Is This The World’s Most Antisocial Flight?

I was going to start this post by badmouthing my babyfather, always a classy move online, for putting Z on the world’s most antisocial flight, EVAH.

The time change between London and Egypt is two hours. The flight time is approximately five hours.

Z is firmly nocturnal, and likes nothing better than to spend his unaccompanied minor flying time appreciating fawning hosties while gaming until his battery dies and bitching mentally about which cheapskate parent put him on a plane WITHOUT GAMES IN THE BACKS OF THE SEATS AND TOUCHSCREEN ONES AT THAT…

So, leave London 10.30pm, arrive Sinai 5.45am.

Doesn’t get much better than that, does it?

He’s TOTALLY going to sleep on that flight, NOT.

As I thought I’d made perfectly clear on email.

Conducting a cold case review of said inter-parental email exchange, however, I’m not entirely sure that I did.

I’d clearly used up all my passive-aggressive reserves in a rather whiny sequence along the lines of “What do you MEAN? I PAY for him to come to London from Beirut? Oh, alright then…”

Cultural studies majors, please note.

The Anglo-Australian exchange where I thought I’d made it CRYSTAL clear that this flight was a REALLY bad idea reads like this:

“Cool bananas. I’ll book that on the weekend with BMI. It looks like an early arrival (5.45am).  Will that be okay?”

“I can cope with an early arrival, and give Z a couple of days to recover from the dislocation (he will barely sleep on a night flight — you know what he’s like about staying up late, will be watching movies till 3am), so, yes, go ahead and book it.”

Can you guess which half of this exchange is British, and which half Australian?

Or, for that matter, which half is male and which is female?

a) I thought I’d said “No” and I actually said, in so many words, “Yes”. And, further, not just, “Yes,” but, “Yes, go ahead and book it.”

b) Jesus! How passive-aggressive is that?!

To be honest, it wasn’t technically the best day to be flying into Egypt, either. What with the elections and all (for an overview on some of this, start here), things felt, even here in the whirl of kittens and desert and shisha pipes and diving and palm trees and rooftops that is Dahab, well, tense.

The Egyptian presidential elections had resulted in a runoff that had me scratching my head and miming spoiling a ballot paper whenever anyone asked me which way I’d vote if I was Egyptian.

It was Ahmed Shafiq, former general, army strongman, and Mubarak’s choice of prime minister, versus Mohamed Morsi, the so-far-not-caught-being-corrupted official candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Ladies, liberals, revolutionaries! Take your pick! Islamist? Or military-backed old regime strongman?

If it wasn’t for the fact that many Egyptians have to travel nine hours or so there and back to vote, I think the liberal campaign to spoil the ballot paper could really have taken off.

To add further to the tension of this dramatic denouement of the ongoing saga of what I can only call the Arab Spring while simultaneously making wind-up motions and two-finger quote marks (and, yes, I can do both those things, at the same time, and no, I do not have any spare limbs), Tahrir Square was already swelling with people.

Now, while Dahab is a long way from Cairo and folk here have the world invested in tourism, nobody, whether anti-Islamist or Islamist (I have not met a lot of folk who are pro-Shafiq qua Shafiq) was looking forward to the bloodbath that would inevitably ensue if the army announced the army (sorry! Shafiq!) had won.

Oh, yeah, and the army conducted a silent coup last week and dissolved parliament.

So… Tense. Ia a nutshell. Penalty time at a football match tense.

A football match where hundreds, if not thousands, will die if the result goes the wrong way.

More Hunger Games than football match, in fact.

As M, my driver (yes, after driving in Lebanon, I can cope with anything, but the only cheap car hire here requires committing to weeks, plus I’m no more a morning person than is my son) for the 3-O-CLOCK-IN-THE-FUCKING-MORNING start for the airport put it, “Shafiq? Morsi? I don’t care!”

He’s Bedouin. They DON’T care.

The Bedouin have been fighting Egyptian power for approximately 5000 years and many of them quite liked the Israelis who occupied this region during the 80s.

The Israelis, y’see, having kicked off the yoke of the mighty Ramses II a few millennia ago, had the basic sense to leave the Bedouin, who were fighting Ramses at around the same time and haven’t changed THAT much, to get on with their opium farms, smuggling, arms dealing, feuding and, ahem, traditional pastoral lifestyle rather than stealing their bloody land and making them kidnap tourists to swap for drug dealers as is currently the case.

So, on one level, I guess, 5.45am (4.45am, in fact, thanks to either preternatural flying by EgyptAir or a basic time change cockup on the part of BMI, and I’m reckoning EgyptAir’s planes don’t have go-faster stripes) was not a bad time to get in. Given that no one was going to be rioting or shooting people then.

Which didn’t make it feel any better when I stumbled, baggy-eyed and haggard, to the coffee-shop on the corner of my street at 3am and rang M, who was, obviously, asleep.

Because who but me would stay up till 3am precisely because they knew the next day started then?

Oh, yeah, my son.

And the lugubrious chap was in the coffee shop.

At 3am.

What are my chances?!

A rush of maternal warmth floods over me – and no, I am not making this up – as I see my son striding through the airport in his smart white shirt, his new dark jeans, and the sandals he will lose the NEXT FUCKING DAY on the beach (and only when one has gone through eighteen – count ’em — shoe shops in Lebanon looking for size 37 boys sandals can one fully appreciate the impact of this on both parent and child).

He looks, in my extremely biased opinion, quite unbelievably handsome.

And is accompanied by two firmly male hosts.

Poor Z, I think, as I shed the two coffee-shop workers who have deigned to join my table and hit on me for the last 40 minutes while M does his thing in the airport mosque (“You like Egyptian men?” “Yes, I have many Egyptian friends.” “You are married?” “Not right now, but I am very serious with someone. I was married before…” “What is his name?” “Ummm….”)

Poor, poor Z. An all-male flight crew for the unaccompanied tween male minor.

Whodathunkit?

“HELLO, gorgeous!” I say, sweeping him up in an embrace which is all too easy given he still only weighs about 30 kilos but still… well…

“Stop it, Mum!” he says. “You’re embarrassing me.”

“Oh,” I say. Of course I am. Like, d’oh. The boy’s not nine any more (incidentally, this website will be moving soon). “Was Paris fun?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Futuroscope was good.”

“How about the Louvre?” I say, deciding not even to get into the question of whether said virtual reality theme park is in Paris, which it isn’t.

“Meh,” he says.

“What?” I say. “Even the Mona Lisa?!”

“Yeah,” he says, articulating the almost universal response to Da Vinci’s masterwork in its heroic frame. “I thought it was a bit small. Nice. Good to see it. But a bit small.”

“How was your flight?”

“They didn’t have games in the seats,” he says. “BMI is a cheapskate airline AND this is a codeshare. It’s not even BMI in the first place. Now Emirates…”

I curse the family member who ever put him on a decent airline (not me) and cut him off. “You should see our new house in Dahab!” I say. “It’s totally cool!”

“Have they had the election result yet?” he says.

“Not till 3pm,” I say. “It’s a bit tense, to be honest, but we’ll be safely in the house before anything goes mental and watching it on telly like the rest of the world. We have cable!”

“Oh,” he says. “Well, nice to see you. I missed you. Sort of.”

I look at the clock. It’s barely past 5am.

There’s an infinity of hours before bedtime, and only Iranian cable to fill them. And, hilarious though both Iran Hot Fun and God TV (broadcasting out of Kansas) are, that’s looking like a long, long day.