Follow @mileswriter
An empire in decline is always dangerous as we see with the USA, led by a convicted criminal with ambitions to rule the world, aided by his paymaster, the pro-fascist richest man on earth. Elon Musk with his strange rabbit-like jowls becomes more like the Mad March Hare every day. He has called for the overthrow of the British government by the USA and yet we haven’t heard a murmur from Downing Street. What’s going on? Where is James Bond when we need him? We should take out that fascist creep. The Russians and the Israelis do it all the time, and how many ‘regime changes’ has the USA conducted? What’s the USA going to do to Britain in response that it’s not already quite likely to do anyway in terms of tariffs and sanctions? As for Trump, I hope he chokes to death on a plastic straw; the life of one dolphin is worth far more than his. The USA is rapidly becoming our enemy, and we should be prepared for it: European defence should disengage from the Americans and international oil and gas prices should switch to the Euro. Well, that’s my opinion. Harrumph!
As for Britain, my son Theo and I were able to get away from it, leaving at the end of January for Egypt. We elected to have a ‘meeter and greeter’ who had a pass to enable us to meet him before customs, who then escorted us to the various stations we required: buying an Egyptian visa ($25 US currency, even though it is the Egyptian government you are paying. Remember to bring dollars; the taxis and tours available through our hotel were priced in $s, as are the menus of more upmarket restaurants.) Thence to Vodaphone to get an Egyptian sim card – a great deal cheaper than using your UK one and finally a waiting taxi with a driver parked not far away. The scrum of taxis and hustlers thus avoided you can enter the great seething shouting honking mass of the great city in comfort and safety. Or you could if you can leave the airport. In our case some VIP was entering or leaving so they closed the entire airport road system for him and we sat among a thousand cars in an uneasy silence until the armed guards opened the barrier. In Cairo they lean on their horn as a matter of course, and motorcycles and scooters weave their way through traffic emitting a series of beeps like bats sounding out their flight path but here no-one honked, they know better than to antagonise the police state.
We stayed at the Carlton Downtown. Naturally the cab driver took us to the Ritz Carlton on Tahrir Square instead, which is twice as expensive (or more), but our Carlton is not far from there. It was built in 1935, part of Cairo’s belle époque that began when Khedive Ismail saw what Baron Haussmann was doing to Paris and decided to do the same to Cairo. Now the buildings are run down, many having stood empty since Nasser sequestered them in the early sixties, but you can see why Cairo used to be known as the Paris of Africa. The Carlton has obviously seen better days, but it still has a lot of original wooden panelling and detailing, the rooms are clean, and there is a roof garden where you can have your free breakfast (allow plenty of time, much more than you would expect), that turns into a sort of night club in the evening. Unlike many places in Egypt, it serves beer and wine. What’s more, the cleaner arranges your towels into a different shape each day, though it might be more convenient if he left them in the bathroom where you can reach them after a shower. This is apparently a common occurrence as we experienced the same later in Luxor and someone said they’d had it in Singapore.
Our friend Tom Hardwick had organised a party at his flat in Zamalek to welcome us to Cairo and it was already in full swing when we arrived. Like Tom, most of the guests were Egyptologists so there was some good gossip about the new GEM (Great Egyptian Museum) and its many failings. I also met a fellow member of the Shakespeare Squad, as Burroughs called it, Nina Frances Ellis who is writing a biography of Lucia Berlin, the short story writer (best known for A Manual for Cleaning Women: Short Stories [2015]) Lucia Berlin taught at Naropa in the English dept set up by Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman, and she was very much promoted by Ed Dorn so we found we knew a number of people in common. I love these chance meetings in foreign countries.
On our first day we decided to first visit the GEM, the Great Egyptian Museum, the 1.4-billion-euro centre of Egypt’s tourist industry where all the most spectacular artifacts from Ancient Egypt are gathered and to go from there to the nearby Pyramids. I had been to them before and knew you had to run the gauntlet to get near enough to them to be left alone by the touts, hustlers and con men but I thought we could probably arrive by taxi or even public transport.
The final plan will make GEM the world’s largest archaeological museum devoted to a single subject – it covers 500,000 square metres – connected to downtown Cairo by an overhead monorail with its own metro stop. It is built to a triangular plan, the base of which will be the three great Pyramids themselves. As it stands, you get there by driving for kilometre after kilometre through some of the most depressing high-rise slums that most people will have ever seen. The museum itself is still surrounded by a construction site as it will eventually include a series of pavilions and gardens, and the pyramids themselves are two kilometres away and not yet joined to the site by the planned pedestrian walkway or transport. The design template is a pyramid, which is everywhere as a design motif. The architect wanted a smooth, dramatic frontage like a temple pylon, but official interference was so great that he eventually resigned. The interior is, to me, a mess, with so many fussy triangular shapes jostling for dominance. There is also the perennial museum problem of how to house a huge statue in a large gallery – in this case an 82-tonne statue of Ramses II from 1200 BC – without the larger enclosure diminishing it. You can’t. It really belongs outdoors where it originally stood. Construction on GEM began in 2005 but political instability and financial problems delayed the project which really only got underway in 2014. It’s still not fully open – the two Tutankhamen rooms that will house his tomb treasure are still not ready and the two Solar boats have not yet arrived. It was rumoured, no doubt totally falsely, that one reason for the reluctance to transfer the Tutankhamen collection is that some curators have been conducting private tours of them back in Cairo and were reluctant to end this good thing. Full opening is projected for July 2025. We shall see.
My favourite goddess is Sekhmet. The British Museum has four beautiful examples, the Louvre and the Vatican Museums even more, but in GEM they are everywhere. I loved it. The labelling at GEM is adequate, but I think people would find it easier to also know the Gregorian calendar dates as well as the Dynasty and Kingdom – when was the Second Intermediate Period exactly? (1782 – c. to 1570 – BCE). But more seriously, the objects have been arranged to look beautiful, to give pleasure to tourists and visitors rather than in a more academic order of chronology or style. A large group of shabti figures or scarabs are labelled collectively and so arranged that it seems unlikely that one of them can be removed for study and research. In other words, commerce has dominated over research and academic study. A visit to the British Museum will often reveal a small card informing the viewer that the object has been removed for study, and though GEM has a huge – or will have – a huge restoration department, it seems more likely that the tourists will get priority over the academics at GEM.
That said, for the most part, the objects are beautifully displayed such as the colossal statue of King Senwosret the First, taken from the Amun Temple at Karnak. Other things will no doubt be fixed later such as one vitrine placed in front of a window so that the reflection of the bright window made it virtually impossible to see what was in it. Another thing I hope they change are the shallow pools filled with tiny little stone pyramids located in the main reception area. People have already stumbled into them and fallen over. More serious is a misinterpretation of the plans by the builders. Outside one vast window the plans called for a ramp. The architect intended it to slope away from the building, the builders sloped it up and so when there was a torrential rainstorm a few weeks before we arrived, rainwater poured down the slope into the reception area. But it’s not yet officially open so these are teething problems.
