My days are very confused now. There was excitement in filming the port at Tangier- something that I found very revealing and at times dangerous. It was compelling, more importantly it gave me the idea that I might have something original in this film. Since then, I haven't filmed anything significant in days. I'm running out of things to ask Abdullah. Even when we sit to talk, I can tell these on-camera interviews won't be dynamic. There is information there, but I can't put together an exciting film with it.

We've come off a twelve hour bus ride to Meknes, getting in at 4am. The ride was miserable, rough and noisy, I could barely sleep. In the middle of the night, I stared at the lights of passing cars playing beautifully on the ceiling while everyone slept.

Abdullah brought me here to see his home, to meet his family. We sit in the bus station for three hours waiting for the city to come alive. I can hardly stay awake, resting my head on the cafe table we're sitting at. I fall asleep, without knowing it, in the taxi to Abdullah's village. At one point my head falls onto the shoulder of the stranger sitting next to me. I'm reminded of mornings in London, years ago, when my sister would watch me fall asleep on someone's shoulder as we rode the underground to school. I would jolt, wake suddenly, and catch her laughing at me. Sometimes I would laugh with her, other times the person next to me looked pissed off so I just ignored it.

When we get to Abdullah's house, we drink some coffee and eat a few pastries brough in by his mother. We sleep for another two hours. Abdullah gets up to pray, but I stay in bed for another hour.

I can't figure out what it is that's been gnawing at me lately. Every so often, I get irritated, impatient, I lose my temper with Abdullah. I think it's many things combined. In part it's his character- he can be arrogant and condescending, but that's not unusual. At other times he suddenly becomes helpless and asks "what do you think of me? Do you think I'm a good person?" These aren't questions I want to answer.

It's also the fact that sometimes nothing happens for days on end. I'm making the film, of course, recording his life, his family and experiences. But there's nothing to them. He admits he has a very shallow relationship with his family and no close friends. We spend hours talking about the misery of his life. Sometimes I can sympathise. Other times I try to look at it objectively, simply to try to build the story. But after enough time, the truth is that I just want to get away from it.

We spent most days just wasting time. Drinking coffee, sitting in his house talking, always changing his mind, waiting, moving to another place to drink coffee. I'm drinking dozens of cups a day. We meet Abdullah's sister and her children. She seems very kind, doesn't show any of the pain or bitterness that Abdullah holds. Her children are beautiful- I find myself laughing with them for the first time in days. Abdullah's brother and brother in law are also in the house. No on talks to anyone. I spend my time playing with the kids. Downstairs, while having dinner, Abdullah tells me this is what it's like in his house, this is why he hates being at home. He says there's no sense of family, no communication or love. We manage, for the first time, to have an ordinary conversation about religion without arguing. On the television beside us, Morocco beats Benin 4-0.

At night, Abdullah is very disturbed by the thought of sleeping in his house with his brother there. He hasn't yet told me exactly what happened between them, but I imagine it was something so serious that now they hardly talk to each other. So we walk around and around the streets of the Agourai kasbah, looking for a friend's place to stay at. Along the way we meet Izzedin, a friend who's on the local council. We sit at a cafe with him and drink some coffee. Even around his old friends, Abdullah is tense and nervous. No one else but me knows that he's planning to get into Europe.

Later we're walking around the kasbah again looking for somewhere to stay. Along the way, we follow a group of boys Abdullah knows into a tiny room at the corner of two lanes. The space is about four meters long- it's more of a storage closet than a room. The walls are plastered with hundreds of pages ripped from magazines. Every space on the wall is covered with ladies, guns, some politicians, animals, football players, a Quranic quote scrawled over an advertisement for perfume. I have no idea who these people are in the room, but they all seem to know each other well. Abdullah tells me I can record them, so I start filming. He tells me they're all butchers. As music is blaring loudly in this tiny space, the boys are handing around pipes, smoking kif, drinking beers and wine. Sometimes they laugh, there's singing, yelling, someone runs out of the room, someone else comes in, I'm introduced again, they look into the camera and welcome the audience to Morocco. This goes on for almost an hour. In the middle of this, Abdullah looks very uncomfortable. He looks like he's trying to have fun, to drop his burdens for a moment and do something vapid, but he can't.

Later, when we're having dinner alone at his house, Abdullah tells me that's what he's trying to get away from. Kids wasting their time, smoking and drinking while talking about how much they love Islam. Just trying to forget there lives because they have no jobs, not enough food. They look happy because they smoke, he tells me, it just takes them away and makes them forget everything around them.

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