“Jean-Paul asked me whether he should call me madame or mademoiselle.”

“What did you say?”

“Mademoiselle, of course, I haven’t been fully claimed* yet.”

“No-o-o.” (with nervous laughter)

“Ye-e-e-s.” (smiling sweetly)

“But, uh, no, uh, you can be called madame once you reach a certain age.”

“Well, perhaps, but whatever that certain age is, it’s certainly not 28. I’m a mademoiselle.”

It doesn’t matter where we go, the fact that Mr S has not made this Grouse into his spouse always comes up. “Is your husband here?” or “Are you over here with your husband?” are frequently asked. There are two avenues. First just answer ‘yes’ and forget about it. This inevitably happens during drinks/aperitif only to be followed by an awkward moment during dinner when someone else asks, “So, Mr S, when are you going to make an honest woman of Grouse?”.** The second option is responding, “My partner? Yes, he’s here.” Raised eyebrows and a quizzical look follow as thoughts sweep behind the eyes, “Here on holiday? No, I’m sure she lives here. Gay? No, surely not. Engaged? No, she would have said fiance. Why is she here in Egypt with someone when they won’t commit to each other? Strange.”

I don’t mind at all that the issue is raised by friends and strangers..it means I don’t have to do it!

I have this picture in my head: a cute bob with the edge a little higher at the back and a little longer at the front and lots and lots of layers at the back. I have been to the hair dresser three times in the past year, pointed to the picture of this in his book and each time come out with something different. The first time it was just rescued from being a mullet. Absolutely not what I’ve been dreaming of.

A friend of mine has short hair and it always looks nice. “Aha!” I cunningly thought after I saw her last sporting yet another fab do, “I’ll go to her hairdresser.”

I turned up armed and ready: print outs of exactly what I wanted from the front, side and back. No room for confusion this time. No siree!

Chop, chop, brush, brush, snip, snip. It was going swimmingly. Best still, after asking where I was from and my name, he didn’t try to talk too much to me.

Sitting next to me was a platinum blonde getting something done with her colour. About two thirds of the way through my cut, she started getting antsy: she wasn’t happy.

The simmering turned into a boiling, “My husband only has one day off a week..”

“Oh bloody hell,” I realised, “She’s British.”

“..and I’m wasting it in here!”

Heads remained still, eyes around the room picked out other eyes.

“I wanted a rinse! I’ve been here three hours and you’ve done nothing!”

“Yes, madam,” my hairdresser said, “we gave you a rinsage.”

My hairdresser, Sam, was Lebanese. Lebanese generally speak Arabic first, French second and English third. His English wasn’t fluent, but was comprehensible (and come on, his third language!).

“But I wanted a rinse!” At this point we are now rising up the decibel scale.

“But madam, yes, we gave you a rinsage!”

The other client and I had stopped breathing.

“I just want someone who speaks ENGLISH!” Now topping the decibel range.

Other client and I shifted uncomfortably.

“Nobody’s fucking listening to what I’m saying!” she said under her breath, but loud enough for everyone to hear.

“I JUST WANT SOMEONE WHO SPEAKS ENGLISH!”

Absolutely dumbfounded, probably with my mouth gaping, eyes certainly popping out of my head, I thought about saying something in her beloved English along the lines of, “We’re in Egypt, nobody has to speak English!” but was in too much shock to say anything.

The Egyptian lady on the other side of her volunteered to translate in a tone, lost on the British woman, that saw stern and utterly disapprovingly.

In the end, Blondie flounced out of the salon without paying.

My hairdresser was by now just as furious as Blondie had been, but he couldn’t flounce out. I, still mortified, sat stock still and didn’t say a word.

This was rather unfortunate.

Hairdresser Sam was taking his pent up frustration out on my hair.

I breathed deeply decided that I would sit back and think of the UK. Not wanting to give everyone in the salon, who was now watching Sam, further reason to think that British women are cows I resolved to keep my mouth firmly shut.

Perhaps too firmly. When the receptionist looked at me, then up at my hair and asked perplexedly if I liked the cut, I should have broken down and started wailing there and then. With valiant stiff upper lip, I smiled politely instead and said, “Yes. Thank you.”

So, great my country men, in the name of your honour and all that is good about our great nation, I now sport a haircut that looks like a short, curly Worzel Gummidge with an uneven pudding bowl.

And to my one particular fellow country woman: if you wake up and find your hair dyed green, or wake up to find it has all been shaved off, you’ll know I’ve foregone my right to pistols at dawn.

I mentioned in my last post that the enjoyment of getting clean increases incrementally the dirtier you are. Well, yesterday I was indeed dirty. I had been hiking here:

and shopping here:

and it was 36C (according to the thermometre in the car when I got back). The water had been off when I got in the shower in the morning, so I showered in a mere dribble. My Amy hairstyle was witnessed by Lynda from Lulu’s Bay and I was more than ready to get a scrub-a-dubbing in the evening.

Having not had proper water for two days, and hearing the pressure from Mr S’s shower, I decided a bath was in order. Once again, I assembled my creams, scrubs, and any fun paraphernalia I could possibly use in the bath to get clean and come out smelling rosey. Definitely time, therefore, for the precious (in the irreplacability stakes here) bubble bath to be emptied.

Bubbles mounted, fluffy and white and the water flowed.

I reached my hand in to test the temperature of the half full bathtub and recoiled in shock as my scalded hand jerked out of the water. Moving the handle on the tap to be fully cold the gushing slowed to an absolutely totally nothing. I tried again. Nothing.

The water coming out had been from the hot water tank, which was now nearly empty, given the amount of steaming water in the bath. It had not been mixed with the cold because, yes, the water was off.

After a good few minutes of huffing and puffing and hoping and praying for someone somewhere to flick the switch that would give me water to cool my bath down I returned to use an improvised paddle to ’stir’ the water, thus introducing more of it to the unfortunately rather warm evening air and hopefully cool it down.

I stirred and I stirred and I tried to play tricks with the flow of the water so more of it could reach the air, but after a good twenty minutes, I hadn’t had much success.

My next tactic was to ‘acclimatise’ my body with the bath water. Perhaps if I just went in really, really slowly, I would be able to stand it and at least get my hair wet.

A few scalded toes later and that plan was down the drain.

Next came my brainwave (no doubt brought on by the throbbing in my feet): ice cubes. I brought through three litres of bottled water (the people talking about carbon footprints don’t have to deal with problems like this) and five trays of ice cubes and emptied them all in the water.

Now I was pretty certain that this would work and was even slightly worried that I might make the bath too cool. When I saw the ice cubes floating around in their pretty star and heart shapes I began to wonder if I’d made a big mistake.

I put my foot back in and it still seemed pretty hot, however, having just seen the ice cubes take a good few minutes to melt, I decided I must just be being a wimp about it and forged ahead.

I did get myself in and indeed my hair wet. It was about five minutes after that that I started to feel seriously light-headed. I got out, head swimming, leaning against the wall lest I faint and waited until I was composed, then went to get the food thermometre to test the water.

It was, by then, ten minutes after I’d got in.

The reading: 45C!

Queue for subsidised bread taken by and copyrighted to Les Parents

There was a little cafe in the wee village I grew up in that offered a ‘clean plate surpise’ for children who finished all the food on their plate. It was a good tactic and the ‘surprise’ ice cream seemed to work with everyone (apart from Lil’ Bro - but that’s a very boring story about the world’s slowest eating child).

Then there was the “There are starving children in the world who would love your food” when those greens were lying around on dinner plates.

Now, chances are, if you’re reading this blog, you have not been to my little village in the Central Highlands, but you are very likely to have heard about the starving children somewhere far away in the world when you were a child.

Recently I was lucky enough to have dinner at a swanky hotel restaurant. It happened to be buffet night so the choice was endless (well, for Cairo anyway): Australian beef, New Zealand lamb, sushi and sashimi carefully prepared by the Japanese chef with produce flown in from afar, mountains of desserts with Swiss chocolate. You get the picture.

It was as I reached for my plate and realised I had to decide what I would eat that it suddenly occurred to me how obscene this was. The world is currently facing a crisis of food. Multiple causes of course, but the end result is rising prices on the international market.

No doubt wherever you are in the world, you’ve noticed that your pint of milk costs more, that a loaf of bread is more expensive than a year ago and that fuel prices are rising. More than likely you’ve absorbed these costs, albeit begrudgingly.

Egyptian’s too have faced price rises over the past year, but the effect is incomparable to what we have felt. According to a World Bank study in 2005, one fifth of the Egyptian population live in poverty with a further 13% just above it. Baring in mind that prices were significantly cheaper back in 2005 and wages (for those that have a job) are not much different, it is probably safe to say that a good part of that 13% have now dipped below too. Add to that the size of the population: the UN’s 2007 estimate is 77 million. All in all, that is about a third of a lot of people.

The problem in Egypt is compounded by essential governmental subsidies on wheat and fuel (amongst other things). So, while the Egyptian people have been experiencing rises, they have not yet felt the full brunt of the international market’s gains. The government, however, has seen subsidy payments eat further into its budget and logically, cannot sustain the situation for ever. In a country where much of the population is dependent on the government, difficult times for all may be ahead.

While I have a curiosity in things such as this and am lucky enough to have had an education combined with experience that provides me with a modicum of understanding about daily life for the ‘average’ Egyptian (ok, who exactly is ‘average’ is an issue in itself) most expats do not. For somebody arriving in Egypt to Maadi or Qatameya, living in a comfortable apartment/villa with a team of staff, getting used to a new country, it is absolutely understandable that life struggling to buy bread that costs about US$0.01 is extremely hard to imagine, even though it’s on our doorstep. It is also not that easy to see as our normal hang out places are quite removed from the subsidised bread queues.

I am not apportioning blame: this is a local problem caused by a global phenomenon. It cannot hurt, however, if those of us who live cheek-to-jowl at least in global terms, offer a little more patience, and perhaps at the very least slightly larger tips, to those who are in our lives and are struggling to eat half decently, while we gorge at the smorgasbord life has given us.

If you correctly guess what this is I might make you some. If you finish reading this post, you might not want to guess.

Mr S and I have fallen into a bit of a routine when it comes to meals. Generally speaking, I will prepare starters and desserts and he makes French culinary masterpieces for the main. It works well.

Or it worked well. A distinct flaw became evident last night as we (Les Parents et moi) arrived home from our little exploration of the neighbourhood. We had passed a TBK motorcycle delivery man, who, upon seeing me pointing out the bike to Les Parents, did a U-turn and stopped to give us menus. I told him that I had one already and I really liked the burger. He carried on handing us the menus. It wasn’t until he drove off that I realised I’d not been speaking Arabic. Or English. Nope, FRENCH. Why on earth could that not have happened in my French GCSE?!

So, as we took off our shoes and put our bags down, Les Parents looked at the menus we’d been handed. I suddenly heard a voice inside me screaming, “Say you want burgers! Say you want burgers!” as I realised Mr S definitely wouldn’t be here for dinner and the sad truth hit that my starter-and-dessert-making has rendered me incapable of cooking main courses.

They didn’t appear to want burgers (Mr S later told me they are not very keen on them) and seeing as it was their first night here, I felt like I should at least make an effort. Les Parents are extremely kind and polite, and even said they liked the meal. In all honesty, with no false modesty, it was a horrible meal. The pesto tasted more of garlic than pesto, the presentation was, no other word for it, sorry, crap and the bread..well, the oven is Egyptian made. Some Egyptian things are well made, some are not, and our oven falls into the second category. On this occasion, the heat of it melted the timer causing it to fail..and the bread to burn. Gordon, Delia, Nigella, Nigel, Ainslie, or anybody else who can wear a tall white hat (and command respect), I am not.

So, if you get invited to dinner chez insteadi, you might want to gently inquire about who the chef is that evening before accepting.

After an exciting, but tiring, week on a Nile Cruise, Les Parents are resting, having decided that seeing pyramids today would be too much. Phew! Gets me off the hook trying to explain things in dodgey French. I had dug out an old French guide book (well, not old incomparison to the structures I guess!) that I could pass over to them, open on the appropriate page (preparation is everything), but this is best all round.

And poor Mr S. The first time his parents come to Egypt to visit and where is he? Aberdeen where he had a two day one night meeting? Amsterdam where his KLM flight to Cairo was supposed to leave from? Nope. He’s in Paris.

“What’s he doing there then?” I hear you ask and well you may. Kindly (excuse me while I clear my throat), given that KLM had cancelled their Cairo flight yesterday, they moved him to Air France for today’s flight.

Air France is, to all those who travel on it and know it only too well, rather like TWA in that it is blessed with an name/acronym that provides rich pickings for dissatisfied travelers:
TWA (Transworld Airl.) Take the Waitress Away
TWA (Transworld Airl.) Travel Without Arrival
TWA (Transworld Airl.) Try Walking, Asshole
TWA (Transworld Airl.) Try Walking Again
TWA (Transworld Airl.) The Worst Airline
TWA (Transworld Airl.) Took Wrong Airline
TWA (Transworld Airl.) Terrorist Welcome Aboard
TWA (Transworld Airl.) Terrorists With Arms
TWA (Transworld Airl.) Teenie Weenie Airlines
TWA (Transworld Airl.) Traveling Without Air
TWA (Transworld Airl.) Tiny Wings A-flappin’
TWA (Transworld Airl.) Tight Wad Airlines
TWA (Transworld Airl.) Try Walking Across (transatlantic perspective)
TWA (Transworld Airl.) Teenie Weenie Airlines
TWA (Transworld Airl.) Twenty Wobbly Airplanes
TWA (Transworld Airl.) Twits Win Again
TWA (Transworld Airl.) That Was Awful
Air France so easily slips into (conveniently in English as well as French) Air Chance.

So, right now, having had an unscheduled and unwelcome night in Paris, Mr S is now stuck at the airport where his Air Fr..Chance plane has been delayed.

Knees, terribly sexy.

“Shorts? In Cairo?” my friend remarked with raised eyebrows.

“Oh, yes. Definitely, but only in the Hood and only in certain parts.”

It hit 35C yesterday - extremely unusual for this time of year, and more than that, after a few days of warm weather, no sand storms have hit. Perhaps there’s a real biggie on the way. Hopefully not. In the meantime, however, it’s kind of like summer.

The recent temperature hike has taken a lot of people by surprise. One result is that the cinemas haven’t turned on their refrigeration systems yet, aka A/C, so you can actually enjoy warm weather outside, then sit in the cinema and not catch a cold. Heaven.

After my little foray into the coffee bars and cinema of the Hood wearing shorts (just slightly above the knee - risqué) I felt superbly summery. Humming a happy little tune this morning I washed the summer stickiness off my skin and stepped out of the shower. I had just reached for my towel when I heard a cough. It wasn’t Mr S.
Then I heard a clattering and realised the cough came from outside. Being sufficiently high up that nobody could be near my window I had a moment of confusion.

In my happiness I had totally forgotten that scaffolding (of a sort) has been erected outside my bathroom window. I had no idea if Mr Cough had seen me in the buff, but I was sufficiently concerned that he shouldn’t see anything else (not least for fear that it become a regular occurrence for him and his buddies) that I was then stuck up against the wall holding a towel length-ways over my front waiting for a moment to sidle up to the door and slip out.

Suddenly the shorts seemed like very conservative attire.

A trailing spouse, for those of you not on the expat circuit, is a wife (normally, but there are some husbands) who have moved abroad for the sake of their other half’s career.

Generally, in Egypt, Trailing Spouse does not work (either because of spouse’s company regulations, or just because it’s nigh on impossible to get a working visa once you are already in the country) and has a lot of free time on her hands. There is the gym, art classes, golf tournaments, shopping trips, day excursions, organisation of the household staff and children’s activities. Often the free time gets consumed in one gulp by trying to carry out just ONE task each day. Not because she is lazy, but because it takes ages to get anything done here.

Trailing Spouse is often in a precarious situation, particularly if her marriage is not stable. Not uncommon are the stories of wives who have been dumped while taking children back to visit relatives in the home country over the summer. In one fell swoop they move from fairly relaxed days to a nightmare of organising a house in the home country, enrolling their kids in school and trying to explain to upset children that after the holidays, they will not be joining Daddy, will not be getting their toys and will not be seeing their school friends. And why. Never mind the stories of access being denied to joint bank accounts and organising a divorce while husband is shacking up with a new woman in the foreign country.

Life as Trailing Spouse is not always easy.

I am not Trailing Spouse. Key to being a trailing spouse is the ’spouse’ part. This is where I fall on shaky ground. I am, however, trailing. So, it would appear, I am Trailing Grouse. That’s right, a trailing Scottish bird.

‘Can you take me to Square Y on X Street?’
‘OK’
I hop in the taxi and set off to my destination.

Only half, the long, very roundabout way, there I am told, ‘Ok, you can get out here.’
‘But,’ I say looking around, ‘We’re not near X Street.’
‘No, but you can take another taxi from here.’
‘But I’m in this taxi and you said you would take me and that was five minutes ago.’
‘Yes, but I’m going to collect my children from school.’
‘You knew that when I got in the taxi and you told me you would take me to X Street.’
‘Yes, but I have to get my children from school. I’m not going in your direction.’ He shrugs his shoulders as if to say, ‘What can I do?’

I did at this point say something not very nice, that I’m not proud of and I won’t repeat here.

Then out I got and walked to another place to get a taxi from, cursing the fact that after all this time I still think I can dodge the situation of extreme self-consciousness that is getting caught out wearing the ‘wrong’ clothes in non-foreign parts of town.

After a week of waking up everyday with a sore jaw due to sinus problems, being exhausted just walking down the road and barely able to hold my concentration long enough to have a half-way decent conversation, not to mention stinking of chlorine, I decided enough was enough and tried out a new masseuse.

Despite some of my rantings, there are some definite perks to expat life. One of them is massage. At home. Yep, I get the temperature exactly as I like it, I get my own towels, I choose my oils and best of all, I don’t have to get dressed afterwards and go outside to make my way home (or, heaven forbid, back to the office).

And, to make a Scottish lass even happier, all this is for a tenner.

Am I smug?

Hmmm, too blissed out to say.