No sooner had Ben left for the airport than another friend of mine arrived in Cairo. Tom had been on holiday in Italy with his aunt, creating mayhem no doubt, before arriving for a week in Egypt before we both head back to the UK. I’ve known Tom since the first year of my undergraduate degree at UCL, when we lived on the same corridor of the infamous Ramsey Halls near Tottenham Court Road. It was a bit of a bleak student barracks, with its sole claim to fame being that within its peeling walls the band Coldplay had formed several years earlier. It certainly has a lot on its conscience.

I picked Tom up from the airport with only a little difficulty and soon he was being treated to his first taste of Cairo’s notorious roads. Our driver had to be in Imbaba to break the fast and so put his foot down on the way back from the airport. It was exhilarating. After a while you kind of get used to the odd bit of crazy driving, but having a newcomer on board brings home the madness of it all! We made it back alive somehow, anyway. The picture shows Tom visiting the Egyptian National Museum – he’s having a great time.

That evening I was determined to show Tom some culture and so we headed down to the Darb cultural centre in Mar Girgis with our friends Ruw and Pauline. The centre is doing live music shows every night of Ramadan and that night it was to be a ‘fusion’ of modern and traditional Egyptian music with Sufi dancing. Sufi dancing is the one where they whirl round and round in flowing robes and is often pretty amazing. There was also drinks and refreshments for sale and bean bags to sit on and discuss the weighty issues of the day.

The evening grew to a climax in which the Egyptian traditional musicians were sat at the back of the stage while four whirling dancers performed in front of them. They began but unfortunately one of the dancers was having great difficulty getting his robes to whirl out away from his body as intended. He rotated furiously but perhaps there was a problem with his outfit because it just wasn’t happening for him. I sense that the exertion was beginning to make him dizzy because he came perilously close to staggering in to the dancer next to him, who continued to spin sympathetically.

Meanwhile, his problems seemed to be distracting the other members of the dance troop. One of the guys on the other side of the stage stopped for a moment to irritably throw some wires that had been getting under his feet to one side. The band disapproved. Then when he started to twirl again he just managed to build up a head of speed before his robes caught the singers microphone and music stand, with everything falling to the ground with a mighty crash. The guy who couldn’t get his robes to whirl then gave up and tried to sit down but, being very dizzy, simply toppled backwards on to the musicians and their instruments. Then everyone stormed of stage.

It was one of the most entertaining performances I have ever seen. Highly recommended.

Tags: Cairo, coldplay, dancing, darb 1718, middle eastern museums, sufi