Just for the record

I resent panpipes. I resent the reedy, insipid bleating they emit, which sounds like Enya’s farts, or a flute with a cough.

Proof of panpipes’ plainness, as if any was needed, lies in the fact that they lend themselves to any song of any style with results such as these:

Panpipes are the appendix of the music world, serving no obvious purpose other than filling spaces of silences in lifts, hotel lobbies and my local Alfa Market. While they are not as bad as Yosra, panpipes are inoffensive, which is possibly worse. If they were human they would talk about the weather. Or about new age healing spas, their favourite haunt apart from my local Alfa Market. Pan Pipes are the Scientology cult of music, stripping songs which fall into their clutches of all personal identity and forcing them to wear a pair of beige slacks, and every time I hear ‘Bright Eyes’ or ‘Tears in Heaven’ done a la pipes I wonder at the cruelty of mankind.

On a different note, yesterday I spoke to a woman on the phone who informed me that her name was Dolly, and wasn't joking.

Suber star actor and former fit bloke Hussein Fahmy is on television presenting a programme called ‘the People and Me,’ in which Lord Fahmy gives ordinary plebs their Warhol 15 minutes. I am pleased to report that Hussein has taken the time to colour coordinate his pink jumper with his perma-flush face. I have just relayed this information to my mother on MSN, prompting her to exclaim “Hussein my old friend! I used to talk to him on the phone,” revealing yet new boundaries to her former hobnobbing with the stars 60s self, now discovering another type of glamour in Croydon. When I asked her whether Hussein’s face was still flushed back then, she said “yes, and he was very fat.” Fancy that!

Pont-ification*

Walking home today across one of Cairo’s bridges the usual scene of marauding packs of pubescent boys, flower sellers, and ambulant lovers was interrupted by an unusual sight.

Standing perilously on the edge of a the bridge’s railing, one arm wrapped around a lamppost, was a young man clutching two placards bearing a scrawled entreaty to ‘release the detained Al Azhar students.’ Parked in front of him were two navy blue police pick-up trucks, while at his feet plain-clothed policemen milled around bearing aloft their walkie-talkies as if they were talismans. Over on the other side of the bridge the one or two people who had stopped to impassively observe the proceedings were urged to move on my more walkie-talkie bearers, their arms waving back and forth, in the manner used by farmers herding geese. Their concern about the protest attracting attention - or even worse participants - was entirely unfounded of course, and cars, lovers and horse carriages clattered past with indifference as above their heads the lonely defence of freedom staggered on, risking at any point to topple into the murky blue depths of the Nile, or the even murkier blue clasp of the police vans.

As I was standing there some old geezer mumbled conspiratorially in my ear as he went past, ‘the government are coming behind me’ - presumably a warning about the giant blue truck trundling along. It was actually carrying army recruits, and the old fella might have been slightly bonkers, but the USSR-Big-Brother-is-watching nature of the exchange delighted me.

I ended my observation of the happenings when I could no longer stand the rocking motion caused by traffic moving over two ill-fitting pieces of the bridge. My memory of the hoo-hah surrounding London’s swaying Millennium Bridge makes me almost certain that such structures are not meant to move, certainly not to the point of inducing a waterbed sensation, and as much as I wished to stand (preferably without moving involuntarily) in solidarity with the brave protestor, I was very conscious that falling off a collapsing bridge would bring together my least favourite ways of expiring: great heights, water, and being in the vicinity of a horse and carriage driver who, even as we plummeted down, would doubtless spend the descent assuring me that I really do want a ride.

* Ladies and gentlemen, bilingual wordplay of this calibre surely deserves some kind of international recognition, possibly in the form of a Nobel prize. Hear me roar, world!

Porn cocktail

Remember the last post where together we hypothesised about possible reasons why some gentlemen cannot resist launching into impromptu monologues about strangers' bums? It would seem that our speculation about the cause of this behaviour omitted the real culprits, who are those naughty boys THE MEDIA.

According to this article, "the sexualisation of girls and the normalisation of the sex and porn industries have made it increasingly acceptable and "fun" for women to be viewed as sex objects, and for men to view women as sexual commodities."

And this has a negative effect on boys as well as girls apparently because "boys who are not enthusiastic about it, or speak out against it, run the risk of being ignored or ridiculed, of being labelled "gay", "unmanly", or not liking sex. Boys and young men are under pressure to act out masculinity in which power and control over women, and men, is normal. In which violence is normal."

I'm sorry to bombard you yet again with possibly naive questions about trouser matters, but I had several issues with this article about which I would like to canvas opinion.

- The writer's main premiss seems to be that exposure to violence in porn not only fetishises this violence, but leads to the objectification of women and an increase in sex crimes against women. Can such a simplistic code really be used to decrypt something as complex as sexuality, and the impulses/illness which lead to rape and other sex crimes?

- Before the advent of porn was there no sexual violence against women, or were incidents of it significantly lower?

- The article is presumably describing vice-ridden Western society, and the picture it paints of it is one of prone naked ladies everywhere you look being set upon by hoardes of young men whose brains have been addled by porn. Is this the unique guise in which women appear in the public domain? Are men offered no alternative images of women?

- And where are women in all this? Do women not contribute to, act in and consume porn, voluntarily? Do women also not choose to exploit their sexuality in order to e.g. make loads of money? When Madonna makes porn, it is a positive expression of the emancipation of female sexuality. When men consume it, they are negatively objectifying women. How does this work?

- Surely porn is not regarded as inculcating an impulse that wasn't already there? Hasn't sex since time began always been the expression of a control dynamic? Even if it doesn't get to the whip and handcuffs stage, isn't there always someone taking (not necessarily the bloke) and someone taken? Why else would the seduction process and its culmination be called the chase and sexual conquest respectively? The point I am clumsily attempting to make in a series of questions is that while porn is referred to as fantasy, its titillation value does necessarily rest on an element of realism. Since women do actually like to be taken sometimes, and because men often like to take, women in porn (and in mainstream films for that matter) are portrayed as 'weaker' than their hairy chested male counterparts while the two are in bed, even without the addition of violence. But are the people who reject what they term the objectification of women opposed to the power dynamics involved in sex generally, or is it that they just don't want it to be presented on screen?

I thought the fruitless rumination would end with unemployment, but it is apparently intensified whilst eating President cheese triangles at a desk and downloading stuff from 6rb.com.

Group sex

To all Googling perverts who ended up here cos of the title: I’m happy that you’ve come, but understand that you are possibly neither of these things.

I recently read a book, School Ties, by the excellent William Boyd. In it are two screenplays influenced by his time at a British boarding school, and which are prefaced by an excellent introduction in which Boyd describes his experience of the boarding school regime.

I am the product of boring, rather than boarding, state schools. For those of you not familiar with the British education system, private schools are ones where Mr and Mrs Hodges-Wilkinson pay fees for Farquar or Jemima to receive generally top notch education whilst wearing straw boaters. Farquar and Jemima usually then go on to hold political office or produce progeny in line to the throne. In contrast Mr and Mrs Pleb do not have to pay for Kevin and Sharon’s free education, possibly because of the accounting complexities of calculating exactly how much should be deducted from school fees during pregnancy and knife-related injury absences.

Obviously my school wasn’t that bad - only three girls in my year got pregnant, and nobody got stabbed during school hours - but put it this way: when I receive an email telling me that an ex-classmate has updated her account on Friends Reunited.com, it is rarely to inform us that she been awarded a new government portfolio.

My father told me a while ago that he and my mother briefly considered making sacrifices and sending me to private school, but dismissed the idea as being at odds with his lefty anti-Thatcher egalitarianism. My mother holds no known notions of egalitarianism, and I can only assume that this decision was over-informed by my father’s alleged egalitarian ideals, and was taken unilaterally in the style of great leftist totalitarian leaders of yore. Full respect for the class war brother Fidel, and let me reassure you that perfectly decent old people’s homes are available to those with even the most limited earning potential.

But back to Boyd. What really struck me about his introduction was his description of the way in which the strict sexual segregation then enforced shaped and marked the boys who endured it. One bit particularly stood out:

“The sexual apartheid to which we were subjected all those years utterly warped our attitudes and precluded us from thinking about girls and women in any way but the most prurient and lubricious. The female sex was judged by one criterion – fanciable or non-fanciable, to put it rather more delicately than we did.”

He then goes on to describe what happened when the few unfortunate female members of staff at the school came into contact with the boys:

“Their encounters with the boys, three times a day at meals, were characterised by a one-sided traffic of sexual banter of the vilest and coarsest sort. Given the opportunity, more daring boys actually molested them – squeezing, pinching, feeling…I think our attitudes to them brought out the very worst in our natures: it was male lust at its most dog-like and contemptuous…I dare say any male sodality - rugby team, army platoon, group of Pall Mall clubmen - can descend to this level for a while, but what is depressing and degrading about the male boarding school is the unrelieved constancy of the tone, year in, year out, for at least five years. It must have some effect.”

Reading this I immediately thought of Egypt where verbal and physical harassment are, as we know, a regular occurrence. Attempts to explain this phenomenon as it manifests itself in Egypt frequently make reference to the ‘socioeconomic and cultural contexts’ (must you be wearing a polo neck in order to be considered suitably qualified to say this?) - that is, poverty precluding marriage, strict sexual mores and so on. But as someone who has walked past a British building site on several occasions, and been in a British pub at closing time on more occasions than I care to remember, I have always been suspicious of these explanations. Britain abolished marriage in the 80s, and the limits of its sexual mores is the edict that it is bad manners to bonk a family member, and yet the same vocal crotch lust exists.

My experience tells me that the potential for such behaviour lies dormant in all men, and that as Boyd seems to be suggesting, it is when individuals are subsumed in a group (boarding school, football team, Egyptian society, sometimes) that repressed behaviour finds an outlet in the approval and perhaps anonymity of the group. Rather like when normally tame packs of dogs turn on small children, or when women find themselves in all female company and deem it acceptable to bore their interlocutors for two hours about the meaning of Him Not Returning a Text Message.

No, men are not lust hungry atavistic wolves (that’s us ladeez!), but they are sexual beings – as are women. Can men tell me why it is being in an all-male environment seems to be the heat which brings otherwise simmering water to the boil? And ladeez, why is it that we don’t feel a similar urge to commend male strangers on their bottoms at loud volume? Or if we do, why don’t we act upon it? Is there some fundamental difference between male and female sexuality, or at least the expression of this sexuality in groups?

*Clarification*
May I say that this is most definitely not an anti-men tirade. Men are fabulous creatures, and I am constantly impressed by their ability to grow chest hair, and by the straightforward, even keel, cause and effect nature, of their emotional lives.

Human rights & Sons

I have started walking to and from work, for two reasons:

1. It is an effort to counter the physical stagnation induced by continuous sitting at a desk
2. A eunuch’s underpants sees more movement than does Cairo’s traffic between 3 and 9 pm, and walking is therefore faster.

My walk is actually enjoyable, as everyday I gaze at the magnificence of the Nile and also get to see a man in shorts wearing a bum bag (or “fanny pack” as the Americans insist on calling it with no sense of irony) speed-walking his two Labradors.

One soup stain on the tie of today’s walk was the vision of a youth sporting a James Brown type hair helmet who appeared to have borrowed his girlfriend’s hair straightener. Straightened man-hair is deeply disturbing, it upsets the cosmic order of things somehow.

When they are not focused on other people’s barnets my thoughts eventually end up at work, usually about ten minutes before I actually physically arrive at the office. I am happy to report that I have survived the first week, can now get out of bed like a pro and am enjoying it immensely. I often reflect on how different the human rights NGO for which I currently work is from my last place of employ. Before I sentenced myself to a year’s exile in the chav-infested oblivion which is Essex University I worked in another of Cairo’s human rights NGOs. This establishment did, and continues to do, some good work. It is unfortunate however that the values it seeks to disseminate in Egyptian society are apparently not applicable to its own staff.

That this organisation has scant regard for the happiness of its employees was immediately obvious the first time I visited its office, where it looked like someone had spread glue over every available surface area before emptying the contents of a giant vacuum-cleaner bag on top. The toilet was of course a different category altogether, and suffice to say that I became a dab hand using my elbows to turn on taps and open doors. The place was literally black with years of accumulated dirt and neglect, and everything – the paint, the plants, the people – seemed to sag under its weight.

That people actually continued to show up for work I always found amazing and commendable, because the place was run like a cross between a family grocer store and a minor department in, say, the department of agriculture. In practice this meant an entrenched hierarchy, endless and needless bureaucracy, petty backbiting and nepotism.

The regime employed was like this: big kahuna boss guy - who we’ll call el 7ag - sits imperiously at the top of the pyramid and - when he is not attending international conferences - appears on television and is quoted in newspaper articles. While he himself sits outside the metaphorical family shop smoking shisha, he delegates the day-to-day running of the shop to Kirsh, a distant family member who cannot believe that he has been given power over the lives of others, and spends his time devising ways to torture those under him. His obsequiousness towards el 7ag is rivalled only by that of 19th century indentured servants, and is characteristic of individuals who understand that they are where they are thanks to blood, rather than brains.

Kirsh is threatened by those he knows are more able than him – who are many – and responds firstly; by directly fermenting dissent amongst the unfortunate unit under his direct control by pitting members of staff against each other, and, secondly; by doing everything in his power to quash and contain the threat of individual talent. He is helped in this by the organisation’s recruitment policy which, by keeping it in the family, means guaranteed support and a steady stream of the most mediocre of the mediocre and hence nothing which might conquer Castle Kirsh. To illustrate: one of the few talented lawyers there, Umm Nakad, was given the brief to go to Alexandria to interview the family of a man who had died inside a police station. This was in winter. When another supposed lawyer (yet another relative of the grocery shop owner) learnt of the trip she exclaimed, “bass el donya shita ya Umm Nakad! Hatebredy! Esstanny tayyeb we rou7y fel sayf.” [It’s winter and you’ll get cold. Wait and go in summer.]

At the bottom of the pyramid were the office boys, who were expected to work from 8 a.m – infinity. When I first started this was six days a week. These boys were the most maligned, exploited, cheated people I ever met: youths in their prime paid a pittance to empty waste bins and act on Kirsh’s every whim when they should have been in college or out bothering girls or something, anything rather than this. He went through one phase of making one of them go into a grocery store and buy biscuits while he waited outside, after work. Why did he do this when he could buy them perfectly well for himself? Simply because he could.

Only one person was treated worse than the office boys, Ustaaz Damyaat, a journalist/researcher. When I first arrived at the organisation I shared a room with him and Lion. Ustaaz D had a thick Damietta accent, and struggling to understand his interminable stories about his beloved hometown made by then newborn Arabic come on leaps and bounds. He had an encyclopaedic knowledge of Egyptian history and politics and culture in general, and a thirst for culture which might have been satiated by the internet if only he knew how to operate a mouse. (We agreed that I would give him internet lessons in return for his endlessly providing me with friendlier synonyms for archaic Arabic legal terms. The plan died at birth, when Kirsh came into our office once and summarily ordered Ustaaz D to get off the computer.)

Ustaaz D was extremely poor, and like most of the staff received an appalling wage. At the time I joined he was getting 250 LE a month (to put this in perspective I started on 1500 LE a month) and never ate lunch. Instead he would come in reeking of meat and onions, having consumed some kind of starchy, carbohydrate filled concoction which, together with his cigarettes, would sustain him all day as he sat at his desk writing copious notes on the particular research issue given to him. He was also extremely old-school and proper about the use of titles (despite only being in his early 30s), and still unfailingly refers to me as Ustaaza Amnesiac. Kirsh made a particular point of never referring to him by the formal, polite title of Ustaaz(a) which prefixed all the staff’s names bar the office boys. Instead, whenever he wanted him he would bellow out his name – and expect Ustaaz D to go to him rather than himself coming to his desk. On one occasion Kirsh’s unit required an extra chair, and Kirsh didn’t hesitate to instruct someone in the unit to take Ustaaz Damyaat’s chair, leaving the cripplingly polite Ustaaz D himself to stand at his desk, bewildered and humiliated.

Ustaaz D received this scurrilous treatment from Kirsh not only because both men are weak but because Ustaaz D is a reminder to Kirsh of who he is. Both are from outside Cairo and in different but equal ways condemned by their circumstances, and both feel reduced by this fact. Kirsh knows and has admitted to Umm Nakad that he is living on borrowed time, and that when the grocery shop owner retires his replacement will not retain Kirsh’s services.

The biggest losers in this farce are ultimately human rights themselves. In order to do a good job of advocating for and defending human rights in the depressing and disheartening Egyptian context you need at least a bit of passion, and heaps of dedication. Most importantly you need yourself to feel respected. Combining half of an extended family with one or two gifted individuals (whose talent is eventually snuffed out by the mogamma3 type mentality which will kill or drive away any talent) is the best illustration of how uncivil Egyptian (civil society) can be.

*Paragraph breaks are by special request, for everyone's favourite advertising mogul, Mr Fawlty.

Chain gang

As is perhaps evident from the relative decrease in nonsense posted on this blog, I have finally started work. After nearly four months of idle sedentariness - three-fourths of which were spent horizontal in bed – work’s unremitting, merciless routine has needless to say shocked me to the core in a way I last experienced when I misjudged the temperature gauge on a bidet. What is particularly odious is being thrust out of sleep by an alarm clock, more precisely my mobile alarm clock, whose alarm music is in theory meant to gently ease one into the morning with a soothing, cheerful tune gradually escalating in volume. I obviously never wake up immediately, and in my semi-conscious state usually incorporate the music into my dream a la Spielberg. As a result of this I invariably wake up flustered, disorientated and devastated that the sound hammering in my ears is not in fact my and Ahmed Ezz’s wedding march. A recent addition to this barbaric chaos has been my cat, Lupin, who occasionally experiences the urge to sit on my head on certain mornings. This is not meant to be a cute and twee exaggeration: in an effort to wake me up so that he can then trip me up on my way to feeding him, the animal literally wraps himself round my skull like a hat/launches himself at my face.

All this is marginally better than the (unrequested) wake-up call I used to receive from my father, which consisted of him SINGING “wakey waaaaaaaakey! Dah de de dah dah daaaaah” at 8 a.m. The barrage of expletives which this inevitably provoked would then result in a lengthy discourse on why getting up early is a healthier way to live one’s life, since getting up any time after 8 a.m. means missing “the best part of the day” – all while I was still lying stunned in bed. My attempts to persuade him that it is unnatural to get up any time before 9 a.m. for any reason other than catching a plane or escaping a burning house if the smoke is bothering you have failed miserably, and whenever I am under his roof this postman’s regime is imposed on me. For added piquancy the first question he asks me once I am vertical is invariably “how did you sleep?” to which I answer “horizontally” in the hope that he will desist. He doesn’t. I have noticed, come to think of it, that members of no nationality other than the Brits interrogate me as to sleep quality on a regular basis, leading me to conclude that this question forms part of the battery of grunts and sounds which British people find themselves compelled to emit when in the presence of other persons anywhere other than on public transport, and which for the most part revolve around the weather.

Working in an office is equally rebarbative. There is something truly soul-destroying about being incarcerated in a room at a desk for eight or more hours, regardless of whether you enjoy your work or not. This malaise is unique to office work, and entirely different from the armpit nature of for example manual labour. I once did a two week stint in a giant shed, which the company called a factory, where my task was to stand at a bench and stuff paper adverts into magazines before putting these magazines in clear bags, from 9 am to 4 pm. We did of course receive a half hour lunch break together with tea breaks, during which one of the girls there would regale us with stories about her pit bull terrier. We were also not allowed to change the radio station, with the result that as I stuffed the adverts into magazines knowing that they would be thrown away without a glance, I was serenaded by a constant stream of Phil Collins. The factory owner’s car number plate was something like ‘Paper 1.’ He was a very short man who drove a very big jeep.

The work was physically a nightmare, mentally a graveyard, and the musical accompaniment made it near-torture, but the mindlessness, the unchanging routine and the knowledge that it would end lent the work a certain reassuring constancy. It is this mindless constancy which is somehow absent from office work, or at least the desk jobs I’ve found myself in, with the result that I am mentally stimulated and alert (eventually) but confined, which I believe produces mental agony on a par with that experienced by giraffes kept in zoos.

With or without you, preferably without

Ahhh Sir Bono. Where would the world be without you, Mr Paul Hewson? Who else, apart possibly from Princess Di, could fill your leather trousers as they roam the world combating global hunger with such finesse, and such big sunglasses? While you claim that you wear them because of an eye condition, we all know the truth: It is to conserve the beneficent glare of your luminosity, which you save for African villages and meetings of the World Economic Forum. But luckily for the rest of us, your share your light with us verbally, and we are all richer for the wisdom you send down to us.

Take for example the following gem, in which you are asked to describe a concert which changed your life:

The Clash
Trinity College, Dublin, 1977

Bono: Can't remember the set list, can't remember much about the music, to be honest. I just know that everything changed that night, and I'm sure it was not just for me. Year zero. The shock of the new, where everything reconfigured. The venue was the exam hall of Trinity College, founded by Bishop Berkeley 300 odd years previously ... the man who spent his entire existence trying to prove the existence of existence. I'm not kidding. He also had a corner of San Francisco named after him. Other reconfigurations, other revolts.
It wasn't so much a musical event. It was more like the Red Army had arrived, on a cold October night, to force feed a new cultural revolution, punk rock. Marching boots and the smell of sulphur. Not weed or speed but fear, fear of the future, no future. And the delight, so much delight. All kinds of symbols pinned on jackets, some ridiculous swastikas, Red Brigade t-shirts, hand made knock-offs of extremely expensive Seditionaries threads from London. But as there was a war going on 100 miles from here, in a strange way, the Clash made more sense in Dublin than anywhere.
As I sat in the box room and stared out the window the next day, it was very clear. The world is more malleable than you think; reality is what you can get away with.

Delight indeed.

Sulphur is of course the smell of flatulence, but we all know that you meant the smell of revolution. You have of course acquired the patent for this smell - which was created by Bolivian farmers using extant samples of Che Guevara’s sweat - and you will be bottling it under the name Twat pour homme. All proceeds will of course go to charity.

Clerics are currently preparing an official interpretation of your comment “the world is more malleable than you think; reality is what you can get away with” in order to counter the stone hearted individuals who accuse you of being a pseud and claim that this statement is in reality an oblique acknowledgement by Your Eminence that one can get away with the most pompous pretentious nonsense as long as it’s for charity. Achtung baby.

Question for Hollywood filmmakers

Why must virtually every film you produce, even those dealing with important political themes of the zeitgeist, include a romantic story line? In the world as it is presented by you, romance flourishes in war, during genocide, during Armageddon, in outer space, even where one of the bloody lovers is dead. The irony is that when all is well in the world, love seems to go tits-up, with the result that we must sit through ninety minutes or more of a wife bawling and clinging to her absent husband’s suits hanging in the wardrobe, while away in the next scene husband is busy shagging another woman, before both realise through these very different means that that they were destined to be together, it’s just that their love has “matured.” The final scene usually includes: a Labrador/children playing in a sprinkler, and the reunited couple holding hands fondly watching their antics. Decidedly absent is any mention of the fact that the only reason the husband came back is the missus’ first-class lasagne/blowjobs/both.

While I admit that if given a choice between watching a romantic comedy and boiling my head I would in most cases put the water on the stove, I do not object to romance as a genre per se, my objection is its omnipresence. It seems to be the tomato ketchup of film production: added to virtually any dish in order to make palatable otherwise difficult to swallow fare. I am thinking in particular of the film I saw tonight, Blood Diamond. The production and directing of this film was mostly excellent, and it dealt with issues of critical importance, namely the trade in illegal diamonds, the part this trade plays in funding civil wars and the role of foreign governments/mercenaries in this sordid business. The lead was played by Leonardo DiCaprio, who is gradually wringing the last drops of Titanic out of his persona with excellent roles such as these. The female lead was played by the stunning Jennifer Connelly, who played a - guess what! – sexy yet intelligent journalist. When Connelly appeared my heart sank. because the film had until then been going great guns (geddit?) with its realistic and effecting scenes of civil war. Then these two met in the bar, he with his broad shoulders and blood hi-lites, she with her green eyes and well-formed bosoms and I heard the knock knock knock of someone trying to extract ketchup.

More horrific than any of the war scenes was the moment where DiCaprio is preparing to enter war-torn diamond country on a potentially fatal assignment and must leave the intrepid Connelly behind. We are subjected to a five minute dialogue in which he entreats her to settle down with a good man, while she replies that she has three sisters married to good men, and she herself prefers her life of roaming the planet searching for war zones in tank tops. Sorry, but who cares? And why add insult to injury by having Titanic-style pipes playing softly in the background? I was secretly hoping that Celine Dion and her heart which must go on would appear simply so that she would be shot by a rebel warlord.

To go from watching the deaths of countless (anonymous) Sierra Leonians and the forced enlistment of children in rebel armies to this hogwash was almost obscene. While the platonic relationship between the journalist and DiCaprio’s mercenary was integral to the story, the romantic element was entirely superfluous and annoying, particularly given that it almost compromised the film by risking making the civil war merely the background against which their love plays out.

How does it work then? When a script dealing with political intrigue/war etc arrives on a producer’s table, does he tell the script writer “well this looks great Bob, but I want you to go ahead and make the prisoner of conscience fall in love with a feisty gal from Brooklyn, preferably with big knockers”? Is it mandatory, in the same way that in 1999 it was made the law to include Hassan Hosny in the cast of all future Egyptian comedy films?

To be fair, you are merely part of a supply and demand equation, and it would seem that the audience like their war misery pizzas toned down with a bit of romance sauce. How sad however, and what a damning indictment, is the knowledge that for a film to succeed, the misery of an entire country - an entire continent - must be described using the stick figures of boy meets girl.

Wednesday night's alright for fighting

Tonight I went to a pop concert which ended in a mass brawl – always my idea of a splendid night out, what with possessing English blood and all.

Sharshar has been raving about Arabic pop prince and heir to the throne Mohamed 3adeweyya ever since he saw him live last year, and bored us into going to tonight’s concert with incessant droning about his ba7a. (Hoarse. But in a good way.) While the concert was organised by al-Saqia, it wasn’t being held in al-Saqia’s (convenient centrally located) Zamalek base, but rather “somewhere on the Cairo-Ismailia Road.” Sharshar assured us that it wouldn’t take long to get to.

After spending an hour in static traffic during which Amour attempted to explain the wisdom of the Egyptian saying “ask someone with experience rather than a doctor” (what if the doctor is himself mogarrab??) we eventually broke free onto the highway. As we sped past anonymous buildings in the darkness, I enquired as to whether Sharshar in fact knew where the bloody place was. He replied confidently “if we find ourselves in Ismailia, we’ll know we’ve gone too far.”

Miracle of miracles however, we saw a dimly lit sign announcing al-Saqia on the other side of the road, and discovered that Mohamed 3adeweyya was in fact performing in a school, hired for the night by al-Saqia. This was one of those expensive-looking soulless language schools, with beautiful furniture but no books. I have always found schools devoid of the children which give them life somewhat eerie, but this one had a particularly creepy the Shining emptiness about it. After traversing its silent palatial halls and immaculate garden we were ushered into what was obviously the lunch hall, and which was adjacent to the assembly room where 3adeweyya and his ba7a were booming out of the speakers. The lunch hall itself was scattered with signs bearing words such as “tolerance,” “patience,” and “respect,” presumably for the miniature diners to ponder as they steal each other’s sandwiches. It is unfortunate that similar signs did not emblazon the stage on which 3adeweyya performed, given the subsequent turn of events.

3adeweyya himself really was wowzers blazers, possessing in addition to an excellent voice, that lovable, smiling geniality of the type exhibited by Nelson Mandela which - in addition to facilitating national reconciliation - can make an assembly hall full of people forget they are in a school and hang loose. His evergreen smile and liberally distributed thumbs up signs made me entirely forgive him for the fact that he was wearing an otherwise criminal brown corduroy ensemble which put me in mind of the contents of my cat’s litter tray, and pointed brown shoes of an indeterminate material.

3adeweyya also possesses the world’s most enormous band of musicians which is not actually an orchestra. I counted some twenty five people on stage, including a boy who was clearly someone’s brother, and whose only task as far as I could tell was to stand immobile behind 3adeweyya and dispense tissues as needed. I was particularly delighted by a Riqq (big tambourine) player who was spectacularly morose, and when not drumming would sit, cross-armed and frowning, with the expression of a man forced to spend many nights staring at a jolly man in a brown corduroy suit. He was rivalled only by the saxophone player, who could not disguise his disgust whenever the keyboardist usurped saxophone soundalike solos which were rightfully his.
3adeweyya cheerfully made his way through his songs, accompanied by fire effects, bubbles during slow songs, and lung disorder amounts of dry ice. At one point the effects engineer released a rocket-type fire effect of such ferocity and velocity that it shot upwards and caused a plastic ceiling tile to come crashing down, almost on the head of the morose Riqq player, which needless to say ensured that I got my money’s worth of entertainment.

After a rousing rendition of ‘zahma,’ the song made famous by his legendary father Ahmed, 3adeweyya announced a break during which the audience devised ways of smuggling food into the hall without teacher seeing. Some of the band eventually began filing back onto the stage, but the first sign that all was not well on the ranch came in the form of a bespectacled man who mumbled into the mic that “the concert is over.” The audience ignored what was clearly either a prankster or a lunatic, and carried on extracting packets of crisps from their underwear until 3adeweyya himself appeared and confirmed that “they have cancelled the show.” A cohort explained that this had occurred because “there are people in the audience kissing each other and generally not giving proper respect to the surroundings.” Being unable to give us detention, the school managers had thus cancelled the show, which understandably enraged the audience whose demographic was largely 18 – 20 year olds wishing to assert their existence by any means possible, but preferably a fight.

As we left the hall crisps were eaten and fags smoked in a defiant manner, and excitement mounted as the boys sensed that a ruckus was in the offing. Sure enough, once outside the angry crowd began milling around the ticket window swearing and posturing, Rebel Without a Cause style, while the poor bastard inside trembled. The crowd bayed for the blood of whichever despot it was who had denied them ‘bent el sultan’ and cheated them out of their money – they needed it to fill up the 4 x 4s waiting for them in the car park, poor things – until the bespectacled man who had announced the cancellation made the mistake of attempting to run to his car. The crowd selected him as the conduit for their fury, and immediately leapt on him. Things turned ugly as some 50 people surrounded the car before dragging him out from as he tried to explain to the bags of testosterone that he in fact had nothing to do with either the cancellation or their tickets. He was eventually let go, and was ushered back inside the school’s gates, faint and stunned, to wait for the police and figure out which member of the mob it was who relieved him of his car key. During this chaos, Amour observed the proceedings impassively, while smoking a cigarette, and observed that if he had had brought a couple of boys “men 3andina” [from his area] the bloodthirsty crowd would not have got near bespectacled man. Ignoring the youthful hyperbole, I expressed my pleasure at his desire to protect the man, to which he responded that the only reason they would have done so was so that they themselves could “sort him out” and find out where the money is.

Back at the gates the Armani-jeaned Proletarian masses continued protesting the injustice they had been subject to by vigorously shaking the gates and fighting both the security guards and, occasionally, each other. Who said Che was dead. They were eventually placated by a promise that they would get their money back if they were good boys and formed an orderly queue. Something resembling a queue did eventually form, though this being Egypt it mutated into a scrum at the window itself. Amour eventually emerged from this with the refunded money, muttering something about bringing his matwa [knife] next time, and we were all delighted to discover that we had been refunded ten pounds too much, which Amour promptly pocketed, for his trouble.

And so ended a charming evening which contained all of man’s most important primitive urges: dancing, fighting and seeking refunds. I cannot wait for February 14th when 3adeweyya will perform again, this time in a sporting club. I am hoping that the brawl will end up in a swimming pool - stay tuned.

This is what happens when you don't have satellite TV

"Ya 2amar"

A scene in an Egyptian soap opera tonight featured a couple walking into a nightclub- type establishment before being guided to their seats by a waiter. Being a consummate professional and connoisseur of old-school restaurant etiquette the waiter stood behind the lady’s chair as she sat down, and then did the holding-onto-the-back-of-chair-and-pushing-slightly-while-lady-sits-down-thing. Now this is all very Omar Sharif and chivalrous etc, but the lady was sitting in a tank-sized leather sofa, which resulted in the waiter having to adopt a stance similar to that one adopts when pushing a car which has run out of petrol up a slight incline.

This took the edge off the rage induced by accidentally hearing thirty seconds of a song by suberstar Yousra. I do not know the name of this atrocity but it is the one where she bleats on about everyone needing love, in Arabic, English and French - because she’s international and debonair, people. The chorus features accompaniment by a choir of children whose voices have not yet broken: a musical crime of the first degree. It seems to have escaped Yousra’s notice but there is a reason why microphone stands are so high: it is to prevent precocious little tuneless individuals sneaking into studios and recording songs with which to torment us. You may be angelic, Derek, but you sound like Tinnitus.

Why must Yousra sing? She is a good looking actress of a reasonable standard who can boast that her lips have been within two centimetres of Ahmed Ezz’s face – surely her work is done? Seeing her in the vicinity of a piano makes the Jaws soundtrack play in my head, and during her rendition of La Vie en Rose in the Yacoubian Building I found myself biting on my knuckles, while trying to curl myself into the smallest ball possible - a defence mechanism used by small mammals in response to danger from predators. It didn’t make the pain stop. I literally felt embarrassed for Yousra, whose unctuous, tuneless, supposedly seductive warbling is essentially poor man’s Dalida, and induces a mixture of rage/vicarious embarrassment every time I hear it.

Speaking of His Majesty Omar Sharif, and I take any opportunity to do so, I saw him in his mole-bedecked glory days in ‘Men agl Imra2atin’ yesterday, and nearly passed out while contemplating his beauty. Those slightly scary intense eyes! Those lips! The man was a god, and I can in fact boast to having met him for exactly two minutes after my Bridge-playing auntie smuggled Mildred and me into a Bridge tournament hundreds of years ago. I am pleased to report that he still had his certain je ne sais quoi-ness goin’ on then, and the motor is still revving now - if his antics at the latest Cairo Film Festival Awards anything to go by. The contrast between his polite but tepid greeting of male winners, and the old fashioned mental undressing treatment he gave the ladeez was a joy to behold. At one point a breath-taking statuesque Italian beauty with enormous bazookers glided onto the stage dripping sex. Omar’s jaw dropped and he immediately began fanning himself theatrically with both hands. During her (faltering but sexy) speech Omar was clearly visible whispering to (Dr – how come?!?) Ezzat Abo Auf and his toupee - while all three checked out her endless legs. He was probably saying something along the lines of “eih el ta3ama deih” only in French, cos he’s sophisticated, innit.

Afterwards while all the fabulous people on stage formed a line and smiled, and the ordinary people in the audience clapped them, I kept my eye on cheeky Omar. Sure enough he edged his way gradually towards Bazookers using a sideways-stepping crab motion before standing on tiptoe and whispering something in her exquisite ear. She looked briefly baffled before herself edging away, both of them all the time clapping and smiling rigidly, leading me to conclude that he may indeed have whispered “eih el ta3ama deih” only in Italian, cos he’s sophisticated, innit.

Meeting Omar seems to be a family tradition, because my mother used to see him - only in black and white – in the Gezira sporting club during the sixties. Both she and I share the same tic of involuntarily sighing ‘ya 2amar’ [moon] whenever we see a black and white Omar on screen. God forbid that anyone should think my mother missed a romantic opportunity all those years ago, because she is now married to a librarian and lives in Croydon, where she can enjoy its first-class tram service.

Lest anyone think I am name-dropping, allow me to state that I have not met any other celebs apart from a pre-Olympics British pole-vaulter who never made it. I did once however enter a restaurant just as Amr Waked and his green eyes were putting their coats on and leaving.

Note: Never before have I hyper-linked to so many men, I feel quite the trollop.

Sock it to me

Scene:
Amnesiac and the Pig are cruisin’ in the Corolla on the traffic-free Maadi Corniche.

It is a Friday, and the Islamic new year holiday, and Cairo can stretch and yawn into the empty other side of the bed, still warm and recently vacated by its poorest migrant workers and richest long-weekenders.

The weather is trademark Egyptian winter: intensely sharp coldness bathed in the sun’s languid heat. The azure perfection of the sky is rivalled only by the anything-you-can-do-I-can-do-better silky blueness of the Nile waters, and everything and everyone gleams in the incandescent brilliance of the sun.

Amnesiac has not seen a single donkey or horse being beaten. She has not in fact seen any working animals of any description. She has only seen cats chillin’ on roofs. This is the kind of thing which makes her happy.

Adding to her general joie de vivre is the fact that Ilham el Madfai is singing ‘Baghdad’ on the car stereo, his richly sad love song/lament for the city he loves.

Ilham: We ensy el 3ataab, faqad neseet 3ataaby etc etc [forget blame, because I have put reproach behind me]
Amnesiac: Allaaaah etc etc
The Pig: He doesn’t sing in tune.
Ilham: [ignoring the Pig]: 3aynaak ya Baghdaaaaad, mondhu tefoolity [your eyes, O Baghdad, since my childhood]
Amnesiac: [ignoring the Pig]: Doesn’t matter. His voice is full of shagan.
The Pig: Hmm.
Ilham: [rababa solo]
Amnesiac: [Practically in tears because of its exquisite sadness, and also because of PMT]: This rababa solo is gorgeous!
The Pig: It’s not a rababa, it’s a violin.
Amnesiac: No, it’s a rababa.
The Pig: La2 it’s not. Etc etc.
Ilham: la tunkury wajhy…fa anty 7abeebaty…we woroud maa2edaty [do not deny my face, for you are my darling, the roses on my table]
Amnesiac: Yaaa “ you are the roses on my table!” Gorgeous!
Ilham: …We ka2ss shuraaby* [and my cup of life. Literally “the cup of my drink”]
The Pig: And my socks ya3ni.
Amnesiac: …
Amnesiac: Do you realise that I will never again be able to listen to this, one of my favourite songs, without thinking of footwear?
The Pig: [Looks straight ahead and smiles the smile of a boy who has just kicked his worst enemy’s football onto an unreachable roof.]

* shuraaby is a homophone which can mean either “my drink” or “my socks,” for allegedly comic effect.

Catharsis

I occasionally get acute attacks of the Egypt blues. During these bouts my head aches in the same way it does when I read books which attempt to explain the size of outer space, while my chest feels like I’ve been inhaling pure, undiluted, sadness. Brief but intense, the only antidote to these episodes is watching Rachael Ray, so that I am reminded that there exist other, worse, realities.

Egypt’s capacity to induce melancholy is, of course, no surprise, and these particular Egypt blues should not be confused with the feelings induced by witnessing particularly heart-rending scenes of poverty, oppression or misery. It is a sad truth that an essential coping mechanism for living in this society is steeling yourself constantly to witness/hear about some hideous event practically off the scale of human suffering. As a result, I - and apparently everyone else around me judging by the levels of indifference - have become inured to seeing crowds stepping over invisible limbless beggars, inconsequential people breathing their last breaths in police stations, and six year old Kleenex sellers.

This protective armour has rendered me (almost) insensible to the daily misery, but cannot prepare me for the less direct, more low-key sadness akin to the water which melted the otherwise indestructible Wicked Witch of the West. Sources of this sadness are many and varied, but are linked by the common element of being entirely mundane. They include; soldiers outside embassies with no shoelaces in their boots; the taxi driver in the beat-up taxi who kept having to push up the car’s sun visor every time the car went over a bump; people wearing shibshib at night, in the dead of winter; tears in the seats of trousers which have been repaired using thread an entirely different colour to that of the trouser fabric; the Nile TV English channel programmes devoted entirely to interviews with foreign tourists, and filmed with what appears to be a mobile phone camera; moneyed people who subject powerless restaurant employees to Abu Ghraib-type humiliation, only verbally, simply because they can; Mohamed Hosny Mobarak plaques on any edifice of any kind, including tram stops in Alexandria; donkeys; bureaucratic officiousness; shops called bookshops devoid of books; people using sports club membership as a key factor governing a marriage decision; sycophancy, particularly of the type witnessed on “el bayt baytak”; radio listeners telling Nagoum FM DJs that they love them “gedden gedden” and DJs similarly declaring their love for people about which all they know is their first name; bridal white face paint; dirty bear/clown costumes during children’s parties at MacDonald’s; long little finger fingernails; the ‘who shouted fire’ manner in which people get on and off metro trains; ‘7ader men 3anneyya el etneen’ and then nothing happening; ‘3addeeha ya Amnesiac’; the furniture used in soap operas and films; prefacing first names with Mr/Miss, even when speaking Arabic; ‘look at me’ displays of piety; schools with the word ‘home’ in their names; people prefacing their name with their occupations in situations where their occupation is entirely irrelevant i.e. ‘ma3k el mohandess Abaza’ or ‘ma3k el fadya Amnesiac’; ‘kol sanna wenta tayyeb’ as an extortion device; soldiers lining the 2asr el nil bridge whenever some minor official is in the environs; when these soldiers relish ordering people to keep to the pavement.

These things perturb me because they are a reminder that Egypt’s social and economic problems have seeped into every single aspect of its existence, and are so interlinked, that attempting to fix one area would be like the time ten of my mother’s necklaces became knotted together, and she asked me to extract one, and I discovered that in order to do so I would have to spend hours undoing the whole bloody lot.

Egypt obviously still rules in a myriad other ways, and I could write a lengthy love letter to her exulting her many virtues, but also advising her that she appears to have fallen in with a crowd of shady types who are leading her astray.

Badonkadonk

I went to a house party on Friday night about which I can remember very little. One very clear memory however, is my “friend” Sharshar inexplicably dragging me over to talk to the boss of a centre where I was going to work, but who I had turned down with a curt email. Sharshar obviously did not give me enough time to think of a convincing and inoffensive reason why I had refused the offer, and the brief but intense moment of social awkwardness which ensued was dispelled only when I realised that Almost Boss guy was so completely pissed that he would not remember the conversation - nor indeed meeting me. It turned out that he had reached this astonishing level of intoxication in record time by doing Ouzo shots. Sharshar discovered this after Almost Boss became particularly animated during a discussion about the human rights issues surrounding the niqab case (the conversational tone at the party was initially high) and spilled his glass all over the sleeve of Sharshar’s suit jacket. The sleeve subsequently spent the rest of the night trying to seduce the female guests before throwing up over a plant.

Gombaz demonstrated that sisters are still doing it for themselves by identifying a Man Target and cutting through the mingling party-goers like Moses traversing the parted waves of the Red Sea. She claimed subsequently that she was “going to get food” and that she and Man Target’s eyes had just happened to meet as she wrestled him to the ground was choosing a selection of mezze.

Sharshar - who usefully doesn’t really like to drink and is therefore the always and forever designated driver (despite the intoxication levels of his jacket sleeve) - spent most of the evening like a UN peacekeeper: allowed only to observe the course of events without himself being permitted to join in the action. He demonstrated good will and forbearance towards we, the drunkards, however. Like an indulgent granddad, he patted the Pig’s hair while the Pig patted his in order that they too could join me in marvelling at the rich textual difference and associated sensory variation experienced during the process of patting their two curly hairs (Sharshar: think Tom Jones. The Pig: Glen Medeiros.)


Sharshar


The Pig

At the end of the evening Gombaz and I line danced (or is the past tense lone danced?), she elegantly and fluidly, me flailing and limping, to house music. This is possibly the first recorded instance of such a juxtaposition of the two art forms, and is certainly so within the middle east and north Africa region. Gombaz then walked on her hands, and the Pig performed a magnificant football player-style shoulder spring (again at my insistence) which transformed the party into a small-scale suburban Cirque du Soleil, minus the dwarves.

We eventually left after the hostess called out from the other side of the room telling Gombaz and me not to keep changing the music, or else she would send us to our bedrooms (while we sniggered). I was eventually bundled into the car and the next day happily examined mobile phone photos I have no recollection of taking. Always a sign that a good time was had.

Update: Gombaz is insistent that she will teach me to dance the 'electric slide' and has made me download two country music songs in preparation. I am delighted to discover that the songs in question are by 'Trace' Adkins (the best names are verbs), and the songs are entitled 'Ladies Love Country Boys' and 'Honky Tonk Badonkadonk.' I am sold!

Separated at birth

Corella DeVille


Walid "el koun" Aouni

Best headline of 2007 so far

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Swings and roundabouts no. 2

Bad things about Cairo Mall, Haram: The monkeys maddened by being chained to fake trees in a jungle-themed coffee shop. The acres of beige polyester. The window displays full of sad looking ladies' underwear in the style worn by elderly prostitutes who refuse to admit that they've had their day.

Good things about Cairo Mall, Haram: Demonic child mannequins:

Chuckie











Demonic child mannequin.

Yeah but Forrest didn't get bothered by boys in Lancers

Continuing this week’s theme of doing foolish, masochistic things, tonight I went jogging in the streets of Zamalek with Gombaz and her 19-year old jogging pal (yes such things exist.)

To put this in context: I have not undertaken physical exercise of any kind since I was doing my dissertation last summer and, during a particularly idle moment did my Cindy Crawford: the Next Challenge Workout DVD.

What persuaded me to undertake this foolhardy step was:

1. Bum envy. Gombaz is a runner and has a posterior you can rest objects on, such is its 90 degree-ness.
2. Being 30. I wanted to test if I can actually still run normally or whether I have irredeemably acquired the gait of unfit middle aged women running for buses (head down, side to side motion, arms and handbag lodged under bosoms to stop them bouncing.)

I was happy to discover that I can still run. In fact it started out splendidly, I kept up with the kids with only minor breathing difficulties, and successfully negotiated at least two 3- foot curbs.

Then we stopped suddenly because Gombaz needed to pee and a minor detour was made to the Four Corners restaurant, after which it all went downhill. As Gombaz and friend glided along in front of me, I began to tire. I like to think that it was because of Cairo’s infernal pollution, but in fact when I face the music and listen, the tune playing is “Amnesiac is hideously unfit.” At about the time I started to lag and eventually stop, three youths in a Lancer appeared in order to shout “encouragement” at certain parts of my two companions’ anatomies. The whole circus disappeared round the corner, and when I eventually arrived (walking and swearing) I saw the youths still in full voice, but noted that they stopped when I appeared. This prompted the sobering thought that perhaps these boys mistook me for a lady chaperoning my two daughters, and had stopped their testosterone charged antics out of respect for the presence of a senior citizen.

Anyway I soldiered on and about the time I began to master my breathing, the Rugby induced knee injury which had been cured by complete inactivity decided to put in an appearance because it missed me so much. This was outside the Marriot, so I was forced to limp, red faced, the entire length of the 26th July drag to our meeting point at Um Kulthoum tower. Gombaz and her pal gallantly remained by my side and propelled me along with light banter, making me feel like an enormous taxiing airplane being guided onto the runway by the men with the lollipops.

I can now say with authority that jogging in public in Cairo is a preposterously foolish act on several levels. I had strong suspicions that it was such before embarking, because of the memory of my father jogging in Dokki in the 80s and being pelted with stones. He however, insists on wearing shorts resembling Speedo swimming trunks, and the uncharitable part of me thinks that he got off lightly with this treatment.

I am now pleased to report that I am the proud owner of a limp similar to that of Dustin Hoffman’s Ratso in Midnight Cowboy and, when mounting stairs, must swing my completely straight left leg to the side in an arc motion.

Not everything that is banned is good/we Ahmed Ezz maalu?

I voluntarily went to the cinema to watch Donia tonight. It turned out to be a particularly foolish act of masochism.

My interest in the film derived from the fact that media reviews had touted it as a bold film which crosses Egyptian cinematic red lines, tackles thorny issues such as female genital circumcision and, as a result of this audacity, had been banned by those reactionary killjoys with their busy scissors at the Ministry of Mind Control. Egyptian films seem largely to fall into one of two broad categories; arty/independent or mass consumption, by which latter is meant either Ahmed Ezz or Hany Salama in a car chase, or Mostafa Qamar/Khaled Selim running in slow motion on a beach with Dalia el Bekheiry/Nelly, all laughing uproariously at some unheard joviality and the sheer magic of life. Having had my fill of implausible plot lines and la la land Egypt First, what Religious Sectarianism?© propagandising with el Raheena , I looked forward to watching Donia. By the end of it I was longing (even more strongly than I usually do) for Ahmed Ezz surviving a 4000 foot drop off a cliff, and Russian actors pretending to be American. As Sharshar said once he had regained his ability to talk after seeing it “law makanoosh mana3ooh kont ana hamna3oo” [If they hadn’t have banned it, I would have.]

The film simply had no plot, but rather was a series of the following self-contained, apparently unrelated scenes: [Excruciatingly long, but friends share pain, right?]

- Hanan Turk does Kate Bush style dancing in a circle, while a very camp Walid Aouni with a frankly ridiculous accent (yes yes kettle and pot) and Corella Deville hairstyle entreats her to “truly feel the music” and “focus all her weight on the pivot” as she is “surrounded by the universe…the UNIVERSE….the never-ending UNIVERSEEEEE” as he himself waves his arms in the manner young children use to represent trees swaying in the wind during school plays.
- Fathy Abdel Wahab lurks in waiting for Hanan in a pervy stalker manner, and confesses his love for her after he descends upon her. Hanan rebuffs him in a playful way, but her cheeky smile, and the fact that she is standing so close to him that she is practically inhaling his nipple, tells us that she is Hot for Him.
- An overweight woman appears in a very short nightgown and belly dances.
- Mohamed Mounir rails against the banning of 1001 Nights.
- Hanan dances again, this time against the backdrop of a giant poster which is meant to be her mother. That it is actually Hanan Turk is plainly obvious to all.
- Aida Riad drives a taxi while smoking, for she is a Woman Who Doesn’t Give a Fig About Social Conventions.
- Mohamed Mounir rails against the banning of 1001 Nights, this time while topless and wiping his sweaty face all over the body of a woman wearing 407 bangles.
- Fathy jumps out from behind Aida’s taxi and tells Hanan that he loves her.
- Hanan dances. Walid is camp.
- Four overweight women dressed in what can only be described as opaque coloured cling film belly dance.
- Mohamed Mounir rails against the banning of 1001 Nights, but this time he is blind. He has lost his vision at some indeterminate moment - possibly during the five minutes that my companions and I were debating whether to get up and leave.
- Aida drives her taxi.
- Fathy and Hanan marry. Hanan wears a wedding dress made out of paper, and gets on the back of a lorry carrying a wardrobe, laughing playfully.
- Hanan and Fathy experience problems in the bedroom, largely because Hanan is eggs and consumed by feminist and existentialist angst which she simply must share with both us and poor old Fathy, who himself just wants a bit of how’s your father.
- Mohamed Mounir, this time not railing against the banning of 1001 Nights, teaches a young boy letters drawn in the sand, in an isolated spot in the desert. Blind Mohamed is led by the arm placed on the young boy’s shoulder, but nonetheless insists on extending the other arm in front of him in a comedy sleep walking manner, just in case he should bump into any buildings left carelessly in the desert.
- Hanan dances, but this time a pouting Walid is angry with her for absenting herself for ten days. He lambastes her in a super bitch way while sitting on a stool a la Boy George, clutching an invisible handbag. Hanan works through her rage by attempting to dance, in a defiant Rocky manner, but Walid and his handbag tell her that “she is not really with him.” Hanan responds by removing the pencil holding up her hair and breaking it in two (why??). The music ends dramatically with the snap and a close-up on the pencil and Hanan’s slightly squinting eyes. Walid fumes. The scene brought to mind a preposterous homosexual Million Dollar Baby. On the ground surrounding Hanan are ten male dancers doing backstroke. We don’t know why.
- Aida drives her taxi with Mohamed Mounir railing against the banning of 1001 Nights in the back.
- Hanan dances, and then Walid makes her eat a rose.
- Mohamed Mounir enters a music store and rails against the banning of 1001 Nights. Meanwhile, the audience wonders whether the director deliberately left a poster advertising Mounir’s latest album in plain view behind him. Is this post-modern irony or an oversight?? Do we care??
- Mohamed Mounir rails against the banning of 1001 Nights, and receives a gift of an uncensored Indian version of the tome, brought to him by Hanan. He briefly regains his vision and sees the birthmark on Hanan’s neck. Sharshar says that the birth mark switched between the right and left sides of Hanan’s neck. This shouldn’t be attributed to continuity problems of course. Rather, it symbolises the constant objectification of women in Egyptian society.
- Mohamed Mounir rails against the banning of 1001 Nights while feeling up Hanan.
- Being felt up by Mohamed Mounir resolves Hanan’s bedroom issues.
- More overweight belly dancing.
- Etc..

And so it went, on and on and on. It was all so highly symbolic as to be entirely stripped of fun and entertainment, but then again maybe me and my companions were too dense to see what the bloody hell eating a rose means. It will however, be well-received Outside by men in glasses wearing polo necks because its scenes with prayer beads conspicuous in the foreground and the obligatory sound of the muezzin inevitably transform it into a damning critique of the socio-economic dichotomy of gender roles in contemporary Arab society blah blah blah.

About the only scene which moved me in any way was that depicting a female circumcision, which was leg-crossingly horrific and quite well done.

We all left the cinema to the sound of my friend Amour dispensing various mother-related invectives against the film’s directors. Amour is 20, his favourite pastimes are looking at Haifa Wahby pictures and playing sadda radda, and his best film is Titanic. We bonded in my last job when I explained female menstruation to him and he repaid the favour by making me a George Wassouf cocktail. Were it not for the fact of Amour’s jubilance about the recent news that his army service had been delayed for three years, I fear that an act of violence could have been committed in the cinema tonight.

This weekend I am going to see Ma7atet Masr to get the taste of Donia out of my mouth. So to speak.

Swings and roundabouts

Good thing about Egypt: People can roam the streets wearing pyjamas, dressing gown and bedroom slippers without a single onlooker's eyebrow being raised.

Bad thing about Egypt: The right to appear in public in such attire is reserved to gentlemen aged over 65.

Elvis and the wings

I am unemployed and idle as I think is obvious from the prodigious amount of crap which spare time has allowed me to deposit on this blog. One perk of unemployment has been my ability to socialise with my cousin Mildred’s kids, Elvis (3) and Boosa (1 and a half). Spending time with them is always a wonderful experience and an opportunity for personal growth for all parties concerned: Boosa demonstrates that it is humanly possible to repeat a single word 78 times in the space of a minute, Elvis is as good as her word and doesn’t vomit in my face when I spin her on top of my head (at her insistence), and I fight the good fight and continue the war I am losing of trying to make them sound British.

Elvis has introduced me to Dora the Explorer, a bilingual Latina cartoon person with a Beatles moptop haircut and a talking monkey. Either the formula is fantastic or my brain is slowly turning into sponge, but I have been entirely seduced by Dora and her hypnotic patho-tunnelo-pyramidos, and regularly sit there fixated, my mouth hanging open, as Boosa plays in the dribble leaking out of it and Elvis climbs on my head.

I found myself watching Dora with three children under three at Mildred’s place last week. Mildred herself was out. Two of the children were Elvis and Boosa. The third kid, Nably, I recognised as the daughter of Mildred’s friends, though I wasn’t sure what she was doing there. I assumed that she was being baby-sat rather than e.g. having driven herself over to discuss her stock portfolio with Elvis.

When Mildred and her husband arrived home I briefly tore my attention away from Dora and noticed that they were carrying with them fancy dress butterfly wings, and reflected on how far either toys or parents have come since my day, when I was given empty egg boxes to play with. In the interests of short person harmony Mildred diplomatically announced that the wings were for both Elvis and Nably to share, because “sharing is caring.” Elvis attempted to challenge this by demonstrating, practically, that “not owning = moaning” but luckily was silenced by the wings. Not for long however, and, like a certain recently departed Arab ruler, she discovered that sanctions and an eventual resort to force follow failure to comply with orders to hand over embargoed items. Nably of course was entirely oblivious to Elvis’ silent rage as she enjoyed the timeshare wings, and meanwhile Boosa pronounced the word “key” repeatedly, and at high volume, for reasons best known to himself. Eventually both Nably and Elvis tired of the wings and discovered that it was more fun to run into each other at high speed.

One of life’s enduring mysteries is how small children are able to locate any available liquid matter and immediately stain themselves with it, even if they are in outer space. Nably did the honours somehow - even though I don’t recall her leaving the room - and Mildred was forced to clothe her in one of Elvis’ jackets. Noting that the wing-stealing intruder was now apparently misappropriating items from her wardrobe, and that compounding the outrage was her own mother’s complicity in this dark act, Elvis pointed at the jacket and bellowed “NO!!!” with a ferocity last witnessed at Sodom. Mustering all her impressive parenting skills, Mildred attempted to enter into negotiations with Elvis, who was pulling the face I myself pull when I see boyfriends looking at other girls’ bottoms. Mildred explained that the weather was cold, and that without a jacket Nably risked falling ill. Asking what she must have thought to be a straightforward question she asked, “you don’t want Nably to get sick do you Elvis?” To which Elvis calmly replied that in fact yes, she did want Nably to get sick - which pleased me enormously. Almost choking on the laughter I was repressing, the sofa shook with my silent hysterics as Elvis reiterated for clarity in a spooky Silence of the Lambs voice that she did definitely want Nably (who was completely unaware of Elvis’ vitriol and was herself protesting having to wear a jacket) to get sick, despite her mother’s protests.

Elvis is of course a wonderful, kind, and good-hearted child, she was merely demonstrating firstly; the importance of never asking a question the answer to which you are not sure of, and, secondly; that as compensation for not being able to go anywhere unaccompanied, drink caffeine, watch TV after 8 pm or make any executive decision of any sort, small people are allowed absolute free reign with the truth and can make startlingly rude observations with impunity. I discovered only recently that this right is rescinded at some unspecified point during puberty, and that since conversations are consequently something of an offence minefield, giving an opinion and in particular a truthful one is to be avoided at any cost. I am beginning to slowly understand why British conversation is so centred around the neutral zone of the weather, where it is virtually impossible to cause offence to one’s interlocutor, unless you are talking to a cloud.