Connecting to Egypt

For the past few days I've been closely following the events in Cairo and other cities in Egypt. The word revolution is being used - again. As well as having a lifelong interest in people's power around the world, I feel an extra connection with Egypt because of my family background. I would have been born in Alexandria if it hadn't been for an earlier revolution. Just two months before I was born the Egyptian government rejected the previous decades of British occupation and domination of its country and asked all British citizens who were employed by the government to leave immediately. This included my father, even though, as a left-wing, Welsh anti-imperialist, he sympathised with the Egyptian people and had taught in their universities for over twenty years.

I hope no more protesters will be killed or injured by the police and that the Egyptian people achieve peace and democracy.

My parents had to leave quickly so they brought few belongings with them, just what they could carry, mostly their sketchbooks and photos. This morning I've collected an Egyptian collage of my own books and some of their pictures: clockwise from top left: Olivia Manning's Levant Trilogy, a map of the Nile bought by my mother when she returned to Egypt in 1991, Ahdaf Souief's The Map of Love, part of the 'Cairo' section of my father's autobiography, Lawrence Durrell's Mountolive (part of his Alexandria Quartet), Stevie Davies's Into Suez, Alaa al Aswani's The Yacoubian Building, Naguib Mahfouz's Palace of Desire (part of his Cairo Trilogy), and in the centre an etching my father made of boats on the Nile and my mother's drawing of Arab women. On the left is a page from their photo album showing pictures of a trip they made to Wadi Natroun.

See detail in LARGE