Friday, December 14, 2012

Brother Mick...

With my impending but now delayed semi-retirement from playing competitive pool, I was toying with the idea of framing my county shirt as a little trophy-cum-reminder to make me smile in my dotage. This reminded me that somewhere at my mum's house in Yorkshire I also had a very old county shirt from my days playing for the Humberside County Pool Team in the mid-1980s.

I'd kept this shirt in pristine condition for many years until older brother Mick ending up using it to do some painting in, then ended up wearing it to a house party at my cousin's house. The house party was going great guns until pissed brother got pushed into a plate-glass window elbow-first. So it was goodbye blood-covered county shirt as older brother was driven to casualty to get his arm sorted.

This was a very serious injury and it took a few major operations to piece his arm back together and get it fully working again. Thankfully the surgeons did an excellent job. However they did have to lose some of his elbow skin as it was lacerated thanks to the plate-glass window and they had to graft some skin from his buttocks to replace what was missing.

I was thinking about this and I suddenly realised that, quite literally, my older brother does not know his arse from his elbow. Fact. It may explain a lot...

Saturday, December 01, 2012

Egypt: Part IV...


One of the best days we had on our epic Egypt tour was the full day we spent in Cairo with our own guide and mini-bus.

We kicked the day off at the Pyramids and the Sphinx just outside Cairo. This was both stunning and a bit surreal.

It was stunning because the scale of the three pyramids was incredibly impressive: the big one was made of 2,300,000 huge stones and was amazing. The Sphinx was less impressive but the whole complex was well organised.

The highlight for me, though, was the mini museum housing the reconstructed 3000-year-old boat made of cedar wood. I come from a port town with its own docks and a now-defunct shipbuilding industry so I've always had a fascination with ships and boats and how they are made and what their jobs were.

It was surreal because the whole complex is so close to Cairo and if you look one way it's the pyramids and the Sphinx and lots of desert. But if you turn round it's the backs of hotels, houses and businesses in the not-too-far distance.

We then went to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. This was a big deal for the Missus as alongside Abu Simbel it was the highlight of the tour. And it didn't disappoint. Two huge floors of antiquities from the Old Kingdom, the Middle Kingdom and the New Kingdom, plus the loot from Tutankhamun's tomb and the rooms containing the royal mummies. We spent three hours there and could quite easily have spent double that.

On the plus side, though, it does mean we have a reason to go back. But we'll probably wait until the latest social unrest is sorted out...