El Andalous - Forgetfulness

Coral and Fish at Ramp in Sahl Hasheesh

Well, I had one of those days yesterday (Sunday) where my brain was like a sieve.

Unfortunately, life isn’t 100% fun, and so Saturday evening was spent filling out my UK tax return. I hadn’t realised that it had to be in by October 30th if I was submitting it on paper. I tried to see if they had changed it so that expats could also fill in the forms online, but in my move I’d thrown away my login details for the tax office. I’d had a pretty extensive clear out before I came here and I could have predicted that a few essential things would go missing.

There’s no way now that my tax return will get there by October 30th, but I’m hoping that if the postmark is before then, the tax office will offer me some leniency. Anyway, I thought it best to get it off as soon as possible.  In Egypt Sunday is a normal working day, so at least I had an extra day to play with from a UK perspective.

I’d already arranged to go snorkeling with Tom and Kath the next day, meeting at 11am, so that meant I would have to get to the post office for 10am, when it opened, if my social agenda was going to work out. This called for some organisation and at first it went well.

I prepared my boiled egg for my sandwiches the night before, did my tax return, put it into an envelope and addressed it, wrote a letter to UBS to request to close my account (finally all Swiss admin, apart from this, is completed!), put that in an envelope and addressed it. Everything was ready for me to post the next day.

The morning started off as planned – I made my sandwich and put it in the fridge ready. Then off I went to the post office. I was a bit worried it would be closed as Sisi had ordered three days of mourning for the deaths in the Sinai, but it was open on time and the guy cleaning the floors let me in.

It was a fairly typical Egyptian encounter. The guy serving me asked me if I wanted to send the mail by normal or express post. I was a bit surprised, since I hadn't been asked this before, but said I’d have one express and one normal, to which he said that they didn’t do express post. Ha! I didn’t bother arguing.

After handing the items over for posting, I went back. This was obviously enough efficiency for me for one day, because this is where it all started to go horribly wrong.

I packed my lunch – sandwiches, snickers, two cans of diet coke – in my cool bag. I packed my snorkeling gear. I checked that I had my camera and then realised I’d forgotten to recharge the battery. That was annoying because I’d thought about it the night before and it had promptly escaped my mind.

I only had five minutes left at this point, but decided that those five minutes would be better than nothing, since the battery was low, not dead.

I packed my towel, grabbed my sunglasses, then put the battery and memory card back in my camera and packed it in my bag.

I thought I was doing really well. I went to meet Kath and Tom, but as I got there, I realised I’d forgotten my swimming shoes. Back I went.

We made it to the beach, we put our towels down. I went to take my dress off and then realised with a shock that I had forgotten to put my swimming costume on. So, ten minutes walk back to the flat, a quick change, and then a ten minute walk back to the beach.

So, basically, I’d packed everything apart from what I needed to get in the water. Doh!

We had a great time snorkeling. When I got back home, I decided to cook myself fish (I did feel a bit bad about that, having just enjoyed watching all the underwater life).

I chopped the onion, left it to fry, but got too involved at looking at my photographs, so the onions burnt.

I added in the aubergine and put the pasta on to boil. I then got a bit sidetracked as to how exactly I was going to cook it all and decided on using some red wine (I know it should be white for fish, but I only had red available). The aubergines seemed to guzzle the wine up.

I was about to mix it all in with the pasta, which was now ready, when I spotted the fish sitting all nicely defrosted on my kitchen table. Doh!

So, I had to wait another 15 minutes for my fish to cook. The vegetables had all goodness sucked out of them by the end.

I hope today will be better.