Cairo Before the Revolution (which might as well have never hapened)

Explanatory Note

This post was written during the 'Arab Spring' about a visit in August the previous year (before I started blogging). Nobody yet knew that the revolution would remove President Mubarak and there would be free and fair elections and a new regime. And that would be where the good news stopped.

Most demonstrators were (I think) hoping for a new liberal, secular Egypt, but that view made little impression at the ballot-box and they got Mohamed Morsi, leader of the Muslim Brotherhood. Morsi never stood a chance, the levers of power remained in the hands of the military and the Americans wanted another 'strong man' they could deal with. He was deposed in July 2013 in a military coup. General Abdel Fatah el-Sisi became president and regularised his position with the usual fraudulent election. The Revolution was over; everything had changed, and nothing had changed.

Return to Cairo - First Impressions

We spent a week in Cairo last July. It was hot, dusty and crowded, but there was no sign of a revolution. Not since 1980 have we spent more than a day or two in the city, so we saw many changes, some expected, others more surprising.

The 6th of October Bridge

The Cairo of 2010 is a much tidier and neater city. It has far to go before it gleams like Seattle or Guilin, and you still need to watch your feet to avoid falling into holes or tripping over protruding cables, but at least it no longer resembles a building site after a typhoon. The traffic is calmer too, though a first time visitor might find that hard to believe. The standard of driving has improved little, but modern road systems impose their own discipline, and the donkey carts that roamed the streets following a set of rules entirely of their own, have (almost) all gone. You no longer see the foul-smelling heavy green rubbish carts, pulled by tired horses and driven by boys as tired as their horses and malodorous as their cargo. I do not know how modern Cairo deals with its waste, but I hope the sons and daughters of these rubbish boys are now at school, where they ought to be. Dress has changed, too. In 1980, my memory claims that only a minority of woman wore headscarves and there were no veiled faces. Now headscarves are almost universal, while veils are not uncommon. Men, on the other hand, have overwhelmingly taken to western dress, while thirty years ago about a quarter wore Arab costume.

Our room in the Ramses Hilton faced the Nile, but the other side of the building overlooks the 6th of October flyover and the bus station beneath. Although the main action in the last few weeks has been in Tahrir Square, two blocks south, we have seen many television pictures of crowds milling, or charging, under the flyover, and of tanks creating barriers from overturned vehicles. Never have rooms on the ‘wrong’ side of this hotel been so popular.

Ours was an unusual visit to Cairo as we made no attempt to visit the pyramids. We saw them in 2009 and 1980 (and in 1965, in my case) so this time we looked at some of Cairo’s less ancient – though still old - monuments. We could not, though, resist the lure of the Egyptian museum, just beyond the bus station, and prominent in recent TV pictures. The collection is disorganised but magnificent. Building work has started on a new the museum and after the move I hope it will still be magnificent but better organised.

The Cairo Citadel

Cairo’s citadel sits on a rocky outcrop some 3 km southwest of Tahrir Square. The fortified complex was begun by Salah al-Din (Saladin) in the twelfth century, though its crowning glory, the Mohammed Ali Mosque, was built between 1824 and 1848.

The Mohammed Ali Mosque, Cairo Citadel

The huge interior was filled with tourists, not all appropriately dressed, and has become a secular space.

Inside the Mohammed Ali Mosque, Cairo Citadel

The nearby medieval mosque of Sultan al-Nasir....

Mosque of Sultan al-Nasir, Cairo citadel

....still feels like a religious building and features a magnificent gold and marble mihrab.

The Mihrab and Minbar in the Sultan al-Nasir Mosque,Cairo Citadel

From outside the mosque there is a fine view over Cairo to the pyramids beyond - at least there was on a clear day in 1980, last August the pyramids had disappeared into a smoggy haze, but the view looking down was still good.

Looking down from the citadel at the Sultan Hassan and Al Rifa'i mosques, Cairo

After coffee, where the waiter attempted to pass off an obsolete 25 piastre note (worth 3p) as a 25 Egyptian Pound note (worth £3, if there was such a thing) we inspected the police museum. We saw the cells where the British had once incarcerated Anwar Sadat, and a model of the ‘battle’ of Ismailiya Police Station in 1952, in which Lynne’s father played a small role as a national service squaddie.

The Prison Cells, Police Museum, Cairo Citadel

The Ibn Tulun Mosque

We spent more time haggling over the fare to the Ibn Tulun mosque than we did in the taxi. Built in the ninth and tenth centuries, this massive mosque has an unusual spiral staircase around the outside of its stumpy minaret. The huge central courtyard, open to the sky, is impressive in its simplicity, and also in its quietness – we had the place to ourselves. (For more about the Ibn Tulun Mosque, click here).

Minaret, Ibn Tulun Mosque, Cairo

The Gayer-Anderson House

Built against the outer wall of the mosque, the Gayer-Anderson House is actually two old houses knocked together by Major Gayer-Anderson, a retired British soldier who lived there from 1935 to 1942. He filled the houses with antiques, including several ornate harem screens, and with a little imagination you can convince yourself you are really in seventeenth century Cairo. The roof terrace, which served as a set in the Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me, affords a fine view of the Mohammed Ali mosque.

The Citadel from the Gayer-Anderson Roof Terrace

Cairo's Coptic Quarter

Cairo’s metro is cheap, clean and efficient. The lines were designed to link Cairenes with their places of work and are generally of less use to those heading for tourist sites, but four stops south from Tahrir Square is Mari Girgis (St George’s), the gateway to Cairo’s Coptic quarter.

Mari Girgis

Some 10% of Egypt’s population are Coptic Christians. Pope Shenouda III* has led the church since 1971 and overseen a revival while keeping good relations with the country’s Islamic leaders. The bomb that killed twenty-one worshippers in an Alexandrian church on New Year’s Eve showed that extremists do exist, but the vast majority of Egyptians, Christian and Muslim, favour peaceful coexistence.

St George's Church in Cairo's Coptic Quarter

In 1980 the Coptic quarter was a warren of narrow streets and high walls, with hidden entrances into ornate churches. Now the visitor is greeted by the extensive grounds of the Coptic Museum and the remains of the Roman castle. The excellent museum covers the long history of the Copts in Egypt, while more literally covering the ground that was home to many thousands of Copts for several hundreds of years.

The Coptic Quarter, Cairo

A small area of narrow streets remain and there you can visit the church in whose undercroft the Holy Family stayed after the flight to Egypt. The Nile now runs 300m away, but used to wash the walls of the castle and, by a happy coincidence, the very spot where the original Moses basket was plucked from the bulrushes lies just behind the church of the Holy Family. You may believe all this, if you wish.

Where Moses was found in the bullrushes (allegedly)

It is sad to see the whole quarter becoming museumised, but it was inevitable. The Copts have chosen to move out of their medieval ghetto - and who can blame them?

Eating in Cairo - Dining with the Expats and Egyptian Middle Classes

Central Cairo offers few eating options, but nobody visits Egypt for the cuisine. Ignoring the overpriced international food at the major hotels, we followed the Rough Guide’s recommendations.

The dimly-lit Estoril, down an equally dingy alley, provided good food at modest prices. The other customers seemed to be expatriate Europeans, while at the brighter Felfela just north of Tahrir Square there was a more mixed crowd of younger middle class Egyptians and foreigners. I can recommend the stuffed vine leaves, spiced meatballs and several variations on the theme of pigeon.

The nearby haven of peace that is the Café Riche serves an older clientele. The future president, Gamal Nasser, plotted the overthrow of King Farouk here in 1952, while last weekend Robert Fisk, the Independent’s Middle East correspondent, retreated to the café from the mayhem outside. Lynne and I used it more than once as a refuge from the midday sun. A waiter in a long blue robe would produce a satisfying bowl of lentil soup and a cold beer, and serve them with a smile.

Sharia Talaat Harb near the Café Riche. Cairo

Eating in Cairo - Kushari and Fuul

All these places serve alcohol but, as Cairo is largely an Islamic city, they are the exception rather than the rule. The restaurants used by most Egyptians are cheap, often crowded, but can be good. At Gad, on 26th of July Street, we walked through the busy take-away and up the stairs to the packed restaurant. I had a long wait for my chilli dusted Alexandrian style liver. It was excellent, but Lynne had finished her fish before I could take my first forkful.

Abou Tarek, which claims to be Cairo’s best kushari restaurant, is also crowded and you expect to share a table. Kushari is a mixture of noodles, lentils and rice topped with caramelised onions. Served with a spicy tomato sauce, the combination of sweetness and carbohydrates makes it the ultimate Egyptian comfort food.

Kushari and fuul are two dishes which should be eaten by every visitor to Egypt, but are often missed. Fuul beans are similar to dried broad beans. Boiled until they start disintegrating they are the breakfast of choice for all Egyptians, whatever their status. Fuul is also popular in Sudan, where for many poorer people it is not just breakfast but lunch and dinner too. In the morning it is eaten with a hard boiled egg or fermented cheese. I like fuul best lightly crushed, mixed with raw onion and cheese and sprinkled with sesame oil and chilli, though perhaps not at breakfast.

Egyptian coffee is always a delight

Words Written Without the Benefit if Hindsight

Hot and noisy, with the continuous blare of car horns, Cairo seemed frenetic but not rebellious, though Egypt is, obviously, a police state. Travelling outside the city involves negotiating regular police roadblocks. Every crossroads has an armed guard with at least one man kneeling behind a heavy metal shield. Parts of Alexandria seem to have more policemen than ordinary citizens. The government is not particularly corrupt, by the standards of its continent, but low-level corruption is endemic. Repression is felt most by the politically aware and Egyptian democracy is not about getting out the vote but controlling the count. With healthy economic growth discontent was muted, but Egypt is not immune to the world’s problems, and people have started to notice what they are missing.

Mubarak will go, he is after all, 82, but that may not happen before September. Egypt may contrive an orderly transition to democracy, or the army may impose their man in the usual fraudulent election.

Harem Screens, Coutyard of the Gayer-Anderson House, Cairo

It is not up to foreigners, or their governments, to tell the Egyptian people what to do, but we should be quietly cheerleading for democracy. The Americans, having bankrolled Mubarak for years, are wavering, reluctant to see the back of a man who brought stability and a pro-American foreign policy. They seem worried by the thought of democracy and in particular by the Muslim Brotherhood; it must be the name, everything the Brotherhood have said over the last few weeks has been a model of moderation. Some American commentators even appear to judge the merit of any potential new government on how good it will be for Israel, not on how good it will be for Egypt.

To support another son-of-a-bitch just because he is ‘our son-of-a-bitch’ would be deeply hypocritical and morally wrong. I think it would also be politically shortsighted.

I hope that when this is over Egypt will emerge with a robust liberal democracy, it is what the people deserve. Whether or not that happens only time will tell. [Yeah, it told.]

*Shenouda III died in March 2012 at the age of 88. He was succeeded by Tawadros II, the 118th man to hold the office which stretches back in an unbroken line to (allegedly) the apostle Mark in the year 33.

A Shark in the Red Sea - my brush with mortality

Last month a German tourist was killed snorkelling off one of Egypt’s Red Sea resorts. Nothing that follows is intended to make light of that terrible event.

I should also apologise to those who have heard me tell this story in a school assembly or on one of several other stages. I would justify my repetition merely by claiming that it is a good story – and a true one, to boot.

  

In the course of this blog I have occasionally had a bitch about the tourist industry. I’ve done it here, here and here. Nothing winds me up more than the ‘all-inclusive resort’. There is something intrinsically wrong about resorts designed to minimise holidaymakers’ contact with the host country. I understand people wanting a rest and a complete break while on vacation, but to visit somebody else’s country and to treat the local people, language and customs as an ignorable inconvenience seems to me downright rude.

I am thus no great fan of the resorts the Egyptians have built on their Red Sea coast, but my complaint is not that it has been developed – opening up some of the world’s best diving is, surely, a plus - but how it has been developed.

We visited Hurghada in August 1990, taking a day trip from Luxor and driving across the Eastern desert. There was then just one major hotel, but the building was about to start in earnest, sites were marked off and ready for the bulldozers.

The nearest thing to a diving centre was a beach hut where a man rented out snorkelling equipment. Having enjoyed my lunch and the ensuing nap I wandered down there and hired a snorkel and a face mask. He wanted me to have flippers, too, but they were an extra 75p. There are times when I am astounded by the perversity of my own meanness, I find £500 easier to spend that £5, and as for 75p, well its good money and I didn’t really need the flippers, did I?

The coral reef starts barely twenty metres from the shore in water that is swimming-pool warm and no more than shoulder deep. Hanging face down in the water above the reef I was amazed by the huge variety of shapes, textures and hues in the coral. I looked down, like god surveying his creation, and watched the inhabitants, as varied and brightly coloured as the coral, going about their fishy business. Then I moved on, effortlessly gliding over a small shoal of sliver grey fish the length of my forearm but almost completely translucent. I hovered over another patch, watched that for a while and moved on again.

After an hour or so I realised I was developing a problem. Being sometimes above water level and sometimes below, my back had felt cool, but the August sun is ferocious and I slowly realised it had been exposed to powerful rays for longer than was good for it.

I set off in the direction of the shore, glancing back under me as I turned. What I saw froze my blood. There, in the deeper water beyond the coral was a menacing shape. It was a huge shape, it was a dark shape; it was, without a doubt, a shark.

Suppressing my panic, I struck out for the shore. After ten adrenalin powered strokes I risked another glance downwards and backwards, hoping to see a bored shark gliding gracefully off into the deep water. But it was still there, no nearer I noticed with relief, but no further away either.

I was swimming as quickly as I could, but trying hard not to splash, as splashing, I seemed to remember, would make me look like an injured fish and attract the shark.

The shark was still keeping station. I had nearly reached the edge of the reef and would soon be over the sand. The water would become shallower, but that brought no comfort - I was sure I had read about sharks attacking in less than a metre of water.

By the time I was over the sand, the shark had reached the reef. Safety was not far away but I knew that, however fast I swam, the shark could close the gap with one powerful flick of his tail.

I swam on, ignoring the tiredness in my arms and legs. If only I had hired the flippers I would be safe by now. One half of my brain panicked, while the other half ticked on coolly, even mundanely. Having reviewed my reading on the subject of shark attacks the cool half turned its attention to my meanness and considered the irony of dying for the sake of 75 pence. It was not, I thought, my whole life that was destined to flash before my eyes as the jaws closed, but a vision of 75 pence of loose change.

Another ten strokes and my chest would bump into the beach, surely then I would be safe. I risked one last look back. I could see the shark had now crossed the reef and was rippling over the sand, and I could see something else, too. The dark shape from which I had been swimming with barely suppressed panic was not a shark at all - it was my own shadow on the bottom of the sea.

I was momentarily stunned by a feeling of relief, then I started laughing. I am quite good at laughing at my own stupidity, even if I would rather others did not do it. I pulled myself together, walked up the beach as though nothing had happened and covered my reddening back with a towel

I am fortunate that the most frightening thing I have ever encountered (so far, anyway) turned out to be no more than my own shadow. That event confirmed something I had long suspected; if you ignore the imaginary fears, the real world is actually a surprisingly friendly and reassuring place.


PS The more I read that last line the more sanctimonious it becomes - but I can't quite bring myself to delete it.

March 2009 - A further thought. There is a well known (and possibly even true) factoid that more people are killed each year by falling coconuts than by sharks. I was recently relaxing outside our chalet (for want of a beter word) at Philip Kutty's Farm, on an island in the extraordinarily beautiful backwaters of Kerala. A ripe coconut launched itself from an adjacent tree and hit the ground less than two metres from where I sat. The earth, or at least Philip Kutty's Island, shook. Had Isaac Newton been from Kerala rather than Lincolnshire he would have invented the bomb shelter, not gravity. I was in more real danger from the coconut than from an imaginary shark - but it was all over before I knew it was happening, which made it a lot less frightening.

Alexandria

The new Library of Alexandria

One August evening in 1966 the SS Nevasa docked at Alexandria carrying over a thousand sixth formers on one of the then fashionable ‘educational cruises’. In the morning, the students embarked on a fleet of buses bound for Cairo.

Me aged 15 and the Sphynx, aged 4500
August 1966

I was one of the youngest of those students, a few weeks short of my sixteenth birthday and taking my first steps outside Western Europe. It changed my life. We drove through the delta and were then shown the pyramids, the Egyptian museum and the citadel. I still recall marvelling at the donkeys and the palm trees in the delta, at the heat and the honking traffic in the city and at the colours and the costumes everywhere. I particularly remember sitting in front of the Sphinx and telling myself ‘you are here, you are really here’ and slapping my leg to prove it was no dream. I had not believed it possible to actually stand beside something so fabulous and remote. I had seen the pyramids in books and until then I had assumed that in books they would remain.

To borrow a cliché, I thought it the ‘trip of a lifetime’. I had no idea how much easier and cheaper travel would become, and I was seriously underestimating the opportunities ‘a lifetime’ could throw up. I have been fortunate, and many more times, and in many more places, I have slapped my leg and told myself that yes, I was really there.

Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandrian Quartet had been on the reading list for the cruise – and I had diligently read the first book – but we had largely ignored the city in our rush to the pyramids, as thousands of cruise ship passengers still do today. Lynne and I have been to Cairo three times since then, but I had never been back to Alexandria and Lynne had never been there at all, so when we visited Cairo last month it seemed appropriate to rectify the omission.

One minor disappointment marred the Nevasa trip. Having driven south through the delta, we were scheduled to return by the desert road. I had never seen a desert and was excited by the prospect, but the road was closed and we had to return the way we came. This time there was no problem and although I have travelled through several deserts since, I still experienced a frisson of excitement as we set off in the relative quiet of a Cairo dawn.

The desert road might have been romatic in 1966, but today it is a six-lane highway. The poor maintenance and erratic traffic provided a little interest, but essentially the trip was as dull as a hundred motorway miles usually are. And we passed through scrubland on the edge of the cultivated delta rather than true desert.

Egypt’s Alexandria was one of several founded by Alexander the Great as he rampaged from Greece to India via North Africa. For defensive reasons he placed the city on the narrow strip of land dividing Lake Maryut (or Mareotis in Greek) from the sea. It thus became a long thin city and retained this shape even after outgrowing the confines of the lake. Today its 4 million people live in a 30 km strip along the Mediterranean coast, but the desert road from Cairo still arrives at the lake’s north shore before tracking round it.

Durrell describes a duck hunt on Mareotis. The well-healed participants were punted out to a pavilion on stilts where they spent the evening carousing. A short sleep and a hearty breakfast later they stealthily set out into the marshes for the dawn slaughter. With this in my head, I was unprepared for my first sight of the lake. We topped a slight rise to be confronted by a sheet of water, the far side lined with towering petro-chemical plants, their flares a dirty yellow against the clean morning sky. There are still ducks on the lake; sometimes they quack, sometimes they cough.

The Haramlik Palace, Alexandria

The pleasure grounds of Montazah lie at the city’s eastern end. For a small price, you can drive through well-tended gardens, around a few hotels and down to a series of private beaches. Ramadan was in August this year, the usual Cairene holiday month, so those who could took their holidays in July. The beaches, both private and public were full and Cairo was, allegedly, empty - though to me it looked as frenetic and crowded as ever. Also within Montazah, is the once royal palace of Haramlik, now a Presidental palace. In 1952, during the coup that would eventually bring the Alexandrian born Gamal Abdel Nasser to power, King Farouk fled from here into exile.

After leaving Montazah it became clear that nothing of interest is deemed to have happened in Alexandria between the burning of the Great Library in AD 293 and the opening of the new library in 2002.



The Roman Theatre
Alexandria

The Alexandria national museum is much newer than the Cairo museum. Many exhibits have a local and/or Ptolemaic provenance and are better displayed, but Cairo’s shear quantity of artefacts – never mind its ramshackle charm – makes this very much second best.



Pompey,s Column,
Alexandria

The Roman theatre is small, but beautifully preserved, while Pompey’s column is an impressive piece of masonry set on mound above a nilometer. It was actually erected by Diocletian rather than Pompey, but his name lacks the romantic cachet. Below the ground, lie a temple of Serapis and the Daughter Library. By 50 BC the Great Library of Alexandria contained over half a million manuscripts. As it continued to grow, it spawned this subsidiary ‘Daughter Library’. The Mother Library, stuffed with ‘pagan knowledge’ was torched by Christian mobs in 193 AD; her Daughter suffered a similar fate a century later.

The Catacombs of Kom es-Shoqfa are reputedly Alexandria’s most memorable monument. The largest Roman burial site in Egypt is entered by a spiral staircase seemingly screwed into the earth. There are family burial niches, a triclinium where relatives reclined on stone coaches to feast in honour memory of the dead, and an atmospheric central tomb guarded by bearded stone serpents and medusa-headed shields. There is also a ban on photography which is, I discovered, rigidly enforced.

One of the Seven Wonders of the World, The Pharos, was partly dismantled in 700 AD then reduced to rubble by an earthquake in 1303. We had a look at the toytown citadel of Fort Quaitbey, which replaced the building that replaced the Pharos. Down by the beach with the bathers and trinket sellers I struggled to get a feel for the place as it once had been.



The Fish Market
Alexandria

Lunch was a relief after so much antiquity. The Fish Market is an upmarket restaurant aimed at foreigners rather than an actual market; it might have been better if it was. The ‘salads’, perhaps mezze would be a better word, were excellent. We enjoyed the tahini, hummus, baba ghanoush and other dips we could not name, scooped up with flat Egyptian bread, but the unidentified fish seemed tired and the strips of squid had far more chew than is desirable.

Across the curve of the Eastern Harbour we could see the new library, a squashed spiral of ever-so shiny granite, sparkling in the sun. We drove round the almost elegant corniche (Michael Palin described it as ‘like Cannes with acne’) to Alexandria’s newest jewel. With a cultural centre and art galleries, in addition to many, many books, the striking building is a fitting successor to the great library of antiquity.

We spent most of the day being driven from ancient site to ancient site, but the modern city surrounds them and would itself repay exploration. I had naively assumed that because Alexandria was on the Mediterranean, and was once a Greek city, it would be wealthier and more liberal than Cairo. It was quickly obvious that neither was the case. Many streets looked poor and the women were even more covered up. Sharifa, our guide, told us of a Christian friend who moved to Cairo when her husband died because it was too difficult walking round without a headscarf – not that this troubled Sharifa, though she had come with us from Cairo. In the 1950s several hundred thousand Greeks remained in Alexandria, now there are virtually none. ‘Where have they gone?’ I asked. Sharifa shrugged. ‘Assimilated,’ she suggested, but with no great confidence.

E M Forster produced a guidebook to Alexandria; Lawrence Durrell and Nobel Prize winning poet C P Cavafy, wrote about the city in their different ways, and all described a formerly cosmopolitan metropolis in terminal decline. Modern Alexandria would point to the library as a sign of its rebirth, but there remains a sense that this once great city has been by-passed by history and overtaken by brash upstarts like Cairo. Alexandria, though, is still worth much more than a day trip and it is a shame that cruise passengers will continue to merely pass through on their way to somewhere else.

See also: When Aunty Edith went to Alexandria

When Aunty Edith went to Alexandria

The event, or rather non-event, related below did actually happen. Over the intervening forty years my imagination has played fast and loose with my memory, resulting, I suspect, in more than several embellishments. I cannot vouch for the literal truth of every word that follows, but it remains, I believe, true in spirit. All names (except Alexandria) have been changed to protect the guilty.

My Aunty Edith never had a good word to say about anyone. I would hate that to be said of me, so I shall hastily say a good word about Aunty Edith. Aunty Edith was a respectable woman. More precisely, Aunty Edith was a very respectable woman. Even more precisely, a teeth-clenchingly, eye-wateringly respectable lady. Unfortunately, she rarely showed others the respect she took as her due.

She once requested investment advice, and her bank duly sent an advisor to see her. ‘My dear,’ I heard her tell my grandmother afterwards, ‘he was the most peculiar looking person.’ This could have meant his hair was too long, or too short; his tie was too bright, or too drab; his lapels were too wide, or too thin. Maybe he had used a ball-point instead of a fountain pen, written with his left hand, or had sat in the wrong chair. Good forbid that he had a beard or his eyes were too close together or (whisper it quietly) he wore brown shoes. There were many ways to transgress against Aunty Edith’s largely arbitrary, and not entirely consistent, code of behaviour.

We can probably be sure that in a small town on the South Wales coast in the 1960’s the advisor was not from an ethnic minority. Aunty Edith would have had difficulty understanding the concept of racism; everybody was inferior to her and it was thus axiomatic that the more different a person was, the more inferior they must be. Having brown skin was, without doubt, several degrees worse then wearing brown shoes, but to Aunty Edith it was all part of a continuum.

Like many unconscious racists, her racism started at home. She often spoke disparagingly of the ‘Welshies’ – a word I have never heard anyone else use. That she herself was Welsh; born in the Valleys with the maiden name Thomas, and speaking with an accent that could come from nowhere else, never seemed to cross her mind. The Welshies were the ‘working classes’, the ‘great unwashed’, the little people whose existence she regretted but without whom life would have been impossible.

Aunty Edith was not, I am happy to say, actually a relation. She was married to one of my grandmother’s many cousins. Godfrey Bevan was a mild mannered man and a banker by profession (think Captain Mainwearing, not million pound bonuses). He and Edith had no children and, for some reason, he spent as much time out of the house as possible. He spent a lot of that time at the ‘Corsairs,’ a drinking club down by the harbour. Godfrey died in the mid 1960’s. I will not say that he drank himself to death to get away from his wife, but I cannot deny that the thought has crossed my mind.

A year or so later Aunty Edith took a Mediterranean cruise, maybe to cheer herself up after the death of her husband, though I suspect she had largely forgotten who he was.

In Alexandria she was met by expatriate acquaintances living in that once cosmopolitan city. She visited their house and then, for some now forgotten reason, had to return to the ship on her own.

A taxi was found, the destination communicated and the fare agreed. Even today, Egyptian taxis rarely have meters, and even more rarely use them. Locals instinctively know what to pay; foreigners are well advised to negotiate a price before starting out. It will be several times the local fare, but it is your duty, as a representative of a rich country, to pay up cheerfully.

I heard her tell the story several times and though I was a teenage boy and would rather have been anywhere than trapped in a room listening to Aunty Edith, I can still hear the indignation and near panic in her voice as she remembered the events.

No one tells a story twice using exactly the same words, but she had certain stock phrases:

‘He drove me for miles and miles...’ Well, Alexandria is a very long thin city.

‘He drove me up hill and down dale...’ Unlikely, Alexandria is a very flat city.

‘My dear, he was the most villainous looking man you can imagine.’ That probably only meant he was, like every other Alexandrian taxi driver, an Arab.

'At one time he seemed to be driving me round in circles.’ I would not trust Aunty Edith’s sense of direction; in an unmetered cab taking the shortest route is in everybody’s interest.

‘I had visions of him stealing me away and selling me into the white slave trade.’ Given Aunty Edith’s notorious prudery in matters sexual (perhaps another reason Godfrey took solace in the bottle) I am not sure she knew what ‘white slave trade’ meant. She was a chunky woman in her mid sixties with a disapproving glare that could wilt an iron bar, anyone hoping to make a living from renting out her body was either an incurable optimist or knew something about niche markets I neither know, nor wish to know.

‘Eventually we arrived at the dock. I have never been so relieved to see a ship in my whole life.’

To summarise: a taxi driver took a woman to the agreed destination for the agreed fare - hardly a story worth telling, let alone retelling. What Aunty Edith never realised was that the tale tells us nothing about Alexandria, or Alexandrian taxi drivers, but a great deal about her. As such, it is a warning to anybody who tries to write anything about their travels: I will endeavour to take heed.

See also our trip to Alexandria