1997

wip

Egypt

Meeting the Egyptian in Soho

• August.
• At a club with Sarah. (I first traveled to India with Sarah.)
• Matthew Copeland is playing a gig there.
• We meet an Egyptian historian.
• I tell him about my upcoming trip to Egypt.
• He tells me about a book I must read: Signs & Symbols of Primordial Man.

Ordering the book from the British Library

• August.
• I go to East Finchley library to see if it’s there.
• It’s not, of course, but I look it up on the database and request it from the British Library.

Byron

• Early September.
• Byron and I leave for Egypt for a month.
• We will visit Cairo and then take a train to Aswan and travel down the Nile on a felucca for few days.
• After that we will go to Dahab for two weeks.

Mount Sinai

• Last week of our tour.
• We climb Mount Sinai.
• You have to leave really early, around 2am, and climb up in the dark.
• I’m with a bunch of blokes and they’re all stomping up the mountain really fast.
• I’m desperate for the toilet, but they’re going too fast, and I know they won’t wait, and it’s dark, so I hold on.
• We get to the top of the mountain and I’m in pain from holding on.
• Everyone takes blankets and finds a spot to sleep to wait for sunrise.
• The sun is starting to reveal some light in the sky but hasn’t risen yet.
• I leave Byron with the blankets and head off to find the toilet.
• I’m tired, wired, and my bladder is screaming.
• I don’t know where I’m going, I’m sort of staggering around the mountain top which feels a bit unwise.
• There’s no-one to ask either.
• I’m thinking about finding somewhere secluded to go but there’s nowhere.
• I turn a corner…

Moses

• In front of me is a man who looks exactly like Moses.
• I’m amazed.
• I don’t know what to do with this information.
• We look at each other.
• He looks as surprised to see me as I am him.
• He is old, with long white curly hair and long gowns, just as you might have seen him in a picture.
• I’m thinking either at that moment but definitely later and for many years, this has to be a guy that lives up here, he’s a bit crazy, he thinks he’s Moses, dresses like him, and everyone’ll know about it, you know, this is too strange for me right now, and my bladder was screaming, so I turned away from him, and immediately found the toilet.

Agents

• I tell Byron what happened.
• I can tell he thinks I’ve lost the plot.
• When we get down to St Catherine’s, Byron is chatting with two well-spoken British boys.
• He’s told them I think I saw Moses on the mountain.
• They laugh at me, asking if he was carrying two tablets of stone.
• I’m cross, embarrassed, offended.
• I go quiet.

Telling people, then not telling people

• I told a lot of people about this, everyone probably.
• And at some point a lot later on I realized that perhaps I shouldn’t be telling people about this, and so I stopped.
• I remember telling Zoe BJ this.

Dénia

• October.
• When I get back from Egypt, my bedroom is being decorated so I’ve nowhere to sleep.
• My friend Roseanne, Paul’s sister, and their younger brother Matthew are going to Benidorm for two weeks.
• They invite me because their friend Martine dropped out at the last moment.
• I accept.
• In the meantime, the book the Egyptian recommended arrived at East Finchley library so I go to collect it for reading material on the Costa Blanca.
• I read it every day.

The book

• It’s bananas; pygmies, axes, masons, forests, signs and symbols.
• It’s an overwhelm of mystical verbiage.
• I understand nothing!
• But something keeps me reading.
• I read it every day.

Las Marinas beach

• On the second week of our trip to Benidorm we rent a car for a few days.
• One day, we drive North up the coast to check out some quieter beaches.
• We pull off the motorway at Dénia and drive through the town on the way to find the beach.
• At the Las Marinas road, we drive up to around the Las Brisas area, park, and hang out for the afternoon.
• It’s lovely, quiet, just a few people milling around; nothing like heaving Benidorm where a man chased me up the road requesting repeatedly I go to his house to take a shower with him, and a 14-year-old boy grabbed my boob in the street one night.
• I go walking on my own at the shore (part of the same walk I will do daily in the summer when I live there).
• I’m examining stones on the sand.
• A stone catches my eye.
• It’s white, oval, something about it makes me interested in it.
• I’m so interested in it, I keep it.
• I’ve never done that before in my life.

The book that night

• I settle down on my bed with my heavy tome to do a bit of reading that night when we’re back in Benidorm.
• It’s masons, the corner stone (I think), axes, pygmies, forests.. and then, the initiate is given the white stone!
• I nearly fell out of bed.

The stone

• I kept that stone with me, carried it everywhere I went, until 2015 in Tibet when I left it at Kailash mountain.

Returning to Sinai

• I returned to Sinai twice to climb the mountain again, and to see if Moses was still there, just a crazy person who lives up there all the time, or perhaps THE Moses, if it really had been him.
• I never saw him again.
• Something makes me wonder what might have happened if I’d been less closed and cynical at the time; like did he having something to say maybe that I missed?
• The last time I went, the guide took me down via the Elijah’s cave area which was really special.
• I’d love to go back again.