it is optimistic and forward looking whilst keeping one foot soundly in Pakistan. It is clearly not Kashmir and it is not only Birmingham Balti. It is a delicious marriage of the two.

Fes, for a brief ten years of the twelfth century, was the world’s largest city. Now, straddling the banks of the Fes River, it still wears the confidence of that history; a solid physical rootedness behind the mountains that keep the Sahara at bay. The Berber is the indigenous people, Muslims with their own language, coming down from the Atlas Mountains to settle in the valley that is Fes. The Arabs came in the ninth century and the French in the nineteenth and so Arabic and French are spoken and interwoven. Once at the centre of seventeenth century Morocco, Fes was a major trading post of the Barbary Coast of North Africa. Historically Fes is a city of refugees, one of the oldest mixed cultures anywhere. There is tolerance somehow, an equality, everyone is trying hard to survive here. The Karaouine Mosque at the heart of medina was founded in 857 by a Tunisian woman to offer education and religious safety to the constant flow of Tunisian and later settlers. Nowadays it is a library, university and mosque still receiving Muslims from afar. The mix is good for the food, abundant produce and farming feed the million or so residents of the city: fresh crunchy salads and charcoaled meat or simple bread, with boiled egg, tuna, onion and chilli sauce, made fresh for fifty pence. In everything, even for the poorest, there are fresh ingredients grown nearby.

At Babrcif, the medina gates, sits the transport terminus, daily awash with taxis and buses, mopeds, carts, donkeys, street vendors, cats and chaos. People are swallowed or spilt to the brim of the dusty Square, as locals drink coffee and smoke outside the cafés. Boys are climbing gates and walking, arms spread, on precarious walltops under the blinding noonday sun. And at midnight amongst the charcoaled giblet sellers, there are shouts of young men playing football, passing the ball between passing cars. This is the border between old and older. This is where the tarmac turns to cobbles and leaves the automotive twenty first century firmly outside the wall and its Moorish arches. Here is truly a portal in time and space.

On the inside, it feels a lot like Dickens, dirty and dark, sinister yet compelling. Full of urchins and poverty. And in the gloom the most vibrant colours glow, on fruit or linen, yellow slippers, hanging pastel bras and rainbows of leather, sequins and silks. Hammered copper and tin catch the sly shafts of light in the mostly sunless maze. The walls are sad and robust, like the elders, like old oaks. So much has happened within the weave of twisting turning paths and alleys. All human life is here, babies are born, men and women fall in love, people and animals live and die. Inside and outside the medina, Fes is a place where day and night, everyone is going somewhere and nothing that can be done standing still, can’t be done better in determined forward motion.

Within the labyrinthine medina, voices warp and echo from somewhere within the nine thousand passages, haunting as the ancient ghosts of this medieval city. In the corners and doorways, and from wooden shuttered booths like caves in the crumbling white stone of the buildings, voices chatter and swarm. Frantic arms gesticulate, rising defiantly above the din to be heard. It is less of a market than a throbbing ants nest, an intense hum of activity. At each turn, the experienced hustling lads hover like wasps around the sweet mint tea of tourist euros offering hammam or manger or hashish, anything for a price and always negotiable. To every stallholder you are my friend or my brudder, and this very special service or deal you are wanting, is for you and only you and one time only, right here, right now. And a barrow passes, its wheel buzzing loudly at the mudguard as all are forced to the wall to let it pass. Luckily, and unlike Marrakech, the Fes Medina’s alleys are too narrow for scooters and their choking fumes.

Warmth that is more than just the North African climate can be felt in the narrow shady lanes that amble and twist and yet there is always a tremor of invisible menace. Cool guys sit in twos or threes, talking sport and watching girls whilst selling cigarettes from a cardboard box. Holy men count beads, still and absorbed on doorsteps and filthy tortoiseshell cats, all skin and ribs, forage hungrily amongst the refuse.  Women greet women and men greet men, with kisses on both cheeks. Never the genders shall kiss. Despite the seedy Arab sexiness, these Moroccans are almost prim, almost innocent. Here women keep house and men work. Surrounded proudly by secondhand shoes or primary coloured ladies outfits (sic), fluttering like newly hanged cadavers on the whitewashed walls, leathered market traders make eye contact. Dark Arabic women look demure and don’t. Children smile and say, ‘bonjour’, and not all of them ask for money.

The rooftops are a safe retreat, though the web continues in the sky with turnings and connections from roof terrace to roof terrace. There are cushions and rugs and endless cloudless space above, the sun blazes harsh and fierce. In every direction there are satellite dishes, carpets hanging, laundry and tiny ant people about their business. From high up, the medina almost seems to make some sense. Cockerels cry out intermittently against the rhythmic hammering of constant repair and renewal, the basin of the medina repeating each knock and tap. A dog is ever barking. Several times daily the call to prayer reverberates throughout the city. To the untrained ear, the hard-wired megaphones seem to sing and answer each other from east to west, across the layered rooftops. Gossip is endemic, the grapevine fast and thorough; they know you’re coming before you do in an everlasting soap opera with regional variations … live! Here is an air of perpetual transaction; the staccato flow of give and take between sun baked people from sprawling families, familiar with God and good fresh food, hard lives and so many other opinions.

Rooted deep in the Moroccan psyche, pulses a deep and ancient calmness born from connection to each other, their common needs and a solidly pragmatic approach to survival. The land here is wet and fertile, more mouth watering than an oasis; it’s a huge larder at the top of the Sahara Desert. This is why Fes is here, it is needed. Relationship is primary here and strangers welcomed. Food is respected and valued, little is discarded and everything has a use. It is eaten attentively and served as to a special guest; with gilded plates and silver trays and chilli sauce, cardamom carrots and shredded radish, with humility and perhaps because good hospitality is a tenet of Islamic law.

The way of life for this collection of communities, occupying different regions of the medina (with its sixteen miles of perimeter wall) each with its own mosque, home bakery and fountain, has not changed so much over the past millennium. People here are not so busy arguing with their place in the scheme of things; they are mostly working, sleeping, praying and reproducing. This quiet, insistent continuity is palpable in the fabric of Fes, the structure of the medina is too tight, too set to permit much sudden change … and it is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Fes el Bali is a hard place to arrive in, hypnotic, repellent and magnetic. The air is finer here and warm, the atmosphere rapid and intoxicating. It calls for alertness, and rewards with the minutiae of cameos, unfolding action and a slightly increased pulse. There are always more surprises. It bewitches and entrances before it exhausts; there is nowhere like it. And so it is harder still to leave behind, for in the heart and mind of any traveller, a part feels just like Fes Medina.

Biljinder and his father, Kundan (both chefs) are there for ‘when the stomach rumbles.’ They specialise in Chaats; essentially street food, made in-house and daily with prime ingredients including homemade paneer (cheese) and garden fresh spices. Rita’s gets through half a tonne of potatoes each week, testament to the irresistibility of Alu Tikka Chaat – two potato cutlets with chickpeas, tamarind sauce and yoghurt — at under three quid. ‘This is raw Indian, not English Indian food,’ warns Biljinder, and he’s right, the two are continents apart. Here in sunny Southall are the untamed, raucous flavours of hot and tropical India, no cream to soften the bite. ‘And we rarely eat poppadoms,’ he sighs.

The proud black Homburgs of the Orthodox Jews on Leicester Road speak of another era. Outside Brackman’s Bakery, the place to meet and exchange news over a smoked salmon bagel for the last 84 years, they mingle amongst the constant flurry of activity. In the array of Orthodox to more liberal eateries between here and Kings Road (the two main streets that form the heart of the enclave), I have the thrilling sense of being an outsider in a strange land. There are signs in Hebrew, and subtler signs in the people. Many women wear wigs to hide their real hair. Under the kippah, (skullcap) young boys sport sparse, dangling ringlets in deference to a biblical injunction not to shave the corners of the head. Besuited men display tzissit (stringlets), hanging from ‘any four cornered garment’ to keep the wearer ‘on the straight and narrow.’ These are the clues to a people living by the Talmud’s dictate, following a 5000 year old religion that has honoured and kept its roots wherever it has found itself.

Across the community’s clique of restaurants and delicatessen, a rabbinical supervisor from the Manchester Beth Din is present full time. Kosher eating, rich with ceremony and ritual, has strict and ancient laws which make specific demands on all elements of food preparation. A lettuce can take fifteen minutes to wash as eating insects is not simply unpleasant but prohibited by God. Before eating Challah (bread), the most sacred of foods,  hands are washed three times and a complex prayer recited. Wine can only earn the kosher stamp if Jews perform every stage of the process, from pressing to serving. Meat and dairy cannot be mixed in the kitchen or on the plate. This enforced attention to detail makes for a truly wonderful eating experience, in taking the comfort of Jewish penicillin (hot chicken soup by the tub from Shefa Mehadrin) or sampling paper-thin beef Carpaccio at the gourmet Rimonim

Despite a reputation for being a ‘closed’ neighbourhood, non-Jewish patrons are made very welcome. Whether Eastern European, Sephardic or Israeli by descent, hospitality is understood and a pithy education in what to eat, how and when, is offered everywhere, with warmth. For me, the simple foods with peasant roots are the most tantalising. At J.S.Kosher, (a legend in every Manchester Jew’s childhood), steaming, tender salt– beef with gherkins and coleslaw, or crispy, nutty falafel with homemade hoummous are staples I would never tire of.  The only complaint owner Michael Issler hears is ‘too much food on the plate!’  Within this solid tradition, a forward looking trend seeks to serve strictly kosher versions of more familiar snacks. Minestrone and a sandwich, or the light  moist rice croquettes in Italian herb, basil and tomato sauce are top sellers at nearby Manna, which focuses on the vegetarian aspect of the menu; no meat allows them to serve dairy. ‘You don’t have to eat kosher foods to eat kosher,’ smiles the owner, Jeremy Libbert. Only the mezuzah on the doorframe (for the eagle-eyed) hints at its adherence to the rules. It is a thoroughly modern European style cafe.

As I head back to London, nibbling at slices of Ox tongue from the epic Titanic’s deli, I feel a sadness. The sense of community and the sacred respect for food is something lost to the urbanite English. I already miss the ceremony, the attentiveness and passion of the people. I remember the salt-beef sandwich shop in Golders Green (run by two old boys in their eighties) and make an appointment with myself to get there soon.

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