Wedding in the hills

What a weekend! What a visit! And what a day!

Hatch, match and despatch. These are often said to be the only functions of an Anglican priest these days – performing christenings, weddings and funerals. I suspect there are clerics of other faiths of whom the same could be said.

I’m now of what we like to call a certain age.

Isn’t that an odd expression? I was pretty certain of my age when I was twenty-eight. Even more certain when I was eight and birthdays still came around far too slowly. In fact, if ever I’ve been uncertain of my age, it is now, when I frequently find myself having to subtract one date from another, a task made more awkward because I have nothing like enough fingers.

Still, a certain age, in the sense of an advanced age, is what I’ve now attained. An age where ‘despatch’ is more common than the other two. Most recently, it was my mother’s funeral. Marriages? Births? In the past for many of my contemporaries.

But then, suddenly, that changed. After all, there are our kids. And not before time, as it happens. My youngest son, Nicky, is 34. But he’s finally taken the plunge, and with a remarkably charming woman. Sheena and he are clearly made for each other, similar where they need to be, and where they’re not, wholly complementary.

So this weekend we were at their ‘matching’ ceremony.

And, boy, did they handle it well. They both live in Madrid (yes, there’s something special about an Irishwoman and an Englishman hooking up in the Spanish capital).

They arranged their wedding in the Sierra, the mountains, outside Madrid. The village was Santa Maria de la Alameda, at nearly 1500 metres, with a permanent population of 40, so the wedding guests tripled the number of inhabitants.

Last moments of bachelor life for Nicky and Sheena

The mayor conducted the service outside a house in which some of the more discerning guests stayed. By discerning I mean ‘of a certain age’. We were the ones who weren’t planning on dancing from the late – extremely late – dinner through to breakfast. It was good to have a place to retreat to well away from the sounds of revelry, where I use the word ‘sounds’ loosely – I suspect the neighbours might have chosen something a little more ferocious, such as ‘noise’ or ‘din’.

Happy couple in a glorious setting

The ceremony was touching. The bride was greeted by one of her favourite songs, played by a band of friends including the groom on guitar. The setting was stunning, flooded with sunlight and with a ring of hills in the background. And the mayor conducted the ceremony with charm and good humour. In particular, she made a point of welcoming the guests who came from France, the United Kingdom, Italy and other parts of Europe, and even from Australia and California (she did say California and not the United States, but I suspect that many of the inhabitants of that fine State would also prefer to make that distinction).

‘Nice of her to be so welcoming of foreigners,’ I told the old friend who was standing next to me.

Well, she’s a young friend, but she’s been a friend a long time. Nicky’s first girlfriend, making it all the more gratifying that she (and her boyfriend) danced at his wedding.

As it happens, she’s also pretty acute.

‘I’m not sure we’d be quite so welcome had we been from Tanzania,’ she whispered back to me.

I’m sure she was right, but as things were, the ceremony went smoothly and pleasantly and satisfied everyone.

That was the tone of the whole weekend. I know Sheena in particular, but Nicky too, invested great effort in organising the entire occasion. And not just them: it was impressive to see how many friends were helping with flowers and decorations, with organising events and helping guests to their bedrooms, with making sure the speeches were given in the right order by the designated speakers, with delivering the right people to the right place at the right time in the right clothes – even, I kid you not, with their hair in the right state (two friends helped get Nicky’s hair just right – and it was; I know Sheena could count on all the help she needed too).

The event proved how right they all were: as always happens when preparations are well directed, there was no sign of the effort, but simply a sense that everything worked precisely as it should, in apparent effortlessness.

Among other things, I was astonished by the meals. On the wedding day, there was a meal referred to as breakfast, but which went on until late morning. There were only crisps and drinks at the time I associate with the idea of lunch. But by 3:00 we were gathering for what was called ‘cocktails’ which seemed to be snacks without drinks though, confusingly, drinks were also available (but not cocktails).

That led without apparent break to what they called lunch, and we in England inexplicably call the wedding breakfast. It lasted into the evening, merging into what I like to think of as dinnertime though in Spain, that doesn’t start until 10:00. At which point they served us some other meal for which I can’t think of a name, but which turned out to be as enjoyable as all the others, so I didn’t complain.

My impression is that from about 3:00 onwards, barely a minute passed when food wasn’t being served. We certainly didn’t go hungry over the weekend.

Or, as it happens, thirsty either.

The entire wedding weekend left me with a feeling for which the word ‘blissful’ doesn’t seem too strong. That appeared to be a general sentiment amongst the guests. As you can imagine, this has left me with something of a taste for such ‘match’ ceremonies. 

You may have noticed that I mentioned this was my youngest son’s wedding. My eldest son has been married for some time. This rather leaves Michael, the middle son, to titillate expectations. And since he was accompanied by Raquel, a young woman as charming as Sheena and as well-suited to him as Sheena is to Nicky, those expectations have been well titillated.

Michael and Raquel at one of the meals.
No idea what to call it. It happened some time between 3:00 and midnight

Who knows? If he (and she) can provide us with another such occasion in the near future, they’ll receive no objection from me.

And, of course, I haven’t forgotten that ‘hatch’ sometimes follows ‘match’. After such a spectacular wedding weekend, who knows whether we might not be celebrating a new arrival some time soon.

Something else I’d certainly be entirely up for.

Leatrice in Beirut

It’s strange how much certain things can change in seventy years. It’s even stranger, and rather sadder, to see how certain other things have grimly resisted every attempt at change. Or got worse.

In 1948, my mother Leatrice was living in Paris and working for UNESCO. In November, she travelled to Beirut for a conference and she wrote to her parents on the 16th, soon after arriving:

… I hope you have already received my cable. I didn’t want to let you know until I arrived that I was travelling by air, knowing that you would worry, but we had a most uneventful trip…

Flying was still an adventure seventy years ago. It’s true, I tend to phone Danielle after a flight to say I’ve arrived safely, but I do the same after a train journey or even a car trip. As it happens, I find the prospect of travelling any great distance by car far more daunting than catching a plane. I have more confidence in the pilot’s ability to fly his plane than in my own driving – or that of other drivers on the road.

As for a cable – a telegram – I don’t even know who still provides a service these days. Certainly, I don’t remember the last time I sent or received one. In the ages of text messages or emails, does anyone use telegrams?

Leatrice (third from left) enjoying a moment's relaxation in Beirut, 1948

The trip to Beirut marked Leatrice for life. She mentioned it frequently down the years. And looking at her letters home, it’s easy to see why.

The mountains now have snow on them, she wrote on 20 November. It is cold, clear and sunny. This country grows on one. The colour on the hills mixed with the brilliance of the Mediterranean is unbelievably lovely. I have come to like the Lebanese very much. After the coldness of the Parisian, it is heart-warming to meet people who laugh with their eyes as well as their mouths.

The people may have been great, but apparently Leatrice was concerned about the sanitary conditions:

… if we drink any water, we put chlorine in it. It tastes exactly like a swimming bath, but is at least disinfected.

Personally, I’d prefer to take my chance on the infection. On the other hand, it took me a week to recover from the Cairo belly I brought back from Egypt ten days ago, so maybe Leatrice was right.

But she hadn’t finished with the subject of the people.

… it is quite obvious that they are a pure Semitic race. Olive skinned, long heads, black hair, large black eyes, curly mouths.

The racial comments I’d probably avoid, personally, but I like the underlying message, one Leatrice would repeat throughout her life: ethnically, there’s no difference between the Arabs of the Levant and Jews. The idea that there should be racial tension between them, far less conflict, is simply indefensible.

But, and this is one of the things that has not changed in seventy years, or if anything has got worse, that conflict is proving agonising and irresolvable.

We touched down in Damascus and came by taxis over the border into Lebanon… We saw some truckloads of soldiers in Syria, but there isn’t actually much military activity there. Lebanon isn’t actually at war, although Syria is.

The Israeli-Arab war of 1948 had already broken out.

Isn’t it curious that at the time Syria had been relatively untouched by war? To the extent that it was regarded as safe enough to bring staff through to Beirut? That wouldn’t be the case today.

In any case, these days we’d fly directly to Beirut.

I am, of course, very tactful about myself, but discover there is practically no feeling at all about the war. After all Lebanon is not officially engaged in it. The people I know are all Christian, and they feel themselves in very much the same position as the Jews in the Middle East. A few hundred thousand (about 600,000 surrounded by 40 million Moslems, who hate their guts). They generally feel that there is a slight bond in having another minority just over the border as some slight protection. In 1860 there was an awful pogrom of the Christians here, and the ones left fled to the mountains, and hence most of the people living in the hills are members of the Greek Orthodox church [I think she meant the Maronite Christian church]. There are actually about twenty different sects getting on fairly amicably, including a Jewish community. I had my hair washed by a woman who spoke Russian, and then burst into Yiddish with another customer.

Some things have changed, others have stayed the same. The underlying tensions have continued and, if anything, hardened. And the communities that got along reasonably well have broken out into full-scale combat, especially in Syria. The fighting Lebanon was spared in 1948 has spilled over its borders. Indeed, the links between the Christians and Jews that my mother spotted, took a particularly ugly form in 1982. That was when Israeli forces stood back and let Maronite Christian militia carry out a massacre of the Palestinian inhabitants of the Sabra neighbourhood and Shatila refugee camp in Beirut.

A deeply moving representation of this terrible event is in the excellent semi-autobiographical Israeli film, Waltz with Bashir. The sense of horror is made somehow even more intense by the film being made as a cartoon. Until the last few scenes, at least.

Leatrice left Beirut on 15 December, after around a month. With many fond memories. As early as in her letter of 16 November, she had written:

Have now seen the cedars of Lebanon. A very lovely tree. Tall, graceful and a very bright green.

What a pity that Lebanon isn’t primarily known for its cedars any more.

And as for the effect of war on a peaceful nation, what more pitiful example could be provided than Syria...

Oh, how I wish I could live in Cloud Corbyn Land

The weather’s glorious in Cloud Cobyn Land today. Well, the weather’s glorious there every day.

Some day my Jez will come

It’s a wonderful land where Jeremy Corbyn, or the Blessed Corbyn to give him his correct title, uses his magic wand on behalf of us all.

Only one wave of the wand is enough to convince twenty-seven EU nations to give Britain the same benefits as members, without all the boring hassle of having to stay in the union or accept any sort of obligation towards it. That’s despite the EU saying repeatedly and firmly that they never would concede so much.

Pouf! One wave and all those tiresome obstacles just melt away.

A second wave of the wand and, lo and behold, here’s £250bn to fund the most exciting, radical and transformative programme of social change Britain has ever seen. All being brought in by a blessed government, elected because having done better than the polls last time round (and lost), Jeremy’s obviously going to do better than the polls next time (and maybe do something that viewed in the right light looks a bit like winning).

It must be a fabulous place to live. Which, no doubt, is why there are so many Corbynistas living there.

Of course, it isn’t always easy. There are sometimes stresses when reality unpleasantly impinges on the inhabitants. But that doesn’t depress them for long. A glance at a photo of the blessed visage is usually enough, or repetition for as long as it takes of the sutra, J-C-4-P-M. If necessary, with the word ‘hashtag’ in front of it.

Sadly, I’m an incurable addict to reality. I’m not enchanted by the prospect of the economic abyss towards which Britain seems to be heading next March. And I look with never-diminishing astonishment at polls that show that Labour is level-pegging, or behind, the least popular government in my lifetime. And mine has not been a short lifetime. It would be so comforting to make the leap into faith. But I just can’t bring myself to. It’s probably a curmudgeonly habit cultivated ever since I stopped believing in Father Christmas.

Still, that doesn’t stop me envying the Corbynistas their ecstasy in living in Cloud Corbyn Land. It’s got to be nice. 

What with all that lovely weather and all.

The four-stage strategy for dodging a bullet

In ‘A Victory for Democracy’, one of my favourite episodes of that excellent series from the eighties, Yes Prime Minister, Sir Humphrey Appleby, Cabinet Secretary, and Sir Richard Wharton, Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office, outline the standard Foreign Office response in a time of crisis. 

This takes the form of a ‘four-stage strategy’.

In stage one we say nothing is going to happen.

In stage two, we say something may be going to happen, but we should do nothing about it.

In stage three, we say that maybe we should do something about it, but there's nothing we can do.

In stage four, we say maybe there was something we could have done, but it's too late now.

Donald Pickering as Wharton and Nigel Hawthorne as Appleby
explaining the Foreign Office Four-stage Strategy

I’ve always found this one of the best pieces of writing in the series, a hard-hitting satire on British politics, cynical but somehow believable.

What makes it believable is that it’s a great way for people who are more comfortable sitting on a fence to avoid being forced off it. That’s happening right now in Britain. Just look at the top of the Labour Party, over the question of Brexit. The top of the party is made up of lifelong Eurosceptics, almost certainly in favour of Brexit, but who don’t dare say so. After all, they lead a party that is massively anti-Brexit, to the tune of nearly 90% of the members. These leaders claim to want to give power over policy back to the membership, so they can hardly admit to wanting to override their wishes on this key question of our time.

So instead they just try to avoid taking a position. Their resolution is beginning to crack, with two close Corbyn allies, the trade union leader Len McCluskey and the MP John McDonnell, both saying that any new referendum on the EU should exclude the option of remaining a member. Even so, they would rather not have to say openly that they back Brexit.

What this does for their claim also to represent a new, refreshing and honest approach to politics I leave it to you to judge.

Honest or not, they need a way out of their conundrum. I humbly submit that they are, in fact, following their own four-stage strategy.

Let them to allow nature to imitate art and adopt a four-stage strategy of their own. Keir Starmer, the Party's Brexit spokesman, has come up with six tests for any Brexit deal the government negotiates. He’s made it clear that they will not back any deal that does not meet those tests.

Let’s leave aside for now the minor objection that it’s not quite clear what ‘not backing’ a deal means. Will they propose an alternative? No one has said yet.

The tests includes this one:

2. Does it deliver the “exact same benefits” as we currently have as members of the Single Market and Customs Union?

I’ve quoted it as it always appears, with quotation marks around “exact same benefits”. What’s that about? Quotation marks usually suggest that the statement within them is open to suspicion. So are we saying that we don’t really mean exactly the same benefits?

Because if we do mean exactly the same, we already know that no deal the EU will accept can meet that test. The EU has been absolutely unambiguous on the subject: the only way to enjoy the exact same benefits as conferred by membership is by remaining a member.

Maybe that’s why the leadership doesn’t want to be drawn on what it would propose as a deal that would meet its tests. Because the only realistic proposal would be to remain in the EU. That’s hardly a position Eurosceptics can adopt.

What they may therefore want is that Theresa May comes up with a disastrously bad deal so late that Britain is forced out on lousy terms, at which point the government falls and Labour wins the the general election that follows. That way Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell and co get to form a government without ever having to address the thorny issue of Brexit, because it’s already done.

Without their ever having to get off the fence.

Smart, isn’t it? They could then pursue the radical agenda of massive public investment and job creation that they propose. The only circle they would still have to square is how they could fund such a programme after the British economy has tanked following Brexit. They may not yet have cottoned on to the fact that far from creating new jobs, in government they would be spending all their time minimising the job losses Brexit will entail.

Ignorance is bliss. They’re clearly enjoying their moment of denial. So, in the meantime, they gaily pursue this four-stage strategy:

In stage one, we say we have our six tests and we will not support any Brexit deal that doesn’t pass them.

In stage two, we say this deal may not pass the six tests but we should do nothing about it for the moment.

In stage three, we say that maybe we should actually propose a deal that passes the six tests, but since we’re not in government, there’s no point so there’s nothing we can do.

In stage four, we say maybe there was something we could have done even in opposition, but it’s too late now that Brexit has already happened.

Most amusing. If only it weren’t for the victims who’ll be left picking up the pieces for the next generation or two.

Entitled racing and how to avoid it

It’s been years and years – around half a century in fact – since I spent any amount of time involved in sailing. And even then it was absolutely the bottom of the range in sailing – dinghies, with no deck, where your feet are a plank’s thickness away from the water. Nothing to do with yachts and large crews and state-of-the-art-cutting-edge-technology or anything like that.

Funnily enough, even a half century on, it’s left me with a yearning to have another go one of these days. I did like that feeling of being so close to the water and whipping along on its surface. I liked the playing with the sails and the tiller and feeling the boat react and race, and I’d be delighted to enjoy those sensations again.

But not yachts or large crews or any of that state-of-the-art-cutting-edge-technology sort of stuff. Oh, no.

Now there’s an organisation known as Internations that operates in a number of cities across Europe. It brings together locals and foreigners who enjoy meeting each other and maybe speaking a little of the others’ language. Usually it’s quite fun.

Danielle and I have joined the local branch, here in Valencia. She’s been to more events than I have, but I have to say that the ones I’ve attended have been good. So when she said ‘there’s an Internations event to watch a sailing race’, the association between an organisation I find fun and an activity for which I still have a hankering felt too good to pass up. So we went.

Now this wasn’t dinghy sailing. It was the ’52 Super Series Valencia Sailing Week’. The crews represented each of eleven nations. And it was absolutely one of those state-of-the-art-cutting-edge-technology competitions. At least, as far as I can tell, though I have to admit that to me most of the boats looked pretty much the same as each other.

Now, I’m not denying that there’s skill in this kind of sailing. My own experience of sailing those dinghies back in the sixties left me with a clear picture of just what lack of skill looks like, so I have a vague idea of what it must be like to sail with real intelligence and aptitude.

On the other hand, when I see the ludicrous figures people spend on their boats, I can’t help feeling that the cash register must weigh heavily on the outcome. At a different, much more recent epoch of my life I spent some time rowing and one of the things I like about that sport is that, in competition (and I was never at competition level) there are strict limits on what one can do to boats. They have to be at least so heavy, the hull has to be a certain shape, etc. So it isn’t the technology that determines winners, it’s entirely the skill and strength of the individual rower or crew.

It’s not like that in sailing. As far as I can tell. Though I admit that to my untrained eye, it looked as though the state-of-the-art technology stuff was all under water...

Anyway, when I got down to the port I was rather dreading being a spectator at a sport for which I was finding it hard to work up much enthusiasm. It felt too much like money racing money. But I needn’t have worried.

The meeting place was in a bar. Or a restaurant. It depends on how you look at it, I suppose. Most bars out here serve food and most restaurants serve drinks. 

It wasn’t obvious which bar was meant, since each successive email gave a different name from each of two alternatives. In one email it would be the Arribar, in another the Marina. Fortunately, those were the only two mentioned and they’re right next door to each other, so it wasn’t difficult to go to one for a while and then check out the other.

Eventually we found the group, and it was as with all Internations events. A lot of interesting people speaking any of four or five languages at different times (though predominantly English: Europe is becoming very English, even if England refuses to be European). We got chatting over drinks and it all went well, as it usually does at these gatherings.

Eventually, Danielle asked ‘what about the race? When do we see the boats?’

‘Oh, they’ve been coming in for the last hour or so,’ the organiser assured us, ‘I’ve seen a couple. But you’d have had to turn around to see them yourself.’

I asked how the race had been going. She didn’t know exactly, but said she’d been pleased to see that there was at least one female participant.

‘In the South African boat. One – only one, but still one – of the crew was a woman.’

‘Good for them,’ I said, ‘and how many were black?’

‘Ah,’ she said. ‘It’s true that while they may have taken a small step forward against sexism, they’ve taken none against racism. They were all blond.’

Then she smiled. ‘Good looking, though,’ she said and grinned at her husband.

An hour or so later we left the place. As we walked to the bus stop, we came past the line of boats all carefully docked and waiting the next day’s competition.

All lined up and raring to go for the next day’s racing
But they all look pretty much the same to the unpractised eye

We didn’t see any of the actual racing. But then, with a sport of wealth and privilege, maybe that was just what suited us best. We enjoyed the company of pleasant people from Internations, and left the entitled to race against the entitled. 

They do these things better in the private sector

A new timetable was introduced for many of Britain’s railways back in May. And most of the system affected promptly fell apart. Trains were delayed, many were cancelled, and passengers who depended on the service were left stranded.

Now the Office and Road and Rail, the regulator for the railways in Britain, has published a report identifying the train companies primarily responsible for the disruption, but also blaming the Minister of Transport, Chris Grayling. He, however, has immediately declared himself blameless in the matter – Trumpism is becoming commonplace – since it was not for him to overrule the opinions of professionals.

Chris Grayling: 'trouble on the railways? Nothing to do with me, pal.'
He only heads the Ministry responsible

Railway professionals are, of course, the people that railway companies employ. If they’re employed by a public body, then they’re civil servants, and civil servants haven’t the faintest idea what they’re doing. They tend to be classics graduates from the older universities, and while Homer holds no secrets from them, running a railway is a closed book.

That’s true even if they’re actually the same people.

Why is this so?

Essentially, the private sector, because it’s oriented towards the making of profit, has to be driven by efficiency in a way that the public sector simply isn’t. That’s why things go so much better when they’re privatised than when they’re nationalised. Like, for instance, the railways in Britain.

To illustrate this point, I want to give a glowing example of how much more effective the private sector is, based on an experience of my own some years back.

This is a true story. I’ve made nothing up. All I’ve done is hide some of the details: I need to protect the guilty, and particularly to protect myself from vengeance which, in this case, would be harsh indeed.

My manager in this particular company was undoubtedly an expert in the field. We knew that – after all, we knew his background and we knew his qualifications. Trust me, they were outstanding.

As it happens, had we not known it, he would have told us pretty fast. In fact, he did tell us. He took the whole team, at least a dozen strong if I remember, for an awayday conference, but not just in the English countryside – we had to go abroad. There he pulled us together in a windowless room and regaled us with a detailed account of his talents.

‘I’m very good at what I do,’ he started off by telling us.

Well, how could anyone doubt it, once he’d made it so explicit?

For the next couple of days – yes, it was a an away-day-or-four – he ran us through a list of all the major orders he was about to take for our product. I don’t remember exactly how many there were, but there were certainly more than ten though probably under fifteen.

Some of them, to be quite honest, seemed a little dodgy. I mean, I couldn’t help feeling he was being a trifle optimistic. And, well, you know, you have to tell truth to power. So I mentioned that I had some reservations about a few of those prospects.

Sadly, I was already not very popular with my manager. A troublemaker was how he saw me. And that was before I’d had the gall to contradict him in front of his faithful followers. With that, the guillotine fell. It was only a matter of time before he and I parted ways.

When that happened, I’m not sure which of us was the more satisfied. I’ve never been terribly impressed by people who have to tell me how good they are at what they do – I’ve often felt, naively, that it ought to be obvious from the way they do it. As it happens, of all the ten or fifteen orders he was hoping to win, his count of success could be summed up by a nice round number. Not one had come in.

I’ve worked in the private sector for 35 years. I’ve had great experiences, with excellent managers and outstanding colleagues. I’ve also had some real nightmares.

The result? When I see things failing lamentably in the private sector, I’m not surprised. Just as I’m not surprised when things succeed gloriously. It’s all down to the people working on them, and there are people in the private sector who are very good at what they do, as there are people who only tell you they’re very good.

Just like the public sector, in fact.

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.