Albert memorial, London.
Happy Jubilee weekend!
Cruising is a peculiar way of seeing the world. Budget cruises, like that which I joined last year, tend to be overwhelmed by plump oldies straining the ship’s stores of Twinings and slowly, chirpily melting on the poop deck. When the ship docks, they’re dumped on the harbourside and bundled into buses, which whisk them inland for half a day of numb-bummed wonderment. Then they leap back on ship with visible relief, back to their cabins for a good sprucing before emerging on deck, in frocks and crimson lippy, to watch another country slip out of sight and out of mind. So, that was Crete then. Egypt next.
Egypt’s strangeness started out at sea. There were shipwrecks; dozens of them, like great rotting cadavers, just abandoned to the wasting waves. A faint, earthy pong hung on the air as we picked out skinny minarets in the haze. It was nearly every bit as otherworldly as in my imaginations. A dumfounding piece of news was waiting for us on the dockside: we were the first tourists into the port of Alexandria since the revolution. A busload of crinkly pensioners with bum bags and handheld fans had just become history’s most improbable pioneers. The Egyptians don’t call it a ‘revolution’. They prefer ‘liberation’; it’s unreservedly hopeful and morally certain. In the Alexandrian docks it was all smiles, but our guide was weirdly matter-of-fact about it all, as if she were remarking on a pleasing football result: ‘so, welcome to Egypt. You’ve probably heard about the liberation. We’re all quite happy about it’.
The miracle of editing (I).
A few years back, it snowed in London. Not limp, half-arsed proto-slush that’s just ugly and annoying, but proper, knee-deep fairy fluff that turns everybody into chums. We headed to Regent’s Park, which was just swathed in the stuff, immaculate and bewitching. Now, there are two ways to react to the prospect of a square-mile of manipulable raw material. One is to build podgy little figures with carrots stuck in their faces, and take jolly snaps and delight in the novelty of it all. The other is to immediately make projectiles and commence pitched battles. Soon enough, we had a base of operations and a hierarchy of command, led by a fearless and fearsome Bulgarian accountant. It was, by a country mile, the most fun you could have with a bunch of people you don’t know, in a field, with no booze. At one point, a lad in a leotard unwisely sprinted through no-man’s-land, and was battered so mercilessly his legs were the colour of beetroot. At another, an unwary jogger caught a snowball so squarely in the face it knocked him flat. This was, of course, a little unkind, but he took it in giggling, commendable spirit. That’s the snow effect. Imagine if, on any other day, somebody had floored you with an improvised missile. You’d go berserk. But on a ‘snow day’, everybody has a wonderfully robust sense of humour.
I’ve wanted to write this piece for a while; to be precise, since I first stumbled, gawping, into the Piazza del Duomo, Florence, about this time a year ago. The trip came on the back of a tough few weeks in London. I had to miss a day of it because of a sodding interview in the City, and I’d brought a little keepsake from home: a malicious, bulging ulcer searing angrily at the slightest brush. I was tired and thick-headed, with chewed fingernails and prickly red eyes. And the very instant I got to Florence, none of it mattered.
We took proper, bitterly delicious coffee at sundown. The hulking Duomo sat beside us, enormous walls drenched in fleshy pink and deep emerald and white mellowing into the dusk, and crusted with fleurs-de-lis and figures of stone. There was a grand old café across the road with shimmering chandeliers, vibrant gelato and slender, waistcoated baristas. Aged Florentines deftly wended tinkling bicycles over the cobbles. And the whole thing was set against the most glorious score: quiet, day’s end Italian chat, and a soaring oratorio of church bells. I gulped it all down as I did my restorative cuppa, and England became a remote, sodden, puddle-grey memory. Nothing else mattered but this mesmerising place of marbled, rococo class.
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