Sun 16.12.12: Kendra, Mohammed, Mohammed, Mohammed and I jumped into the car and headed back to Cairo. Tahrir Square was having some kind of meltdown, so we had to get back to Kendra’s via Timbuktu, not arriving until 8am. As I wished to be on the bus to Port Said by 8am, this was not the best of all possible worlds. The ferry over to Turkey was due to leave at 1pm, so I’d be cutting this finer than Parma Ham. As the others went to get breakfast I hurtled into Kendra’s flat, had a quick shower (my last until next Friday), gathered my things together and we headed back out. What I really needed was a café with good, fast internet. Kendra said there was a place around the corner, letting her gender down by failing at special distances by a factor of 10. It…

Sun 16.12.12 So long as the world continues spinning and the sun continues to shine, there will be days. There will be happy days, sad days, rainy days, days in the sun, wasted days, salad days, dog days, birthdays, stay-in-bed days, days when the world is your oyster and days when you lose your shirt. But every so often you have a perfect day. A day in which it all comes together. It might be something you’ve been looking forward to for a long time. It might be a childhood dream you never thought would actually come true. It might be a day when you finally win the lottery. Or it might be all three at once. Today was all three at once. I love Egypt. Okay, I’ll poke fun at the place as I would a younger brother, but that doesn’t mean I don’t love…

Thu 13.12.12: According to some, in an alternate reality the path I’ve chosen through life puts me in a very different place. Somewhere in the multiverse there’s a Graham who is sitting on this bench in Aswan’s Botanical Garden, his sassy Australian girlfriend Mandy by his side, laughing and talking like we did on this very same bench 13 years ago. But not in this reality. In this reality I’m sitting here on my own. But maybe it was always supposed to end like this: maybe whatever path I had chosen Mand and I would have split up. Say I had moved to Australia and got a job shelling prawns in the local prawnery (foreigners aren’t allowed decent jobs in Oz, and in any case the strength of the Aussie dollar makes TV and film production vanishingly unlikely as a viable career). Would the gruesome waste…