Eureka!

I've never seen Cairo looking as good as it did today when our plane banked over Gezirah Island during the golden hour shortly before landing. Its buildings stood out proudly like gold ingots, those around Tahrir Square appearing to form a guard of honour there, while, alongside, the Egyptian Museum containing the equally golden treasures of Tutankhamun framed the scene, startlingly, in its cherubic-pink birthday suit.

We drove through the dusk to Downtown with the windows lowered and warm air fluttering, pleasingly, under my linen shirt and around my hot torso as I sat with my elbow out the window. From the radio came the sustained, swooping wails of a string section accompanying an Egyptian singer which, somehow, conjured all the passions of this place into our small space...

'Spare us!', I hear you cry. 'Why can't you just say, ''Landed at 7 pm and drove into the centre.''?' Well, when it comes to Egypt it's hard for me not to pick up the pen and, more importantly today, I wanted to dedicate some words to Helen, pictured above, whom I was arriving to meet, along with Dd, at a The Greek Club on Taalat Harb Square, and who is also a loyal reader of my blips, especially the Cairene and Brazilian ones.

So, these opening two paragraphs are for you, Helen, and through them maybe we will both remember, in years to come, what it is like to arrive in this place which is 'so full of energy', as you put it!

And Helen should know. She lived here for six years, speaks Arabic to an envy-inducing level, and has Cairo deeply mixed into her blood. And she is revelling in being once again in the '3D reality' of it all after an absence of nearly twenty years.

Helen is also my 'mother tutor' from when I did my CELTA course 5 years ago, co-trained a CELTA with Dd in Belen at the mouth of the Amazon two years ago, is assessing Dd's course here this week, and is the person with whom we share regular 'Eureka!' moments as we send little presents from around the globe to each others' homes in Spain and Australia! Our paths have nearly crossed during the last couple of years but little things like coup de etats have got in the way. So, it was a very special 'Eureka' moment, finally, to all meet up and have a 'live' opening and modelling of the latest earrings from Rio!

We sincerely hope to welcome Helen to our home in Barcelona before the end of July but, meanwhile, we have christened ourselves 'The Big River People', having shared both the Nile and the Amazon together!

Here we are in a shot Dd took which was one of the ones which closed the Blip film 'Scotland All Over The World'.