Living for Disco

I’ve only ever spent two Christmases away from the bosom of my family.

The first one was the Christmas of 1998, the last before my father died. I spent it with my ex, in our bijoux flat in New Cross; we were joined by our friend Flip. We spent months filling up the hamper cardboard box under the coffee table with food and drink. It took us almost as many months to get through it all.

For the first time ever, I had my own stocking. In it was a yo-yo and an orange. We drank a lot of gin and tonic, even more champagne, and after making ourselves sick on a dinner of roast duck, followed by Stilton, we calmed our churning stomachs with port.

It was clear and crisp outside, and the trees – recently pruned mutilated by the council didn’t look as brutally stunted as they had during the autumn, when all the other trees still had branches. We danced on the sofa a lot. It was great.

The second one was in 2001. I was in Egypt, leading a group of Christmas-hating holidaymakers through the Western Desert. As they persisted in telling me, their getaway was precisely that - an attempt to flee the horror of the festive period. They’d paid for a week free of Santa, and that was that. It didn’t seem to make any difference to them that I hadn’t.

The Western Desert is beautiful, and was one of my favourite trips, but this time I was, rather unfortunately, lumbered with a driver who had clearly missed his career niche as a vodka-fuelled clown in the Russian circus, a bus with too few seats, and a woman called Penny who seemed incapable of listening to anything I said*.

Christmas Eve dawned bright and hot. Determined not to be deprived of all hope of seasonal enjoyment, I had sneakily purchased two bottles of Omar Khayyam red wine, at great expense, while in Luxor. We squeezed ourselves, with difficulty, into our mini-bus, and drove, squabbling over leg and elbow room, to the market. I should really have learned the words for ‘cinnamon’ and ‘cloves’ before getting to the shop, and after being offered with increasing bemusement a selection of goods including tinned salmon and washing power, I just started sniffing the spices myself. They must have thought I was completely mad.

So that night, in our cosy camp, we sat around and I made a triumphant mulled wine over the fire. It was marvellous. Salah, our driver, came along too. Although by this time I’d become completely sick of his constant lateness, bad driving** and regular disappearing acts, the group seemed to have taken him to heart. They seemed to find our conversations amusing. I don’t know why; they routinely went like this:

“Salah, we’ve been waiting here for almost forty-five minutes, the police have got bored and gone to look for you – where on earth have you been?”
“Ah, my watch/shoe/belt/wallet broke and I had to fix it. Then we had a coffee and a smoke. You have very beautiful eyes.”
“Thanks. Can we go now? And next time, please don’t disappear – we’re really late.”
“M’ish mishkela, m’ish mishkela***, you are very lovely”.
“Don’t mish mishkela me, there is a bloody mishkela. And you’re not going to get anywhere by complimenting me. And I’m not lovely - I’m fed up”.
He’d then look at me mournfully, sigh, get in the bus, and drive us to some shop or other owned by his uncle, where he’d stop, and refuse to drive any more until we had bought something.

The sight of him dancing maniacally around the campfire, fuelled by mulled wine, his beer belly drooping attractively over his a semi-transparent white sarong will stay with me forever.

Christmas Day was even better. There’s an extremely old Christian cemetery that looks over the encroaching sand dunes just outside Kharga. It dates from around the 3rd Century AD, when the Roman emperor Diocletian decided to expel all Christians from the empire. Many of them came to this empty, seemingly god-forsaken place to escape persecution, and for centuries they buried their dead in the necropolis. Because it never, ever rains there, it’s fantastically well preserved. One guide I had used to insist on going down in to the crypts and bringing up ancient corpses until I asked him to stop.

Anyway, I made my group gather in the crumbling, mud-brick church, I forced them to sing Christmas carols for me until I was satisfied, and I let them go.

I wonder what this Christmas will bring?

*“Please make sure you go to the bank before we leave Luxor as we might not be able to go in Kharga” – witness spending four hours in various banks on 23 December, in Kharga Oasis – an ugly town of staggering parochialism - trying to cash a cheque, while Salah and Samir, our police escort, disappeared, never to be seen again, into a coffee shop and the rest of my group mooched around sulkily.
“Don’t stray too far from the camp, and try not to sleep in any vehicle tracks – ha ha!” – witness spending an hour next morning frantically searching the desert before finding her curled up in a landrover track some half mile distant.

** On our way back to Cairo, I awoke from a brief doze, to find an unearthly, terrified silence reigning over the bus. Looking around, I realised that we were hurtling along the highway at breakneck speed, driverless, and Salah was nowhere to be seen. I was convinced for a second that he had finally had enough, and hurled himself from the moving vehicle. Then I realised that he was driving with one arm, while conducting a long search under the passenger seat for a bag of pretzels.

***No problem

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 20th, 2005 at 1:00 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.