Cold showers and testicles

Alexandria, Egypt

If I can thank the Army for anything, it has been the ability to withstand a cold shower without too much screaming. The hopping from foot to foot, the occasional sharp intake of breath, the thumping of shoulder blades to keep warm under a torrent of icy water. Each will have a tactic of their own. Mine is never to stand directly under the thing but just to one edge of the water stream. In goes a foot, a quick splash, out it comes, on with the soap, into the stream again with the foot. Then the other foot, then the arms, then the head for shampoo, trying hard not to fall over. But the naughty bits? Oh dear, the naughty bits. Special tactics are needed for those.

Mine have never done well with cold water. I learned that the hard way in Finland many years ago when the done thing was for guests to leap into the Gulf of Bothnia immediately after a hot sauna. It was a posh sauna, I remember that much, as my hosts had reminded me when I sat bare bottomed on the wooden slatted bench. My left buttock, apparently, had been in exactly the same spot as the left buttock of George Bush some months earlier. Now there is a claim to fame. I have shared buttocks with a President. Occasionally my overinflated ego allows me to think that he actually shared buttocks with me.

Yet it was as I jogged to the end of the Finnish jetty and headed for the icy waters that I recall thinking, “Is this a good idea?” But it was too late. With a simple spring I was in the air and falling downwards towards the Gulf. I was almost in slow motion. I recall hitting the water with a humungous splash that would have made a whale proud and then it was all over. The pain, the shock, and the jolt, were almost unbearable.

They retracted, you see, retracted upwards with a vicious thud. You know, those little, sometimes not-so-little, oval things that we boys dress left or right. The girls don't have them but we do, and much depends on them; the future of mankind, in fact. How can anyone breed without a testicle? Mine shot up, vanished and appeared to take up residence next to my tonsils. Or, where my tonsils would have been had a knife-happy surgeon not chopped them out years earlier. They, the testicles that is, stayed there for more than a year. At least they felt that way.

This time, in Egypt, I made sure there was no repeat of my Finnish experience. The ex-military hopping technique worked well and by 3 a.m. I was asleep having given up on any hope of connecting to the internet. In the Room of Despair, room 538, where this trouble-making Englishman had been sent, broadband was a luxury the hotel clearly could not afford.

Yet life and countries feel different by day. What seems intolerable by night becomes manageable in the light. One thing Alexandria does not lack is sunlight. It streamed past my half open curtains at dawn. And what colour! Everything is blue; a clear blue sky without a cloud to see, and a sea so blue that its colour evades description. Pale blue? Too simple. Dark blue? No. Turquoise? Maybe, but even that would be too routine a picture. I can see why the Greeks have a strong affinity to the place. It is not only thanks to Alexander the Great but the blue of an Alexandria sea is a rough approximation to the blue of the Greek flag. Let one flutter over the other and you have a near match. So despite a bare three hours of sleep and my maladjusted body clock wreaking havoc, I was up and out of my room by 6 a.m., camera in hand, looking to record what I knew would be a once-in-a-lifetime visit.

First stop was to photograph the outside of the hotel, not for its artistic value but for the record, so through the open glass double front doors I strode. I was the only guest awake and smiled cheerily to the Security staff who thankfully had undergone a shift change since my arrival. I was beginning to regret my schoolboy behaviour on the lobby floor several hours earlier. But I was soon out in the already bright sunshine and playing with my idiot-proof digital box camera to take a quick shot of the hotel front entrance. Click! That was one, Click! Two. Click! A third and final image before moving on towards the sea. I turned to head away. I had little time before the conference started and I was programmed to be on stage for much of the day.

“Sir! Sir!” It was a voice almost of panic. I stopped my turn instantly and looked back towards the hotel front doors. It was another security man, this time shaven, smaller, and younger, too. I smiled but noticed the young Egyptian was not smiling at all.

“Sir! No photos!”

“No photos?” I withdrew slightly, furrowing my forehead in genuine confusion. “Why?” I asked.

“Military,” came the reply, “This hotel military”.

Now I was perplexed. There was nothing, absolutely nothing about the place that made it look military. No signs, no crests, no insignia, not even a flag. For that matter I had yet to see a weapon and certainly there was no one wearing any badge of rank.

I was going to challenge my new acquaintance but after the lobby floor trick decided that submissive obedience would have to be my way.

“Oh,” I said. “Sorry, I did not realise.”

“Delete it,” said the young stranger, pointing a nervous finger at my camera’s tiny screen.

“Really?” I hesitated. Was this guy for real?

“Delete it,” was said once more, this time with more authority. The young man clearly meant business, whether or not he had the power he claimed. There are times, quite simply, that one recognises it is wrong to argue. This was one such occasion. Six o’clock in the morning, a foreign land, alone in a hotel car park with a young man in a suit and no one anywhere to act as witness. It was time to play sensible. Or, maybe not?

You see I did fib slightly. Only slightly, I promise. It is just that I am not very digitally minded and have long since struggled with my camera. So when I pressed what I thought was the delete button, some strange menu appeared that made no sense to me but replaced the hotel’s image on the camera’s screen with lines of technical babble.

“Pouff!” I said, “It has gone! There! Look!” I pointed at the screen. The young man peered in the increasing sunlight to see nothing but text and strode away happily. Meanwhile I retrieved the images, the very tedious images with no artistic quality at all and headed towards the sea.

They’ll lock me up one day, really they will. I must truly learn to behave.