Bella ciao

Note loads of foreigners, friendly copper cordon, absence of riot police

Egyptian government has been busy recently adding new chapters to its part-time project of an equivalent to ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’ aimed at despots, called ‘How to Shaft People Within (and beyond) Your Jurisdiction While Not Giving a Shit About Popularity Ratings’.

Earlier this month pictures emerged of what is allegedly an underground steel wall along Egypt’s border with Gaza, designed to put an end to the smuggling tunnels which as we all know are used only to smuggle in weapons and artillery and not food and other basics which Israel (with Egypt’s help) has prevented entering Gaza since it imposed its siege in 2007.

Egypt is extraordinarily obsessed with asserting its sovereignty, in the same way that some short men feel compelled to prove to the world that an absence of stature in no way comprises their masculinity and virility. A better analogy is perhaps a bald man. My mother always told me to never trust a man with a comb-over. Egypt’s eastern border policy, with all its sovereignty chest-thumping, is clearly that of a bald man attempting to conceal the fact that he doesn’t have autonomy over his own border.

I might be wrong of course. Perhaps Egypt’s decision to restrict opening of its border with Gaza and prevent activists from the Gaza Freedom March and Viva Palestina from reaching the crossing is just serendipitous coincidence, a case of Israeli and Egyptian interests overlapping. Perhaps Egypt decided that it is in its national interest to prevent hundreds of foreigners from entering Gaza and instead have them wreak protest havoc in Cairo, thereby ensuring a double whammy of steel wall + foreigner-sprawled-in-front-of-traffic-outside-French- embassy bad guy international media spotlight.

The other theory is that this is all a vendetta against Hamas, that the Egyptian government is putting pressure on it to come to a deal about Gilad Shalit.

Whatever the reason, as usual it’s the Arab man on the street who’s being fucked over in all this. As I wrote this on Monday night there were reports on Twitter that journalists – Egyptian, obviously – were detained for a couple of hours in a police van during their coverage of a protest by 100 or so Gaza Freedom March members who have been camping out on the pavement outside the French Embassy since Sunday evening.

Anyone familiar with Egyptian protests will understand what occupation of a bit of pavement means in Egypt. This afternoon, I was at a sit-in outside parliament by workers from the Ahmoseto company. They were protesting for severance pay. The company owner – deeply in debt – has legged it, leaving the factory closed and them in the shit. As usual. When I arrived there were about 100 men occupying one stretch of pavement with another 500 or so penned in by security bodies around the corner.

About five minutes after I arrived the men began chanting Allahu akbar – negotiations with the government had finished and the men had been promised severance pay. Almost immediately an officious little man of about 25 in a blue blazer with gold buttons began telling them to leave. They’d got what they wanted, now bugger off.

When the man told me to push off I asked him who he was and he said state security. State security have apparently issued instructions to their staff ordering them to dress like the air stewards of a budget airline.

But to return to the theme, Egyptians have very little public space in Egypt and it is therefore expected that if anyone is going to get arrested during a protest attended by 100+ French activists and three Egyptian journalists covering it, it sure as hell wont be Serge and Pierre. Because in addition to being brutal arseholes, Egyptian security bodies are perfidious, ball-less scumbags just like their bosses.

I haven’t been following the Gaza Freedom March with much enthusiasm because if I wanted to join I wouldn’t be allowed to; people with Egyptian or Palestinian Authority (!) passports can’t, according to the website. The justification for this is that “it has been difficult for Egyptian citizens and people with Palestinian Authority passports to enter the Gaza Strip…So unfortunately we cannot take [them]”. I object to this policy. In addition to protesting the siege and torment by one people of another, this is a march against discrimination, and individual demonstrators of any nationality who want to try to enter alongside their more privileged European and American counterparts should be allowed to.

However, it’s always good to see the Egyptian government be given a hard time, and I hope that at some point in the future it is held to account for its actions.

Foreign activists organized a demo this afternoon outside the Journalists’ Syndicate. While trying to get the attention of a woman from Code Pink a state security officer who I am on nodding terms with asked me, “which group is she from?” having seemingly failed to notice that she was wearing a fluorescent pink t-shirt with the words CODE PINK emblazoned on it (and he speaks some English). He also seemed not to have heard of Code Pink, despite the fact that hundreds of foreign women dressed in pink are currently giving him lots of overtime. Stupidity seems to be part of the job description.

Later that evening there was another protest, this time organized by Egyptian activists and attended by some of the GFM members. I was tickled to notice that because this was an Egyptian-organised event, riot police and steel barriers were deployed, despite the fact that numbers were less than the earlier demonstration – when a row of ‘friendly’ plain-clothed policemen formed a loose cordon and chatted with the foreign women.

Overheard from a copper to one woman, while he chewed gum vigorously, smiled and winked: “Why you no talk about Afghanistan? Why you no talk about Guantanamo?”

Inside the journalists syndicate itself a press conference was being held, attended almost exclusively by hundreds of serious looking men and their beards.

After we left the demo and as we were walking down Champollian Street, Moftases and I heard the insistent thumping of a Tabla. It was coming from a side street. Looking down it I was stunned to see two veiled women dancing exuberantly inside a ring of chairs. A mechanic told us that we could approach them, and that it was a soboo3, the celebration of the birth of a baby. The baby was nowhere to be seen, which was good considering the volume of the music being played on the sound system.

We were invited to sit down, before bags of popcorn and sugared almonds were thrust upon us by a child. The dancing continued apace, with unbelievable sensuality, given that it was about 8.30 p.m. and less than ten metres away was a street full of mechanics. Barefoot and dressed in black, the women were exemplars of belly dancing its best, watched idly by a young man next to the decks who spent the entire time resting his chair on two legs against a wall. A group of three boys meanwhile watched transfixed the women’s arses talking sex, left right, left right.

As is inevitable Moftases and I were dragged up in turn to dance. Our arses said very little at all.

Egyptians often ask me why I choose to live in Egypt. I often ask myself the same question. Cairo is an exhausting, perplexing, cruel, bitch of a city. On some days it quite literally stinks; it gets in your nose and burns your throat and wraps itself around your lungs. On clear days there are still moments you feel you can’t breathe.

But then there are moments like tonight, when you turn a corner and find yourself in the middle of a giant Fuck You at Egypt and its iniquities. A stretch of pavement taken over by women, public space (finally, temporarily) owned by the people, a gasp of oxygen.

Uptown downtown nowhere ville

I spent this weekend getting knocked over the head by the many worlds which exist in Egypt, again.

A relative of mine is an event organiser, and she invited me on Friday evening to the launch of recently released new Land Rover models. My interest in 4x4s doesn’t extend beyond avoiding getting hit by them but two compelling factors persuaded me the evening would justify the need to get out of my pyjamas and leave my house: firstly, the high probability of an open buffet and, secondly, the fact that the event was being held in Uptown Cairo.

Uptown Cairo is on top of the Moqattam Hill. The last time I went to Moqattam was to photograph a police station where a man in police custody had been defenestrated. On the way back, Moftases and I decided that it might be nice to have a look at Uptown Cairo.

Now Uptown Cairo is not so much a gated community as a $4 billion fortressed community. A series of flapping flags bearing the insignia “Emaar” (an Emirati property development company) at the corner of a road announce its existence. The road leading to the development is long and windy and makes getting there without a car tricky if not impossible. Which is the point. When Moftases and I arrived at the gate that day posing as potential real estate buyers we were told that we weren’t allowed in unless a company representative takes us around, and that none work on Friday. Moftases has a 10 year-old Fiat with engineering issues which may or may not be material to the matter.

I wondered why they didn’t just build a moat and ask people to send copies of their bank statements via Bluetooth on their iPhones at the gate.

So on Friday night Moftases and I went back to the fortress. Moftases gaily called out “Land Rover” as we breezed past the gate, the security guide waved us through with his walkie-talkie like it was a wand, and we carried on further down the yellow brick road, eventually reaching the obligatory fountain next to a car park where we stepped out into a cold whose level of bitterness was someone between Tiger Woods’ wife and Egypt after That Sudan Match.

Because we have legs and are plebs, Moftases and I soldiered on through the inclemency, ignoring the group of men shouting out something behind us, until a lovely man informed us that a fleet of Land Rovers and Jaguars were conveying guests from the car park to the event location, approximately 1 km away. In we popped and 40 seconds later were deposited at the event marquee on Uptown’s “Street of Dreams” which reminded me of Brookside a bit.

The Facebook invitation to the event had what I now realise was a warning, rather than a recommendation: “Dress Code: GLAMOUROUS”. I had made the concession of putting on a necklace, but as ladies in mini skirts and fur coats floated in on clouds of rich perfume I realized that a brown wool cardigan affair with a stripey scarf and pink socks rendered me sartorially-speaking a badly coordinated Before to their After.

Luckily I didn’t care, and neither did the cheese smorgasbord buffet which Moftases (wearing a blazer) and I proceeded to demolish until we were made aware of the existence of a bar.

We watched the guests file in while coating our innards with cheese. Most were wearing my monthly (if not yearly) salary, they killed me. Cigar-wielding men greeted each other effusively. I was pleased to see that one man was wearing a Del Boy camel hair coat. Music played and drinks flowed and Egypt seemed far, far away.

Halfway through the proceedings Moftases and I went to have a look at the Emaar show home, a two-storey, four bedroomed villa offering lovely views over Cairo. This wasn’t the most expensive finish available we were told, if were prepared to shell out more than the LE 9 million that this particular villa costs.

LE 9 million will buy you a four-storey block of flats in central but ordinary areas of Cairo such as Dokki. The ‘disadvantage’ is that in these areas you are not hermetically sealed off from the rest of Egypt by a road and gate which keeps the unwashed carless and the car-driving undesirables respectively, away.

On Saturday I went back to Egypt for a Kefaya demonstration outside the high court, apparently to commemorate the five-year anniversary of the group’s first protest. As in 2004, Saturday’s protest was to do with impending elections. Kefaya leader Abdel Halim Qandil announced that Kefaya would be boycotting the 2010 and 2011 elections. With the usual bluster he declared that “the Public Group for the Egyptian People” would be created, composed of 500 “former and current opposition MPs, public figures and strike and protest leaders” who will form a “popular parliament” and elect an “alternative president”.




A series of civil disobedience actions like strikes and protests and a signature campaign, Qandil said, will convince the incumbent president to bugger off “freeing Egypt” from his presence, and leaving his seat to the alternative president.

Qandil, tired of thinking about thrash metal, now thinking about alternative rock

Qandil said that Kefaya was “extending its hand” to Mohamed El-Baradei, who is hanging up his Nuclear Atomic Agency hard hat and given the Egyptian media lots to write about now that the football saga has run out of steam by hints that he might run for the Egyptian presidency.

There is something a bit sad about Kefaya protests; perhaps the knowledge that with its protests and grand gestures, the group is pissing in the wind, and like Ayman Nour’s travelling circus, has become a joke. While the reasons behind the decision to boycott the elections are noble, it was probably in no small part taken because Kefaya does not have a credible candidate for the presidential election (even if the election rules allowed it to field a candidate), and understands that someone of El-Baradei’s stature would be unwilling to associate his name with the movement because that would mean instant death.

A mass movement without the mass is reduced to a collection of friends meeting up now and again to do a bit of chanting and remind the world that they are still alive. On Saturday, they were even bickering about whose turn it was to chant, which only deepened my despair. As I watched them I thought about Egyptians who possess the means to buy LE 9 million homes and LE 1.5 million cars, and wondered for the umpteenth time how change is possible in this morass where wealth (both extreme and absence of) ensures that political self-determination is either irrelevant or a luxury to the happy rich and the fed-up underfed who are both too busy chasing a dime to try to stop Egypt imploding.

Sometimes she remembers my name

My mother says: (5:30:39 PM)
Happy birthday!

Carah Sarr says: (5:30:51 PM)
Hiiiiiiii thanks :-)

My mother says: (5:32:00 PM)
You were born at 4.05 pm. I remember it well

My mother says: (5:32:20 PM)
Or was it 4.13?

Related links: This ridiculous article.

The beautiful game

“Football has developed quickly in many countries because it used to be part of the politics of the pursuit of power and the ideologies it serves. Rapidly, it became the expression of nationalism, patriotism and chauvinism, even before federations were established. More than most sports, it lends itself to tribal feelings: the collective effort, the team colors, the speed, the physical aggression.”

“Egypt should bomb Algeria”

My sense of patriotism has always been a bit skewed, I think because there can be no absolutes if your parents come from different countries (or planets, as mine do).

Another factor is the deep sense of bitterness that comes from never really belonging, or being accepted, to both, or either country. That’s a whole other story but in brief my identity is slightly nebulous simply because it’s always been defined (imposed) by where I am, and those around me.

An example: The day before Egypt’s first match against Algeria I went to the Algerian Embassy in Cairo and photographed Algerian fans there. I was approached by a woman who, once she discovered that I work for an Egyptian paper/am partly Egyptian (I never discovered what exactly got her goat) summarily ejected me.

A year ago I was at a protest where a lawyer refused to be interviewed because, he quote unquote, “doesn’t talk to foreigners”. I showed him my national ID card. He remained unmoved. Which reminds me of an incident which happened last week when a secretary registering my details in a hospital said (while turning over my apparently fucking useless Egyptian national ID card in her hand) “heyya el genseyya aih?” (What nationality?)

Which is not to say that I didn’t support Egypt during its World Cup bid. I did. How couldn’t I? Few things match the sense of collective joy I experienced when Egypt won the African Cup, and when Egypt beat Algeria on Saturday. There have been suggestions that an interest in football is a distraction from what really matters, that celebrating a victory by Egypt’s national team somehow gives legitimacy to the ruling regime, or that football fervour is a distraction. I disagree with these sentiments.

In the Egyptian context, football is one of the few areas where the ruling regime has little influence and practically zero relevance, despite the zoom ins on Gamal Kermit Mubarak every time a goal is scored. I also object to the suggestion that a love of football equates to manipulation by the regime, and that football victories are used to let off steam of anger which would otherwise be channeled into political opposition movements. To suggest this is to deny Egyptian football fans agency: some Egyptians actually just love football in the same way that the rest of the world does. It’s also dodgy and highly simplistic, because it links in with the theory that if football didn’t exist to distract the oppressed masses they would all be in their homes plotting the revolution. Where’s the evidence?

Which is not to say that a certain amount of manipulation hasn’t gone on off-pitch. Nationalism is wonderful when it’s positive, but its existence is necessarily predicated on the existence of other nationalities. And mankind likes groups and tribes, and these groups and tribes are necessarily defined by other groups and tribes. And therein lies the danger.

What’s interesting about Algeria and Egypt is that these are two very similar countries in terms of social identity, religion, economic status, oppression, etc. Which means that the Us vs The Unknown Other – the bogey man - element which is so often a theme in the Egyptian media has been more difficult to manufacture this time. The emphasis has been on the violent history of Egypt vs. Algeria encounters and on the suggestion that “our Algerian brothers” have somehow betrayed their Arab identity.

It all started with the allegedly fabricated attack on the Algerian team bus when they arrived in Cairo.

There is a video which shows missiles being thrown at the bus by Egyptian youths. The Algerian team claim that three of their players received head wounds necessitating stitches as a result of the “attack”.

The Algerian team’s claims were almost immediately dismissed as made up by the Egyptian media, and eventually the public prosecution office. I didn’t read a single news item which questioned why – against a backdrop of extreme tension in the run-up to the game – hotheaded fans were allowed to get so close to the Algerian team’s bus. The difference between the team’s entrance to Egypt and their exit from Cairo’s stadium after their defeat was stark, and amounted to about six central security trucks and two riot trucks complete with armed soldiers. The truth about how damage was caused to the team bus is almost irrelevant here. Egypt had a duty to protect the Algerian team. It failed. Whether or not Algeria protected the Egyptian national team when it was in Algeria is irrelevant, because duties are not defined according to the extent to which others fulfil their obligations.

The most interesting thing in all this business was the reaction to the shameful attacks by some Algerians on Egyptian interests in Algeria (Egyptair offices, Orascum employees) after Algeria’s defeat in Cairo.

Egyptians have been fucked over routinely in the Gulf ever since Egyptian migration to the Gulf began. Exploited, abused, vulnerable, unpaid, relieved unwillingly of their passports, injured…Where’s the domestic outrage? I can only assume that there is none because the competitive/chauvinistic element of football is missing. Or perhaps it’s because the Egyptians exploited in the Gulf aren’t Naguib Sawiris, and are voiceless in Egypt anyway.

On Wednesday Egypt was beaten by Algeria. It was a shit match, not only because virtually every single member of the Algerian team insists on throwing himself to the ground “in injury” every time an Egyptian player comes near him, but because the Egyptian team was all over the shop. But the match was irrelevant anyway.

Egyptians who attended the playoff in Sudan returned claiming that they were attacked by hordes of Algerian barbarians flown in by the Algerian government expressly for the purpose of terrorizing them with knives and violence.

Things I find astonishing about this and other developments since:

1. This is a football match being played out against an ongoing feud which began in 1989 and was revived only very recently in Egypt’s defeat of Algeria in Cairo. Violence and football are not strangers. Sudan anticipated violence. It deployed approximately 15,000 soldiers. The international media termed it a “revenge match”. Egyptian fans were apparently the only party “shocked” at the possibility and reality of violence.

2. The On TV channel this morning broadcast half an hour of interviews with Egyptian supporters in Cairo Aiport coming from Sudan, who described scenes of “hell” and “war” and savage attacks by Algerian fans. No Algerians were interviewed. No Sudanese eyewitnesses were interviewed.

3. No videos of these alleged attacks have since appeared despite tens of thousands of Egyptians and their mobile phones flying to Sudan. A video of young men brandishing knives has appeared on Youtube. They are not wearing Algerian team colours. There is nothing to prove where and when this was shot.

4. Nobody has doubted the credibility of claims that Egyptian buses carrying fans were attacked by Algerian fans, while the fact that the Algerian national team necessarily trashed its own bus is not open to debate and a matter of logic.

5. The Egyptian media has entirely failed in its responsibility of uncovering the truth. Truth (where it exists) is composite, and is usually discovered by speaking to people who refute the conclusion you already have in your head when you set out to discover the truth.

6. No distinction is being made between Algeria, football, the Algerian government and the Algerian people. Algeria el sha3b [the people] is now a blow up plastic devil with oxygen supplied by the Egyptian media. As I write this, an Egyptian actress is on a Dream TV talk show telling us that 3,000 Algerian criminals were released from prison and flown to Sudan expressly for the purpose of terrorizing Egyptian fans. She has not provided any evidence for this claim. The presenter has not asked for any.

7. Egypt has recalled its ambassador to Algeria because of the treatment of Egyptians at the hands of Algerians. Apparently, only Egyptians have the right to mistreat other Egyptians.

Samia who cleans my flat and I had a huge argument today about all this. She has concluded that “there’s something not right about Algerians”. I asked her why the Egyptian media has decided not to interview Algerians, to get the other side of the story. She suggested that no Algerian would consent to be interviewed by the Egyptian media, and then repeatedly muttered 7asby Allah we na3m el wakeel under her breath as fans described their experiences on On Tv.

Bread & Butter VIII

Ragai (left) with wunderbar lawyer Mohamed Abdel Aziz

Here's some good news for a change. A copper sentenced to five years after a horrible attack on a man in a police station.

ALEXANDRIA: Relatives of a mentally disabled man who was brutally assaulted in a police station last year were relieved on Saturday after offending police colonel Akram Suleiman was found guilty and slapped a five-year jail sentence.

“This is really great. Thank God. I’m so happy,” Ilhamy Sultan, the brother of Ragai Sultan told Daily News Egypt.

“I really didn’t expect that Suleiman would receive such a heavy sentence … I was confident that he’d be found guilty but thought that he’d be given a two- or three-year sentence at most.

“The court really understood what Ragai went through.”

A juvenile crime squad led by Suleiman arrested Ragai Sultan on the evening of July 22, 2008, as he walked on Alexandria’s Corniche.

His brother eventually found him the next day — after he has filed a missing person report — unconscious in a hospital.

Ragai, who had been dumped at the hospital and registered under the name ‘citizen,’ spent three days in intensive care after suffering a broken rib and shoulder, a fracture in the neck and brain hemorrhage that necessitated surgery.

Suleiman was found guilty of three crimes: misuse of force, possession of an illegal weapon and causing permanent disability.

The first offence carries a maximum sentence of three years while defendants found guilty of the second offence face a maximum of one year’s imprisonment.

The maximum sentence handed down in cases of causing permanent disability is seven years. The sentence is calculated according to the seriousness of the disability caused.

Suleiman’s defense lawyers alleged that Ragai — who is nearly 40 — was targeted by a juvenile crime squad because at the time of his arrest he was accompanied by a teenage girl called Passant, who he planned to engage in sexual relations with for money.

The defense maintained throughout the three-month trial that Ragai’s injuries had been caused by him falling down a flight of stairs while attempting to flee the police.

Forensic doctor Karam Shehata categorically repudiated this defense in October when he told the court that Ragai’s head injuries could only have been caused by being struck with a blunt object.

During Saturday’s court session, Suleiman’s lawyers changed tack and attempted to undermine the credibility of the forensic report. They claimed that Shehata did not examine Ragai and said that the fact that the CT scan carried out on Ragai was not accompanied by a report is irregular.

They also maintained that injuries of the gravity sustained by Ragai could be caused “by someone falling over on a beach while playing tennis”.

Doctors from Al Nadeem Center for the Rehabilitation of the Victims of Violence who attended the trial said that these medical claims were simply “false.”

Mostafa Hussein, a psychiatrist with the Nadeem Center, told Daily News Egypt that CT scans are not usually accompanied by a report printed on the CT film itself, as the defense claimed.

He added that while falls may lead to concussion or a brain hemorrhage, this is only the case where the fall is from “a considerable height” or if the person has a pre-existing malformation in the brain’s blood vessels, “which is not the case with Ragai.”

Two prosecution witnesses, who were held in the Alexandria Security Directorate at the same time as Ragai, appeared during Saturday’s trial, and gave conflicting accounts of what happened.

Both, however, concurred that a junior policeman called Mohamed was responsible for Ragai’s injuries.

Ragai had initially told his brother that the person responsible for his assault was called Mohamed, but changed this account eight months later when, Ilhamy says, his memory returned and he identified Suleiman as his assailant.

Defense lawyers argued that the fact that Ragai changed his account indicates “Akram is an innocent scapegoat.”

Lawyers who had lodged, and won, a claim for LE 10,001 compensation for Ragai’s injuries expressed surprise at Suleiman’s “shambolic” defense team throughout the trial.

During Saturday’s session Suleiman appeared in the dock wearing sunglasses and at points appeared to be crying.

At the conclusion of the defense team’s pleadings, he shouted out from the dock in tears, “Why am I here? Why has nobody listened to me? I’m being tortured in the newspapers and on websites. Why would I hit him? What is there between us that I would hit him?”

Defense lawyer Gamal El-Swede also focused on this angle during his defense pleadings.

He acknowledged that incidents of police violence and brutality do occur, but added, “members of the police only hit people in order to extract confessions.”

While complaints about police brutality are common, few police officers are held to account for such incidents.

Suleiman’s sentencing is roughly the sixth conviction of a police officer for brutality since 2007.

The heaviest sentence was handed down in November 2007 to a police officer and two policemen, each sentenced to seven years imprisonment, after they were found guilty of killing Nasr Ahmed Abdallah.

In a statement issued on Sunday, the Nadeem Center said that Suleiman’s sentence is “one of the heaviest sentences ever handed down by the Egyptian judiciary in a torture case.”

The Gamal Show

The Gamal Show aired online tonight, and I watched it live with loads of people on Twitter. Was fun.

The Gamal Show is Gamal Mubarak’s attempt to convince us that he’s Barack Obama. He appears in a studio with a load of hand-picked young people in a “dialogue”, on this occasion moderated by Lamis El-Hadidy, a television presenter married to Amr Adeeb, brother of Emad Adeeb, head of the executive board of newspaper Nahdet Misr, which recently published a story in which it stated that all Egyptian Bedouins (except direct descendents of the Prophet Mohamed) are criminals.

Lamis wore an odd waistcoat affair that looked like the back was made out of a flak jacket. Gamal didn’t wear a flak jacket because he is protected from flak, because his audience was handpicked and as far as I know he doesn’t meet real people outside studios and controlled public appearances and dinner time with Khadiga.

During tonight’s Gamal Show Gamal was joined by trade minister Rashid Mohamed Rashid, so that he didn’t have to talk as much as on other shows.

Gamal’s hairline and Rashid’s face for some reason remind me of Tunisian president Zeineddin Bin Ali, who in a twist of fate is busily writing himself into another five years of history tonight.

(Aside: Rashid’s Wikipedia page tells us that he went to Stanford, Harvard and MIT, and only acquired Diplomas from each establishment).

The point of the Gamal Show tonight was to impress upon us the importance of a free market economy and the wondrous good being worked by the private sector and private companies who are selflessly and beneficently shouldering the task of providing all the services that Egypt’s failed state can’t, like vocational job training and practical skills.

Gamal, who - God help us - manages to combine looking scary with a complete lack of charisma stressed the importance of reforming the Egyptian education system and, predictably, suggested that this should be done by making teaching a vocation rather than merely a government position.

In government terms this translates into making pay rises for teachers conditional on their passing tests which mostly examine very little to do with what they teach.

As expected, there were several comedy moments during tonight’s Gamal Show:

1. Almost all the young men had been given identical striped ties of the type favoured by Republicans, making them look like a giant Mormon boy band.

2. The questions were farcical, and determinedly and deliberately skirted round ills of Egyptian society using one of the following methods:

Model A

Audience member: I am a victim of [insert minor ill of society, such as unemployment]

Rashid Ben Ali/Lamis El Flak Jacket: Are you still a student?

Audient member: Yes

Rashid Ben Al/Lamis El Flak Jacket: You lack experience and your contribution must therefore be ignored.

Model B

Audience member: I am a victim of [insert minor ill of society, such as unemployment]

Rashid Ben Ali/Gamal: You must immediately open your own business. This will solve everything.

Model C

Audience member: There are no minor ills of society, such as unemployment and people who say so are lazy liars.

Lamis El-Flak Jacket: Bravo. Next question.

3. A contribution from Wahid Ramadan Mohamed, manager of a Macaroni factory. A carbohydrate Willy Wonka.
4. Gamal’s observation that “Egyptians as a general rule don’t like to move from the place they’re born in” – such as the presidency of Egypt perhaps?
5. This series of exchanges:

Exchange 1

Audience member: There is no wosta [use of high-up connections to obtain benefits one wouldn’t otherwise get such as a job, or special treatment] in Egypt.

Lamis El-Flak Jacket: Bravo, that’s right. Next question.

Immediately afterwards.

Exchange 2

Audience member: I wanted to open my business but was unable to get the necessary licence.

Lamis El Flak-Jacket: What? Really? We’ll call the governor for you immediately and sort it out.

Gamal making change

6. Lamis El-Flak Jacket towards the end of the programme telling audience members to get to the point with their questions cos time was running out and apologizing for being ‘dictatorial’ quote unquote. At least she apologises for it, unlike the father of a certain 40-something year old former banker who wasn’t a million miles away from her.

I was surprised to discover that Gamal really does seem to believe all the nonsense he spouts about foreign investment and a strong private sector and a pulling back of the state being the answer to Egypt’s problems, despite much of the evidence pointing to the contrary.

I was unsurprised to discover that he did not have the decency to make any reference to the tens of people who died yesterday night when a train went into the back of another train. But then it only involved Egypt’s poorest, the people who are hopelessly shut out of Gamal’s grand plans for the expansion of the private sector and whittling down of state services, and who are ploughed down daily again and again and again by his government’s merciless schemes.

*Screenshots by Moftases

CAIRO AIRPORT DENIED ENTRY INTO CAIRO AIRPORT

The whereabouts of these plastic chairs is currently unknown

CAIRO: The fate of around 400 plastic chairs, two duty free sections and various other permanent fixtures remained unknown yesterday after Cairo Airport was denied entry into Cairo Airport.

“It happened at around midnight,” an ashtray who wished to remain anonymous said.

“I was approached by a uniformed officer while someone was putting their cigarette out in me. The officer told me that ‘my name is in their system’ before I was taken into a small room filled with people some of whom I recognized. The officer also took the man who was putting his cigarette out.”

Speaking from Paris Asuit Case described his experiences.

“I arrived in Cairo exhausted after 8 hours in transit in Paris. Just before I was about to be put on the luggage belt two officers instructed the luggage handlers to put me down. I was then questioned for two hours about whether I have ever carried arms into Gaza,”

“They eventually put me on a flight back to Paris.”

While journalists were not allowed to approach the site of the Cairo Airport terminal, a mobile phone image smuggled out by an airport worker revealed that the once busy terminals now stand empty.

The assiduous security operation has left no stone unturned. Pen Birolund, a Swedish writing device explained what had happened to him.

“I was stopped just before going through passport control. I was told that that have my name on their computer and they took me into a side room where some police officers asked me whether I planned to lead a strikes and protests in Cairo and declare myself president. I saw Boeing 747s, luggage belts, and soap dispensers being held in airport detention, all waiting to be deported.”

While Interior Minister Beloved Le Juste has not publicly commented on the campaign, a security officer who spoke on condition of anonymity said that the operation – informally known as Operation Stop Wael Abbas – was a security operation aimed at getting to the core of “insurgent” activity in Egypt.

“There exists a minority in Egypt who wish to undermine Egypt’s stability by organizing marches in the countryside involving 14 people and writing about events which actually do happen and calling it news when it is merely a smear campaign,” the official said.

“We have discovered that these people communicate with people outside Egypt using something called Twitter, which is a top secret communication device similar to Morse Code.”

The official revealed that security bodies successfully infiltrated Twitter, by creating a Twitter alias and following people.

“This was an extremely complicated operation which involved signing up for Twitter. Computer specialists were called in for the task. Once we identified that Egyptian insurgents are communicating with outside elements we decided to tackle the problem at its root by banning Cairo Airport altogether. It is well known that Cairo Airport's plastic chairs provide support to these enemy elements.”

The official said that the authorities plan to build a giant moat around the perimeter of Egypt which he says will “stop false rumours entering the nation”.

He added that a leading Egyptian scientist is currently working on creating a giant roof modeled on the roof used on Wimbledon’s central tennis court which will cover Egypt’s airspace and serve the same function of “keeping out elements which seek to destabilise the country”.

It should be noted that Nobel-prize winning scientist Ahmed Zoweil has not been seen since his family reported him missing last month.

Barred

I was woken up today by a phone call at 2.30 a.m., which I was expecting. It was a woman’s voice, which I wasn’t expecting. It was bad news, which I was half-expecting.

“They’ve stopped Per. I’ve got through but they’re not letting him through.”

I digested this as sleep softly beat me around the head. Swedish journalist Per Bjorklund (he of the heavenly Scandinavian eyes) and his girlfriend, A (who rang me), were meant to be staying at my place for a few days while looking for a flat, and looking after the cats in my flat, while I go to Dahab. They had just arrived at Cairo Airport.

A was eventually able to give back Per back his mobile phone and the next time I rang it he answered.

“Hey,” the familiar, phlegmatic voice answered. “My name’s on a computer apparently. I’m being held in a security room and waiting to see a security officer. This looks like it could take some time.”

I’ve never met anyone as self-possessed, at all times, as Per, and this is saying something as our working relationship largely consists of me watching him nearly getting arrested at protests, having his camera memory card stolen by the police (more than once), nearly getting run over while trying to stop a police car kidnapping someone, and dealing with the sinister after-effects of that decision. I’ve never once seen him shout, seen him be rude to anyone. In fact I largely have to attempt to interpret his emotions through the speed at which he says stuff.

I tried to text and call A on her Swedish mobile while Per was inside. All I got was dead air. I then promptly fell asleep :-s

The next message I got was from Hamalawy at around 4.40 a.m., informing me that Per was going to be deported on a flight to Prague.

Per – or Bar as I and virtually everyone else call him - is a blogger, but more importantly he is one of the few journalists I know who actually gets off his arse and goes to situations which he knows won’t make headline news, rather than relying on phone calls and/or Twitter. He was one of the few journalists (Egyptian or foreign) who covered the Mahalla 49 trial with any consistency, having to contend with me at 9.30 a.m. for two and a half hours in a Peugeot.

He was always great company too, and always seemed to be able to analyse – and analyse well – situations very quickly.

In short he gives a shit.

I’d like to think that Per was deported because they’ve been following his Swedish-language reports on the labour movement and street protests in Egypt and decided that he is a threat – at least they’d be a chain of thought there.

I suspect though, as usual, that the decision makes as much sense as a rat in roller skates. I don’t want to waste the few functioning brain cells I have at 8 a.m. on considering reasons why he was stopped because what’s the point when actually there probably isn’t any kind of logical bloody reason for it. As there wasn’t when Travis Randall was deported, and a Palestinian mother was kept in Egypt for a week, supposedly for “being a security threat”.

Per was one of the people involved in the To Gaza march – as was Travis Randall – but other foreigners on that march have been in and out of Egypt since then without problems. No, there’s no great plan. This (“your name is in our computer”) is just yet another instance of what they do best: bullying disguised as bureaucratic procedure, as thought-out policy.

The last call I got in this whole sorry saga was an hour ago, when A rang me, still at the airport. No-one had bothered to tell her that Per had been deported (or at least told that he was going to be deported. His phone was switched off after Hamalawy spoke to him). She had been waiting there, alone, all that time. She broke down in tears.

لمستجير

" و لماذا بتعين علينا عندما نكتب ألا نتحدث إلا عن جمال الزهور و روعة عبقها ، بينما الخراء يملأ الشوارع و مياه الصرف الملوثة تغطى الأرض ، و الجميع يشمون الرائحة النتنة ويتشكون منها؟"

صنع الله إبراهيم

Obla dee

One of the harder things I had to do while in the UK this summer was visit my grandmother, who was recently put in an old people’s home.

The last time I saw her, in 2008, she was in sheltered accommodation, having moved there roughly a year before. She had had a heart attack, was increasingly frail, was gradually becoming less and less mobile and more and more anxious and depressed. The move to the sheltered accommodation didn’t help, or at least didn’t slow down the inevitable. After thirty years of visiting her at the house she had lived in for forever (I think since the 1970s) seeing her, and her antique furniture in this new place was eerie, like the time I came across an old newspaper from 1970-something in an abandoned house announcing that the post office was to become computerized. Trapped history.

My dad and I had a huge fight when we went back to gran’s almost empty flat in the sheltered accommodation this year, after she had been moved to the old people’s home. We were there to pick some of her stuff up, and the fight was ostensibly one of our usual inflated spars about nothing very much at all. I freely admit I was a pain in the arse, and part of the reason was the almost empty flat, with its bits and pieces of her stuff almost all of which I recognised and which now lay abandoned, and forgotten. Some of her belongings Dad and his siblings are storing in their homes. A lot has been given away. It got to me that 90 years of life can be fragmented, and lost like that.

The old people’s home is a two-storey converted detached house, which in the entrance smells like a million condensed British lunches. The smell intensifies and mutates the further you go inside, along a hallway from which residents’ rooms branch off. Their names are written on the doors. One was a “Mr & Mrs ____”, their door was slightly ajar. A television blared loudly.

The heart of the house is a dining area adjoined to a living area, a room lined with high-backed chairs along three of its walls. Of all the other areas on the home, this room hit me the hardest the first time I went.

In the centre there is a big cage, and in it there is a single grey parrot. In the chairs there are mostly women, asleep, or just sitting and looking at each other, or at nothing. When I went to see Gran we sat opposite a slightly obese woman. She was joined by a woman with a false shoe using a Zimmer-frame, who spent ages maneuvering herself into her seat. The slightly obese woman watched her throughout, in silence, continuing to stare even once she had sat down.

It was the staring that intrigued me. It was the type that babies and cats do.

Unembarrassed. Virtually none of the residents greeted or spoke to each other and when they did it was a few words about nothing, about objects, such as a stray handbag.

The first time I went I found Gran in the middle of the room on her Zimmer-frame. The minute she saw me she told me to put up my right hand and declare, ‘”I am Sarah Carr”. She was proving a point to the nurses – most of whom she mistrusts and suspects of being out to get her – that her granddaughter had come.

One of the nurses responded with, “don’t be silly, we never said she wouldn’t come”. I noted a One Threw Over the Cuckoo’s Nest iciness. Paranoia is a feature of Gran’s illness, which explains the Me vs. Them mentality vis-à-vis the nursing staff.

Another feature of her illness is that she has lost, or been liberated from, the trappings of convention. It is perhaps this which is most different about her; throughout her life gran was always very proper, correct, never forgot a birthday or anniversary, was an expert at small talk and manners and enduring people she didn’t like very much without letting them realise the effort involved. A good Christian, a church-going woman.

Although I love her, the politeness was always a barrier to getting as close to her as I would have liked. She was at home in the hello – how are you – fine thanks – lovely weather routine - the conversational signposts which prevent interlocutors straying into the woods of talking about themselves. Just once, I would have liked to hear her say something along the lines of “actually, I couldn’t give a fuck” – preferably to me. So that we could really parlay.

Which is why I was astonished – and pleased – when I saw her reaction to a particular nurse in the home. For a change of scene Dad, Gran and I had moved out of the grim social room with the parrot in it and onto a sofa placed in the hallway area. Nurses, and lost residents went past every so often, including a young nurse dressed in green. I noticed that every time this particular nurse went past gran would clench her teeth and quite literally snarl, like a wolf, at the nurse’s disappearing back.

Apparently, the nurse was a spy or a thief – I forget which now. The new honesty may have been symptomatic of an illness but for me it was a change for the better. The small talk, the chit-chat has simply been obliterated - replaced by weird fantasies and persecution complexes yes, but during the periods when she is lucid at least I know the truth about what gran is actually, truly, feeling.

And the truth, surprise surprise, is that she’s not happy. I see no reason why she should be. It’s difficult to express this without it somehow sounding as if I am pointing a finger of blame at the people responsible for putting her in the home (my father and his four siblings). I’m not. I understand that no other options existed short of gran living with one of them (extremely difficult if not impossible) There’s no certainty in any case that she would have been any happier there. If it was me however, and if I had 90-odd years of life under my belt and kids and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, I wouldn’t want to end my days in a place which smells of lunches and piss with a parrot and strangers.

In a very bleak moment in the social room during the first visit I looked around and breathed in that peculiar scent of food and excretions and catatonia and wondered why begin if this is the end.

During a lull in the “conversation” Dad had got up to harangue the parrot, and began whistling and making duck noises at the creature. Behind him, a woman who had been wheeled in on her wheelchair shortly before watched him intently. Her head was framed in a halo of crazy, unbrushed white hair and she was stick thin, apart from her torso. She looked like a deflated balloon.

What struck me most however was her expression. I wondered if she had modeled for Edward Munch. I would call it despair, except for the confusion. Torment is the closest description.

So there she was, head in hand staring bewildered at my dad making his noises at the trapped bird while the overweight woman and the lady with the false shoe gazed and a woman inhaled oxygen from a machine and in a corner I noticed that what I thought was a pile of blankets was actually a tiny, slumped-over old lady, asleep.

I experienced one of those terrible moments of what pessimists call clarity and optimists call pessimism, when the scale of life and existence is simultaneously huge and tiny, and you are reduced to nothing, and that nothing is everything. Without wanting to go all Paulo Coelho, what I mean to say is that in that moment life sits on your heart like a bag of rocks.

But life goes on and there is always the blessing of practical matters to attend to. For the first time in her life Gran’s fingernails were long and someone had painted pink nail varnish on them. It was now chipped. Gran asked me to cut them. We borrowed a pair of scissors from the woman with the oxygen machine. She had a pair in her handbag. Gran’s handbag had always been a mobile office filled with everything you could possibly need, but now was an extension of herself: confused and messy. She requested that we buy her a pair of nail scissors, and some cheese. Dad agreed to only one of the requests.

Somewhere over the rainbow in Nasr City

I attended a public discussion about a book on gays in a petrol station on Tuesday. Egypt.

The book is a novella called 'Fe Balad El Welad' (“In the Country of Boys”) by journalist Mostafa Fathy, and the petrol station as I recall was Ta3owen. It was held in a bookshop (located inside the petrol station which, God help us, is located in Nasr City) called the J.C bookshop/cafe. Sharshar unhelpfully kept referring to it as Jesus Christ.

We arrived 10 minutes late, which meant we arrived 50 minutes early. We bought books, we drank tea, we stared at a man sporting a bouffant mullet.

By the time Fathy made his arrival the place was reasonably full. He got the ball rolling by inviting questions, and then effectively rolled said ball into a discussion ditch by (inadvertently) inviting a question from a man who on the basis of scripture regards homosexuals as malevolent aliens but decided, what the hell, he'd come along to the discussion anyway we yebden 3alayna shwaya [enrich the discussion with his contribution].

The inevitable discussion ensued, the man’s (“Engineer Mohamed”) first argument was that rather than discussing homosexuality, writers should be covering other “more pressing” issues in Egyptian society. His true agenda was revealed the more he talked, and talk he did, informing us that if he discovered that his boss was gay he would “seriously consider” leaving his job, and that he feels compelled to encourage homosexuals who cross his path to repent and denounce their satanic practices of falling in love and organising parades and enjoying musicals.

Fathy responded by suggesting that since bedroom activities aren’t any of your business Engineer Mohamed, and since you’re not God, and since your complete absence of a sense of humour and human empathy places you beyond advances of any kind, gay or straight (I made that last bit up. I said that inside my head), perhaps you could live and let live and treat people as human beings rather than obsess about their orifices.

This back and forth continued for approximately 29 years until Moftases could stand it no longer and, in an unorthodox move, asked a question about the book. This instigated a trend, and more discussion which did not mention the word Lot ensued until a man who announced himself as a lawyer started on some spiel the point of which none of us could understand. He declared that God has “forbidden relationships between a man and a man” at which point Moftases playfully interjected “and between a woman and a woman” knowing that it would throw the lawyer as indeed it did. He stopped briefly, mouth open, either flummoxed by the idea of Sapphic desire or reminiscing about his last download.

Like a wriggling queen drawn to an Abba revival party the conversation inevitably ended back with Engineer Mohamed and his dull religious crusade. By this time Moftases was doodling and Abadodo was off smoking fags (I mean having a cigarette, not out on a homophobic rampage) every five minutes and me and Sharshar were writing childish things on the sugar packets.

Interestingly though, books periodically fell off the top shelf behind Fathy for absolutely no reason at all, and we all wondered whether a higher power was trying to smite the sexual deviants in the room but had missed.

The book in case you’re wondering reads a little bit like Gays for Beginners and is a collection of angst-ridden trials endured by an Egyptian man coming to terms with being gay. None of the characters identified as gay are entirely at ease with themselves and all except the protagonist are at some point subjected to some form of violent gay bashing. All in all it had the feel of a plea for tolerance masquerading as literature – and Fathy made no secret of the fact that the idea for the book emerged from his original plan to write a series of articles on the subject.

Which is not to say that I didn’t enjoy reading it - I did. And, as a friend remarked, it’s a brave first step towards open discussion of a subject which rarely receives sympathetic – or indeed any - media coverage.

His wife was in unaccompanied luggage

Sharshar regaled us with the story below during a recent summit of friends. While he swears that it's true - having heard it from someone who works in the cargo department of Cairo airport - and while the involvement of Egyptair might support his claims, it nonetheless sounds slightly like an urban myth to me.

Anyway I got him to write it out in Arabic cos I thought it might sound funnier if recounted as he originally said it. Not as funny when he said it.

من القصص المعروفة في قسم الشحن التابع لمصر للطيران ان في مرة واحد خليجي كان مسافر على مصر للطيران من اوروبا و شاحن معاه كلب.
في الترانزيت و هما بينقلوا الكلب لاحظ موظفين الشحن انه مش بيتحرك, ففتحوا الصندوق لقيوا الكلب ميت, فمنعا للمشاكل و الفضايح, استلقطوالهم كلب صاحي و حطوه مكان الكلب الميت و عدت الشحنة.
لما الخليجي وصل بلدة و رايح عشان يستلم الكلب, و قبل ما يقرب من الصندوق صرخ و قال الكلب ده مش بتاعي, قعدوا يقولوله يا باشا طيب اتأكد الاول يمكن هو,
قالهم مستحيل, انا شاحن الكلب ميت

One of the well-known tales about Egyptair's cargo department:

Once a gentleman from the Gulf was travelling on Egyptair from Europe, and had put a dog in cargo.

While they were moving the dog in transit, they cargo workers noticed that he wasn't moving. When they opened his container they discovered that the dog was in fact dead. In an attempt to avoid problems and a scandal, they replaced the dead dog with a live one, and sent it on its way.

When the gentleman from the Gulf arrived in his country and went to get the dog, he started shouting, "that's not my dog" even before he got near it.

"Basha, have a look first you might be mistaken," the workers said.

"Impossible," the gentleman from the Gulf said. "The dog I put in cargo was dead".

Market stalled

I was reminded of the state's relentless obsession with minutiae today, while attempting to buy some onions.

The local street market was mildly frenzied, as is usual in last two hours before Iftar (Ramadan fast-breaking meal) when tired fasting people make last minute purchases. Whilst in a reverie examining courgettes in a vegetable stall/shop, I suddenly became aware of the frenzy stepping up a gear, and looked up to see the shop's workers hurriedly snatching up wooden crates of fruits and vegetables displayed on the pavement outside the shop, and depositing them inside. The same thing was happening all along the street, flustered men barking instructions to other men while fearfully looking towards the square where the market begins.

Standing by the scales inside the shop waiting to pay, another woman and I were effectively boxed in by crates hurriedly flung inside.

“What's happening?” I asked the woman.

“Baladiyya” [a group of municipal representatives] she replied.

Abandoning all hope of purchasing anything I dumped my onions and got out of the shop while I still could, negotiating my way through giant cabbages and crates carried by sweaty, pissed-off men.

Outside, people were standing in small groups looking in the same direction, towards a blue police box (pick-up) slowly making its way down the street. Its pace reminded me of a tank, somehow. Further up, approximately level with the box, uniformed policemen and men in plain-clothing surrounded a boy who looked like he was around 12 years old. Two men marched him towards the box by the scruff of his neck, the boy convulsed with tears.

While this was going on a lorry following the box came to a stop next to a wooden two-wheeled cart laden with vegetables. It was lifted into the back of the lorry by the policemen, who were pelted with onions and peppers falling off the cart. The lorry drove off, while the cart's owners resignedly picked-up from the ground the few intact vegetables which remained.

A man with a towel tucked into his shirt collar outside a barbers told me that seized property is returned to owners if they pay a fine, and that the size of the fine is according to the property's “capabilities”.

A young girl in tears sprinted towards a group of middle-aged women and told them, “khadoo Amira” [they took Amira]. A tough-looking woman immediately marched towards the group of policemen. Some time later I saw her marching back, Amira in tow. A bystander told me that this is the first time they have seized a woman.

More of this street furniture was added to the lorry further on, their owners only having had time to salvage their produce before the baladeyya's arrival. Loaded with carts and tables and even small baskets, it trundled on, plain-clothed men walking alongside it. There were no objections, until the lorry reached a vegetable stall manned by a vocal bearded man and his family.

He attempted to prevent the baladeyya taking his table, while beside him another fruit & veg seller desperately pushed his display inside before triumphantly bringing down his shutter.

Things became heated and, as the lorry began to move away – the table precariously placed on top, held in place by a policeman perched on the side of the lorry – the bearded man attempted to hold on to the side of the lorry. It drove off anyway, at some speed, and the man was forced to release his grip. Standing in the wake of the dust left by the lorry he pointed at bystanders and screamed at no-one in particular, “le kol zalem we ebn zalem nehaya” [every oppressor and son of an oppressor will meet his end].

I couldn't believe the effort put into clearing metre-squared bits of pavement (and to what end?), the (deliberate?) chaos of it all, the (typically) vicious way in which the state dealt with what it apparently considers people as disposable as the furniture its enforcers dumped in the lorry. It reminded me of a cowboy film, when the town's inhabitants all scurry into the safety of their houses and lock the door upon the arrival of the shadowy bad guy.

The real joke though of course is that this assault on people's livelihoods is – ostensibly, at least – carried out in the name of ensuring the free-flow of traffic. It's a shame the state isn't quite as zealous about traffic movement at other times, such as when a minor official decides to cross from one side of Cairo to another and Cairo's 2.5 million other car owners are forced to stew in their vehicles while the flotilla passes.

Sa-hell

Be gentle. Taken by a 6-year old.

I was reminded of the relationship between exclusivity and pleasure in Egypt this week when I joined members of my family enduring each other at close proximity, AKA having a summer holiday.

This year it was the Diplomats holiday village, on the North Coast, whose beautiful Mediterranean shores are gradually being cluttered with holiday resorts hidden away behind perimeter fences, security gates and entrance tickets. In addition to being financially off-limits, many of these resorts are in any case physically inaccessible: I caught a Superjet bus to the Marina resort (half an hour away from Diplomats and apparently the only stop between Marsa Matrouh and Alexandria), and saw some microbuses scuttling along, but imagine lugging two weeks' worth of luggage and kids from Cairo in a microbus on a three or four-hour ride.

Unencumbered by kids or much luggage I enjoyed the trip from Cairo, because of the El-Alamein Road's spectacular scenery - big skies and vast, empty plains, only slightly marred by the fact that we were subjected to Tamer Hosny in Craptain Hima for the duration of the trip. An elderly scowling gentlemen of discerning taste seated next to me rested his chin on his hands - which were gripping the walking stick placed in front of him – and closed his eyes throughout.

Diplomats is a labyrinthine warren of bungalows which in places reminded me of Bournemouth. The bungalows are not referred to as bungalows, of course, but rather as chalets, despite being altogether too grand for such a title. I got lost the second night there, attempting to return to our bungalow in the dark. All the streets look the same. Upstairs Auntie advised me to get my bearings through reference to a giant inflatable Pepsi can placed outside the central Social Club. It helped, but not in the dark.

The Pepsi can was an early indication of the extent of corporate sponsorship in Diplomats and elsewhere on the North Coast's exclusive resorts. On the beach we sat underneath Pepsi umbrellas on Vodafone beanbags. Adverts for a particular bank adorned each street corner. Signs on the El-Alamein road announced that drivers in trouble can call an emergency number – courtesy of Mobinil. The state was conspicuous by its absence. Everything was very well done, very well organised, and reserved for 0.5% of the Egyptian population.

I'm not exaggerating when I say that I heard more English in Diplomats then I do on the Tube in London. The AUC graduating class of 2020 was apparently holidaying at the same time as me. The preference for English transactions is partly explained by the fact that many of the kids I saw on the beach were accompanied by their nannies, mostly non-Arabic speakers of African and Philippine origin. One exchange particularly struck me: a group of three teenage boys elected to bury a member of their group in the sand. “Let's get cracking on this bitch!” said one of them, in the style of Sid from Last of the Summer Wine meets Notorious BIG.

And get cracking they did, first giving their victim breasts before proceeding to lovingly carve out a penis of frankly obscene proportions - which one of them then violently destroyed in a fit of possibly Freudian anger.

Speaking of knobs, an elderly gentleman decided to get his out in order to urinate – in the showers on the beach – exactly at the moment I was jogging past one morning. I wondered if he had mistaken me for a male, and was cottaging al fresco. My long-held conviction that jogging is evil was confirmed, in any case.

Instructions placed in the showers sadly do not explicitly ban pissing, but do mention that “workers and nannies” may only use the beach “in the designated areas” - a bantustan inside the bantustan. Where exactly these designated areas are remains a mystery. The workers I saw were invisible. Silently collecting rubbish, serving guests or looking after their children.

In Porto Marina I saw off-duty workers seated on the ground, eating, underneath a huge advertising hoarding showing a laughing family frolicking in water.

Nannies were everywhere in Porto Marina (entrance fee LE 10) a complex of shops, a hotel and time-share apartments, constructed around an artificial bay. Running through the mall is an artificial waterway on which punters can take a Gondolier ride (LE 20) past shops selling convertible Mini Coopers (around LE 300,000) and waterskiing equipment. My cousin's kids wanted a ride on the boat which does a circle of the artificial bay (LE 25 per person). “Hatet2elab, hatet2elab” [It's going to capsize] six-year old Elvis insisted, when the boat rocked violently in the wake of a jet-ski manned by an eleven-year old slicing his way through the lake.

One of the nannies I saw in Marina was the same height as her charges, around ten years old, fragile and tiny. In the Andrea restaurant in the Hacienda resort a kid with a raspy, newly-broken voice stood outside the toilets. “Etfaddaly” [approximately, welcome] he said, as I walked in. “Etfaddaly” he said, as I walked out. Back at the table I watched an Ethiopian nanny try to rein in a particular boisterous child wearing a t-shirt reading, “records are made to be broken”. He was amusing himself by collecting, and lobbing about, chair cushions. His mother eventually took notice. “Keda 3abat” [that's stupid] she said, and the nanny attempted to restrain him. He gave her a nasty pinch on her upper arm, discreetly.

I mentioned the Andrea kid manning the toilets to my cousin. She suggested that families will send their children out to work whatever happens and that doing this type of job is better than children being exploited in workshops. At least there they learn skills, I said. Yes, but they're exploited, she replied.

There is – of course – an artificial beach in Porto Marina, to match the artificial bay and the artificial Venice. Booths advertise video games and sell Zalabia. Children and teenagers parade up and down Marina's central strip, while in the kids' play-area sad-eyed women supervise other people's manic children in a fluorescent, bouncy castle, nursery-rhyme, hell.