Do you remember sitting in the classroom after swimming class? Plagued by the smell of chlorine that just won’t go away?

Nope, it’s not a line from some cheesy legal commercial inciting legal action against swimming pool maintenance workers, it’s me right now.

I definitely wouldn’t mention it had I been swimming, primarily not to annoy those of you suffering in colder climes, but that is unfortunately not the cause. It’s my shower. Sometimes it is worse that others, and it’s something I’ve always noticed here. Today, however, unless my sense of smell has grown to Pinocchio-like proportions, it is the worst for a very long time.

My stomach churning is only half the story. Having followed my normal morning ablutions, the mixture of the chlorine and the soap and shampoo seems to have induced a spell of finger skin peeling.

I may have to take my carbon bootprint (further) off the scale and start washing my hands with bottled water…

The image is of the Maadi Club Pool..also heavily chlorinated at times and rarely frequented by me for that and other reasons.

The desert was amazing this weekend. The rain clouds that opened on Cairo, passed with a few drops overnight - enough to provide fantastically clear air, but not hamper our breakfast.

It was so beautiful, I won’t ruin it with words. Here are some pics for a taste:

In contrast, this is what we came back to:

My previous life in Egypt, BMS (before Mr S), was pretty carbon neutral. I flew once a year on average and all my transportation in Egypt was either car sharing or in taxis (which are often shared too) and when in the UK, the train ruled.

I wasn’t too worried about my carbon footprint.

AMS (Anno Mr S), my carbon footprint seems to be forming a distinctly size 10, muddy wellington boot shape. By the end of this year I will have flown to Europe five times. I still walk and still take taxis and have started cycling, but more often than not, and primarily for safety, I’m in the car. That’s the car that every morning is cleaned, along with the rest of the cars in wealthier buildings in Egypt, with gallons of water.

Last weekend I went camping in the desert. Very carbon neutral - and we left nothing behind but footprints that have probably now been erased by the wind. So far so good. Prior to the trip I was already feeling pangs of guilt, however, as it involved 10 hours of climbing sand dunes in a 4×4 (albeit 2 litre) and in total there were 25 cars…

My next problem is that I enjoyed it so much, I’m already planning the next trip. On the up side, it’s not my responsibility to deal with other people’s carbon footprint and all the other cars used twice as much fuel as us in their 3.6 and 4 litre engines. What this means, is I can tell myself that for every one journey their cars make, we can make two, however, that doesn’t exactly reduce my carbon footprint any.

So having read, but not signed up to, the Guardian’s eco pledge scheme, I decided to time my shower this morning. I know that I don’t take long in the shower, I just love them so much that time stands still and it seems I’m under the (sometimes faltering) stream for eons. Five minutes was my limit. I put on the timer and under I got.

Waaaaah! Waaaaah! Waaaaah! Waaaaah! The next minute had the timer screaming at me.

It seems that my showers must be at least twenty minutes. Every day. At least once in the winter months. Closer to three times in the summer…

I fear I have found a solution to the carbon footprint conundrum: never mind carbon credits, my foot is so deeply stuck in the mud I can’t get it out to take a step.

In my attempt to miss the regular mayhem, I timed my arrival at the local multinational hypermarket this morning in time to be one of the first in. “Blease, blease!” I heard from a group of suited guys as I sauntered through the attached mall that lines the walkway to the hypermarket. “Blease, it’s not open yet.” A sleazy smile accompanied this, and his cohorts were all looking a bit smarmy. Not in the mood for this kind of thing in the morning, I carried on walking and said, “It’s ok, I’ll wait there.” I picked up speed and didn’t turn around, and whilst facing forward, checked in the shop windows to figure out who was following me.

Having shaken off the suited follower, and completed my march of the mall, I arrived at the closed entrance and began my wait. At about two minutes before opening time, a whole group of people appeared at once. So here I have to hold my hands up. It turned out the mall itself was closed, and everybody had been sitting in the food court waiting to go to the hypermarket, watching the arrogant foreigner march off. Yep, this time it was my fault, the suited guys were security, smarmy or otherwise.

So, there I am in a bastion of modern French globalism and it seems I am incredibly attractive to the shelf stackers. All of them. There was not ONE who didn’t make a point of stopping and staring at me, such was my astoundingly radiant morning beauty. One was so intent on staring that I asked him if everything was ok. After that, I just decided to think about how much electricity is needed to run a store that size as I bought my chilled Egyptian yogurts and Bulgarian cheese.

Live Earth, broadcast to the whole world at the weekend reached Egypt last night. Either technology is crap, or Egypt is part of the whole world. Anyway, too tired from self-inflicted over exhaustion last night, I couldn’t watch (what the hell was up with the sound in Hamburg anyway?) the highlights. As luck would have it, I wasn’t totally left out of the global phenomenon because MBC4 is repeating it as I type.

Curtain lifts with a fantastic holographic Al Gore in Tokyo. Pretty cool. His speech was subtitled in Arabic. As was the introduction of the first band up. For some reason the band’s name was written in English: The Black Eyed Beas.

Now it’s getting ridiculous. The schmanzification of the entrance has meant five 15 cm diametre ground spotlights in the flower bed under the new pillars in the porch area with three in the ceiling plus eleven in the flower bed outside with six in total in the concrete arches. Before this “upgrade” we had one light in the entrance in the ceiling and one at the start of the path. I’m not sure if the night has become darker necessitating more lights, but it’s obscene.

Bear in mind that on the other side of the building behind the garage the concierge-come-handyman (extremely nice and very good at his job) lives in a brick room with a TV, one light, an old rickety bed and a heater in winter. On the other side of the floodlit path and its concrete pillars is another room for the next door concierge, this time with the concierge’s wife, 6 year old son and 8 month old baby. Their roof is basically sacking with concrete poured on top. Their walls are not plastered.

It makes me feel ashamed. Again, these people are not the worst off in the city, but where does it end? How badly off does someone have to be in relation to others to get help? I am not noble enough to dedicate myself to eradicating poverty here and even if I were, I’m not sure I have the confidence that it can even be done. Not in my lifetime anyway. So, I just help the people I can in ways that I can, even if it means making concerted efforts not to loose my rag when I get annoyed because they’ve done something stupid (which actually costs me a lot more than anything I could hand over financially!).

Still, whatever is over the wall, 25 large light bulbs to light a 17 metre path is ridiculous.

I absolutely love the carbon footprint concept. I’m not exactly sure why, maybe it’s to do with not leaving a mess behind (something my Mother was always trying to instill in me, which I solved by finding Mr S - read Super Tidy), or perhaps it’s the control freak side of me that is tickled by the idea that I can even be in control of what destruction I decide to leave in my wake. So, it was with great delight that I embarked on my first Eurostar trip last week.

Of course, in order to get to Paris in the first place I had to fly there. Negative points for me. Before that we had to drive to the airport. A few more negative points. The day before that, as with every day, Mr S had to drive home from work. Negative points. But I work from home, so perhaps that equals his negative points? We do buy locally grown fruit and veg. A couple of pluses there. The locally grown fruit and veg are transported in vans. Does that bring us down more points? Sometimes I buy fruit from a donkey cart. Yes, that brings me up, surely, very green transport.

The sports we enjoy (cycling, diving, windsurfing, gym, running) all leave us smug at our environmental friendliness, however, to get to all of them requires driving, especially the water sports, which take between 3-7 hours driving each way. Ooops. Lots of negative points for that then.

Then there’s electricity. A bit of a disaster really. Summer means AC and winter means heating via the AC units. Hmm. I dread to think where that takes us. Is this the right time to admit to leaving the AC on in our bedroom on really hot days (the majority) so that the wine in our “cellar” there doesn’t go bad?

Ok, it’s pretty bad. Perhaps I can add in here that if we could have solar power for the household electricity we definitely would (nearly impossible to find here and it’s not our place so we can’t go changing the electricity anyway!). Perhaps too I could add that were we to build/refurbish an apartment we would definitely make sure it was insulated, despite what is normal locally, so that we didn’t need too much heat or AC in order to keep the place warm or cool. So, if actions are by intentions, as is the case in the dominant religion here, perhaps we’re actually doing ok.

Of course, we could always look at other ways to offset our footprint. Eureka! Here’s an idea. There are lots of people who are looking for extra ways to make money. We could pay someone, hell, why not an entire building, to not use AC throughout the summer. We can then be comfortable knowing that we’re reducing our footprint and providing income to families who want a bit extra. Two birds with one stone. Great.

Something seems a bit wrong though. Would that mean that we are reducing our footprint, or would it mean that the non-AC users are reducing their footprint and getting paid to on top of it? Hmm. Kind of reminds me of big business tactics. Can’t imagine why.

We have no water. Global warming? Hose pipe ban? Definitely not the latter and probably not the former (didn’t you know, there is no water shortage in Egypt, as any Egyptian can testify, the Nile never stops flowing…).

It wouldn’t be so bad if I couldn’t hear the tse tse tse of the neighbour’s garden irrigation system as it spurts out water over the expansive lawn that is used a maximum of once a month for three hours on a Thursday evening. Or if I couldn’t see a gardener in another neighbouring garden raking up the succulent green grass he has just cut.

It reminds me a little of when I was in Palestine. After a few weeks in a dusty midsummer village, we went to Hebron. A couple of us decided to visit Kiriet Arbaa (a major settlement on the outskirts of town) to disprove the rumour that the man who committed the Hebron Massacre had a shrine there. The three of us (all girls) had to separate from our Palestinian friends under the flimsy excuse of wanting to explore Hebron alone for a while.

We walked all the way there and it caused quite a commotion. At a checkpoint, Israeli soldiers asked where we were going so we told them. Initially a little suspicious, they let us through and on we went. After about two minutes, a jeep full of soldiers decided that they’d like to talk to us and so alternated between driving beside us for the benefit of the front passenger and driver and in front of us for the four in the back. As driving with us meant driving at walking speed, a long queue of cars formed behind us. Not sure if the soldiers being with us was actually safe or not, especially if they found out what we were doing there in the first place, and then to have about fifty irate motorists behind us, we were a little nervous.