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Al-Ahram Weekly 14 - 20 September 2000 Issue No. 499 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 14 - 20 September 2000 Issue No. 499
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region Interview International Economy Opinion Culture Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters To live in a tent
By Nigel Ryan
One of the pleasures, or pitfalls, of being a foreigner in Cairo is the remarkable degree of domestic flexibility it allows. As far as accommodation is concerned you are at the mercy of the letting market, which allows for such a great deal of mobility that life can all too easily slip into a nomadic pattern. But as the years pass by the moves become more and more daunting. Packed suitcases that would once fit neatly into the back of a car are replaced by chests, and pieces of furniture, and paintings, enough to fill one truck, then two, and after almost a decade an entire convey.
I confess, though, that the moving habit is hard to break. Forget the stress of packing, the inevitable breakages and losses en route, the equally inevitable disillusionment that develops, in the first few weeks after a move, as it slowly dawns that your perfect little gem of a flat is in fact incredibly hot, noisy, that the air conditioners which worked perfectly during the viewing now do not work at all, that the water boiler is permanently on the point of exploding, that the windows do not close properly and water drips from every available outlet except the taps. For these are as nothing compared to the thrill of entering a space and deciding on the strategies that will need to be adopted if your own presence is eventually to be imposed.
I always know when it is time to move. It is not when the water heater has eventually exploded and the landlord presents you with a bill equivalent to the external debt of a small island state, mumbling ominously about contractual liability as he hands it over, or when the bathroom ceiling collapses, or when you have electrocuted yourself for the hundredth time because of wiring that should long ago have been consigned to a science museum. It is time to move when the door handles begin to annoy you to such an extent that you cover them all, when slowly but surely all the furniture that the landlord promised to take away before you moved in has been stacked in the corridor, making it impassable without crampons and a mountaineer's rope, and you have started to fantasise about incinerating all the soft-furnishings in the absolute conviction that should you face a charge of arson no court in the land would find against you given your perfectly argued defence that the soft furnishings in question were themselves an affront to public taste. Being forced to look at them everyday, let alone sit on them, contravened your basic human rights. Then, and only then, it is time to start looking all over again for that delightful, bijou residence.
There are three levels to the letting market. Top of the heap are those apartments, generally priced in dollars, that are the natural habitat of those who do not pay their own rent. Here newness is the key. "Brand new furniture throughout, including antiques" ran one implausible advertisement. And those brand new antiques carried a price tag of $2,500 a month, which is kind of bottom of the range at this level. Next come the local currency denominated lets. These break down into two basic categories -- the apartment abandoned as an entity, either because the owners have emigrated, or have died, and their heirs are doing the letting, or else the flat that has been turned into a repository for cast-offs, for bits and pieces of furniture that the owners could no longer countenance in their own home but feel it is perfectly all right to charge some poor tenant a few thousand pounds a month for putting up with their cast offs. The first category can be daunting, in that you will be living with the accumulated clutter of someone else's life. There is the danger of ghosts here, in as much as ghosts are the spirit of others. And as far as the second category is concerned, just try asking for those unwanted bits and pieces to be taken away and then watch your potential landlord's expression crumple into one of tragic victimisation. Bottom of the heap are those apartments that can, with negotiation, be let by the week, day, even, one suspects, by the hour. Here you negotiate the price with the boab, though these are not places in which one would want to live.
Taste is, of course, as ineffable as sensibility. If it is to be pinned down at all it is only through descriptive examples, through an intimation of perimeters rather than any delineation of the heart. Unfortunately it continues to be regarded as unforgivably precious to react too strongly to the taste of others, as if acceptance, in this arena more than any other, somehow denotes an acknowledgment of our common humanity. It does not. And yes, one can be driven to distraction by a door handle.
The major problem of the nomadic, rented life-style is that you are constantly the victim of a cut-price version of someone else's taste. One possible way round this, suggested in all seriousness by a friend, is to adapt nomadic structures -- specifically the Mongolian yurt -- placing the tent in the centre of each room and leaving a corridor like space, between yurt and the walls of each room, in which to store the unsightly and impractical cast offs of the landlord. The yurts themselves are perfectly adapted to a peripatetic lifestyle, and can be neatly packed, ready for transportation to a new venue. Authentic, and infinitely flexible -- by adding or subtracting panels they can be adapted to a wide variety of interior spaces -- the yurt may represent a new departure in modular living, an escape from the tyranny of the taste of others.
As Big Ears once confided to Noddy in one of Enid Blyton's by now discredited, but remarkably popular, children's stories: "I always meant to live in a tent." Next move pending, I too might take his advice.
