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| Finding Nemo |
After ten days travelling round the UK (Horsham, Bristol, Hartley-Wintney, Edinburgh, Dundee) visiting friends and indulging myself in UK delicacies (curries, turkey, sponge cakes, fish and chips, toffee crisp), it was time to return to Egypt.
I’d wondered what it would be like to be back in the UK. I was expecting it to be colder, of course, and Safi said that she is surprised each time she returns to the UK that cold water really is cold and not tepid, as it is in Egypt, so I’d prepared myself for that as well. Instead, what surprised me (don’t ask me why!) was that all the trees were either bare or had only dead leaves on them, holding tight as if trying to pretend it was still autumn. Suddenly, I had a pang of regret at having missed the autumn colours; seeing the trees was like a monument to the passing of time, which, as I’ve said before, seems to stand still in Egypt. It was a brief moment of homesickness.
Weirdly, and I have to note this because I will otherwise forget when I look back to this time in my life, it was during my trip back to the UK that Cairo experienced its first snow in around 112 years. I remarked to my taxi driver (Esmat) that the children must have had a great time, but he reckoned that no-one had appropriate clothes and the children would have been sitting inside shivering! Anyway, it’s pretty typical of my luck that I move to Egypt for the sun and then it has the first snow in over a century.
It was wonderful to be reunited with everyone, even if only briefly, and I feel blessed to have such good friends and I know I never really let them know this enough. I am British, after all. But I hope they are all reading this and I hope they realise that I am saying this because I mean it and not because I want to be polite. I’m too reserved to mention everyone by name.
Each place I went made me think I could live again in the UK after all, having denied this proposition for years, although in the back of my mind I know full well being somewhere for a quick visit is different from being there day-in, day-out. On another level, for many of the places it is a bit of a truism that I could live there, since I already have, which just goes to show that many of my thoughts are not really worth paying attention to.
Anyway, it got to the point where I was due to return to Egypt and a part of me was looking forward to seeing the sun again. I was also curious to see how it would feel to return – would it feel like home or would it feel like starting all over again?
It was quite strange being on the flight with everyone in holiday mode and me in going home mode. As we arrived, I actually felt a little rush of panic, perhaps even homesickness for the UK.
It suddenly dawned on me that I was back to being somewhere where I didn’t understand the language and where I still had a lot to learn about how to navigate the people and the culture to make a success of being there. I felt this more now than at any other time so far, and I suspect it was precisely because I had just been in my home culture for ten days among some of my closest friends.
Before, I had left from Switzerland and had also left close friends, but the culture in Switzerland was still different from my home culture in the UK and so the contrast between the old and the new was not as great as it was now. I was suddenly faced with the enormity of what I was doing. I’ve used a lot of words here to describe something that went through my mind in just a flash, but the feeling was nevertheless there.
I felt a bit lost coming back into the airport because there were masses of tourist agents there to guide their customers through the immigration process, along with Egyptians from the airport asking people if they needed a visa, but I didn’t fall into these categories and felt like a fish swimming against the tide. When asked, I said I already had a visa and so was pointed straight to passport control. I was a little nervous as to whether this multi-entry visa really worked or not. Fortunately, I was waved through without a problem, other than a quick look of surprise, and at the second check the guy even smiled happily when he saw my visa and said “welcome back!”, which allayed my remaining worries about my return.
With my mind now firmly back in Egypt, I was already worrying about what might have happened to my flat in my absence. I didn’t have time to blog before I left, but I’d had two nights of mice in my flat (small mice rather than rats, so it was an improvement; it was also one mouse each night and a different one each night, indicating that they weren’t permanent residents, also a good thing) before I left, with one mouse even having the audacity to jump up on me (by mistake, I think) while I was watching television. I think I even batted it with my hand as I jumped up and screamed.
I’d complained again to the management and my flat had become the most trap-infested place on this planet. I had poison, I had glue traps, I had an old-fashioned mouse trap with cheese in it. No mice were caught, but the night before I left was mouse-free (as far as I could tell).
However, to compensate for the lack of mice (after all, I can’t possibly have a day where I can be free of bad luck), I discovered that there was a leak in the kitchen with water puddling all over the kitchen tops. Fortunately, it was an easy fix, but it was a bit worrying that it happened on the day of my departure. Well, obviously, it was good that it happened before I left, but it left the question open as to what might happen when I wasn’t there.
Consequently, my mind as I travelled back home was on whether the cheese in the mouse trap was stinking the place out, whether there would be a party of mice in my lounge, or would there be water flooding the floor? There were just so many possibilities to choose from!
The staff on duty – and the shopkeepers – all greeted me with smiles and “welcome back!” as I entered the building and I opened my flat door with trepidation. I was relieved not to be able to smell the cheese, although it was still there, a little shrivelled, in the mouse trap. Someone had obviously been into the flat to check the traps as I saw footprints where they had obviously trodden on one of the glue traps by mistake and had left a trail of gluey prints over the marble-tiled floor.
I’d bought four ultrasonic rat deterrents when in the UK, so my first action was to take these out of the suitcase and plug them in. Almost immediately, a cockroach waddled out from under the kitchen units, obviously distressed at the noise I couldn’t hear. I’m afraid I was too tired to have any humanity and promptly squashed it under my foot. It gave me an immense sense of relief, as it seemed to indicate that the ultrasonic noise was effective.
The flat was very quiet, and I went to bed feeling very confident that I wouldn’t have a mouse problem that night. However, when I turned on the light in the bedroom, a huge damp patch covering at least half of one of the walls caught my attention. I prodded it and it crunched.
Even I knew that this wasn’t good news. My heart sank at the prospect of being back in Egypt and having to face problem after problem. I’d had such a nice, peaceful time in the UK. Would my difficulties ever stop, would I ever get the chance just to enjoy myself?
It was late, I was tired, and my mind was in overdrive. So, although I was confident of there being no mice, I instead lay in bed worrying that the entire building may suddenly collapse on top of me as I slept. I tried to sleep on the side of my bed furthest away from the wall. I wondered whether rats could be nesting in the wall and how easy it would be for them just to gnaw through that weak façade. Comfortingly, I knew the ultrasonic deterrents couldn’t go through objects, and I was glad I hadn’t got the rat deterrent that was also electromagnetic to penetrate walls, as then I would have been worrying that the anti-rat device may somehow weaken the structure further.
I told myself that I was being irrational and that I just needed to go to sleep and the sooner I went to sleep, the sooner I would wake up and get someone to do something about it. My mind, however, wanted to worry about it and the irony didn’t escape me that just as I had got rid of the mice, something else had come along to stop me from sleeping.
In the end, of course, I did fall asleep, but my adventures here were obviously not yet at an end.
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