May 2011
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There is nothing as exciting as a revolution. You become instant brothers with people you have nothing in common with.
They would share their last possessions with you. You would give your life's blood for them. Long years afterwards, when you meet them by chance, the years roll away and the old camaraderie floods back.
Still, revolutions can be desperately inconvenient. 'If nothing happens,' I said to my long-suffering producer Oggy, as we boarded the plane to Cairo a couple of weeks before the revolution succeeded in Egypt, 'we can spend a bit of time in the Egyptian Museum'. Oggy is my adviser, friend and, according to my wife, who has also worked as my producer in the past, my keeper.
Something did happen, of course. I have worked in Cairo a dozen times over the years, but I've never yet managed to see the museum. Things have come up: strikes, flooding, war, political crisis, but mostly lack of opportunity. This time it was revolution.
I know everything about the Egyptian Museum. Its bound catalogues, complete with illustrations of the glories of Tutankhamun's tomb, sit on my bookshelves. I own a video tour of it. My little boy's favourite comic-book heroes, Blake and Mortimer, have fought their way through the museum's galleries with fists and guns, and we've watched them together so often on DVD (The Mystery of the Great Pyramid) that we can both quote the dialogue. I've done everything except actually get inside.
This time we turned up at the entrance with our television camera and asked the general in command if we could look inside and reassure the world that the priceless artefacts were still there, safe and sound. I can be very persuasive when it comes to getting heavily armed men to let me pass. It didn't work.
Revolutions show you aspects of a city and its people that you will never see again. Usually Cairo is the kind of place where every man and woman is pitted against everyone else. A gap half the length of a mini appears in front of you in the famously awful traffic, and you stamp down on your accelerator in order to get there before the broken-down taxi, the limousine with the gorgeously dressed lady in the back and the police car alongside you. If you allow any of them to move in ahead of you, they assume you're mad.
I can't say the driving improved during the revolution, but there was a helpfulness, a sense of common purpose, which welled up everywhere.
There were of course nasty moments too: particularly involving the vigilantes who manned some of the roadblocks. At one point things got so bad that Oggy had to repeat back to me a story of mine from Afghanistan, when we were stuck in a minibus in the middle of a huge crowd, who pressed their angry, distorted and scarred faces against the windows. 'Don't look now,' said our researcher, 'but the crowd's turning ugly.' We laughed so much that the crowds started laughing too, and let us go on our way.
Normally speaking, though, Cairenes are pleasant and polite to strangers, some of the most courteous city-dwellers anywhere on Earth. That's why, in 1854, a friend of the explorer/adventurer Sir Richard Burton named Hawkins was so surprised as he sat outside the Shepheard Hotel, beside the Nile, and found himself being singled out for unpleasant attention by a passing Arab. (Burton, at this time, had vanished on one of his unholy adventures: infiltrating Mecca in disguise.) Hawkins and a few of his army friends were smoking their cigars and watching the feluccas on the river. The Arab walked past them several times, getting closer and closer, until his robe actually brushed against Hawkins' face.
'If he does that again,' Hawkins said angrily, 'I'll kick him.' 'Well, damn it, Hawkins,' said the Arab, 'that's a fine way to welcome a fellow after two years' absence.' 'Good God,' shouted Hawkins, 'it's Ruffian Dick!' Burton was delighted with his coup de théâtre; it was just the kind of stunt he loved to pull.
The Shepheard still exists, but only in name. Now it's a featureless 1970s style hotel, with nothing to show that, along with the Peninsula in Hong Kong, Raffles in Singapore, the Taj Mahal Palace in Bombay (now Mumbai), the Mount Nelson in Cape Town, and half a dozen others, it was once one of the great staging points of the British Empire. You'd have a hard time now working out where Hawkins sat smoking his cigar, and Burton lurched against him.
When the revolution was at its height in Cairo, a pleasant but troubled English couple came up to me and asked if I thought they should accept the offer of repatriation by the British embassy.
Well, of course I didn't: there was no threat of any kind whatever to foreigners. It was pretty clear that the husband was keen to stay but his wife was in such a state she wouldn't hear of it.
I explained to her that this was the best possible time to have a holiday in Egypt; that, if I can, I always go somewhere which has just suffered a political upheaval, because security is always hugely reinforced, prices are rock-bottom, there are no other tourists and everyone's delighted to see you. No good: the lady couldn't get out of Egypt fast enough.
Ah well - I tried. But as for me, I'll be back here quickly with the family. There'll be no tour groups. We won't even have to get up early to go to the Egyptian Museum. And this time, at long last, it'll be open.
John Simpson is the BBC's world affairs editor and can be seen around the globe on BBC World News, available in 200 countries and territories worldwide, and on selected British Airways flights.
