Cairo curiosities

It’s been a merely surface-scratching whirlwind of a visit, but after slightly under forty-eight hours in Cairo, and a little more than twelve hours before I leave, I feel I can give a bit of a balance sheet of my first contact with Egypt.

The Sphinx, the the Pyramid of Cheops

The truly unique and third most memorable thing was the collection of pyramids and the Sphinx out at Giza. We went twice, once by night when the light and sound show turned out to be far less cheesy and much more pleasant than I’d snobbishly assumed, and once by day to get a clear sense of the scale of the monuments. It is powerfully moving to stand before the great pyramid of Cheops and think that it has been there, regally looking down on the passing ages, for over twice the time that separates us from the launching of the Roman Empire.

‘From the heights of these pyramids, forty centuries look down on us,’ Napoleon is said to have told his soldiers in Egypt. And even he was out by three centuries.

There are also those wonderful mysterious tales about the great pyramid. I don’t remember them exactly, but it’s something like if you multiply the height of the pyramid in metres by the square root of five, a number someone who knows about these things tells me is terribly significant, though I can’t exactly put my finger on why, you get pretty close to the distance in miles between Luton and Paris. Well, within 5% anyway.

Now, some sceptics may think this is arises by mere chance. But is that really likely?

The second most memorable thing about my brief stay in this city is the traffic. Like the United States where there is a gun for every human, Cairo feels like there’s a car for every inhabitant, and they all get out on the roads all the time, at any time of day. It seems that the use of the horn is a key element in the assertion of identity, which means that I get woken up by it even in my hotel room on the ninth floor with its double glazing.

Traffic regulations are also clearly a kind of general guideline towards which drivers make an occasional small gesture of reverence. Take the Uber driver who got us to the pyramids this morning. He carefully entered the destination into Google but nonetheless managed to miss the ramp up on to the bridge he needed to take across the Nile. So he decided the best thing to do was to reverse back up the main road, against the dense flow of fast-moving traffic. He nearly made it too, only cheated in the last few metres by finding his way blocked by a police car.

So he went straight on towards the next exit from the main road, meaning to leave and return on the other side. But again he missed the turning. This time, he had less far to reverse and there was no police car. So we made it, a little later than planned and with frayed nerves, but none the worse for wear. Physically at least.

I shall remember this experience each time I’m caught in traffic in London and amazed by some of the awful driving around me. At least I now know that things can be far worse.

The most memorable experience was the visit we made for professional rather than tourist reasons.

This was a hospital, possibly Egypt’s most prestigious. It delivers care to children with cancer. Like hospices, where terminally ill patients go, its mission might lead you to expect it to be a dismal place. But, like a hospice, which after all focuses on making sure patients enjoy the best possible life for as long as they can, it needs to be a pleasant, quiet and cheerful place.

Certainly, the Cairo Children’s Cancer hospital achieves all that. Patients have their own rooms – no multi-bed wards or even bays as is common in most British hospitals – and throughout the place, bright, joyful colours predominate, even in the chemotherapy suite. There’s an art therapy room, decorated with children’s paintings and pottery, and where they can also be taught music. The accent is on the need to build the morale of the patients, to help them fight the disease.

The hospital is private and lives by donations on the one hand and, to a far smaller extent, by selling some services. However, for the main target group, children with cancer, the care is entirely free. Many of the patients are from poor backgrounds; they pay nothing for the treatment they receive, and parents are sometimes even helped financially to be able to visit their children if they’re kept in as inpatients.

It’s an inspiring and encouraging place and a joy to visit.

Even the origins of its name had me smiling. It’s called hospital ‘57357’. I often wondered where that came from – it sounds slightly Stalinist, like the name of a labour camp, or at least rather boringly nerdish, like some geographical coordinates.

In fact, the founders had terrible difficult choosing a name. At the end of a long an fruitless day of debates, they were looking at a table covered with documents. One was from the hospital’s bank.

Its bank account number was 57357.

‘If we use the bank account number as its name, at least benefactors won’t have any doubt where to send their contribution,’ they decided.

The Cairo Paediatric Oncology Hospital, 57357

And so the hospital was named. A fine place, delivering a great service. And an atmosphere as joyful as the origin of is name is amusing.

Modernity: nothing so old in the world

There was a documentary on the BBC earlier today which promised to explore how it felt to be an Ancient Egyptian.

I didn’t watch it, so I don’t know what insights it offered. But one thing I’m sure of is that, however else they felt, the Ancient Egyptians didn’t feel ancient (except perhaps the very old ones). 

On the contrary, they were at the very cutting edge of modernity, my dear. So while I don’t know whether the documentary found evidence for its occurring, I’m absolutely sure that a conversation along the following lines took place somewhere in Modern Egypt, as the Ancients no doubt thought of it.

Father: Alexandria? Alexandria? What do you want to go there for? It’s just a huge commercial centre, docks – and you know the kind of riffraff you get round docks – moneylenders, people on the make, no sanctity, no religion, no soul.

Son: But Dad, Alexandria’s where it’s all happening. It’s dynamic, it’s growing, it’s the new Egypt.

Father: You mean it’s rich, right?

Son: Yeah, well, what’s wrong with being rich? Wouldn’t we like to be rich?

Father: Not at the price of selling our souls.

Son: Selling our souls? Listen, it’s a commercial centre, sure, but commerce oils wheels. You don’t become a great cultural centre without the money to pay for it. You know about the new library they’re building now? That’s going to cost a pretty penny and someone has to earn it.

Today's remains of the modern Alexandria of ancient times

Father: Library? Library? All full of Greek scrolls. Greek, Greek, Greek. That’s what I mean about selling our souls. You young people. Keep going down that road and we might just as well be Greeks.

Son: It’s a changing world. We have to adapt if we don’t want to go under.

Father: Adapt? Listen, Thebes is our capital. Been our capital for millennia. Coptic’s our language. It was good enough for Tutankhamun, it’s good enough for me.

Son: Oh, Dad, that’s just so 18th Dynasty. Just because it was good enough for them doesn’t mean it’s good enough for us. Those were the Ancient Egyptians. We need to learn new ways to live in the modern world.

My message to the BBC: if we don’t blow ourselves up or boil our brains by overheating the planet, there’ll come a time when people look back on now and wonder what it was like being an Ancient Englishman. And I want to shout down the ages to them: we’re not. We’re the height of modernity. We’ve got modern art a hundred years old to prove it. We even have post-modern novels. 

So wash your mouths out.


P.S. One of the great modern films – now getting on for 70 years old – is Les Enfants du Paradis. If you don’t know it, get hold of it and watch it without delay. The script is by one of the finest modern French poets, Jacques Prévert, and it contains the immortal line, spoken by the incomparable Arletty in the role of Garance, ‘Mais qu'est-ce que c'est la nouveauté ? La nouveauté... mais c'est vieux comme le monde, la nouveauté !’, which roughly translates as ‘But just what is novelty? Novelty... there’s nothing older in the world than novelty.’

Arletty as Garance