Gerald Butt
Cairene Courtship
Playing Cards in Cairo: Mint Tea, Tarneeb and Tales of the City
By Hugh Miles
Abacus 279pp £10.99 order from our bookshop
Cairo is not a city that allows you to be indifferent to it. The Egyptian capital assaults all your senses, day and night. It is incredibly noisy, dirty and chaotic. Fabulous wealth exists side-by-side with abject poverty. During a recent visit to Cairo I found myself stuck in a traffic jam. My taxi, like the battered assembly of cars, minibuses and trucks packed around it, inched forward, and dark exhaust fumes wafted upwards with each touch of the accelerator. As we progressed slowly towards Cairo University I had plenty of time to study a large advertising board attached to a building at the end of the street. The advertisement was for one of the latest models from Mercedes-Benz. ‘Make It Yours Today’, said the slogan. Viewed from the chaos and paralysis of the Cairo street, that slogan, in English only, seemed to be addressing people on another planet.
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