Читать книгу The Bucks Stop Here - Jim Parton - Страница 5

For my month’s notice period, I booked a flight to Egypt with Gen, my three-year-old son. This is pronounced with a hard ‘g’ as in Ghengis, not ‘Jen’. People always ask what it means, and it’s nothing to do with the great Khan. It means ‘origin’ or ‘fountainhead’, which may sound silly, but it was chosen by both sets of grandparents, largely because it is easy to pronounce.

My wife Rika couldn’t come because of the pressure of work. She helps Japanese TV companies when they come across to make documentaries, and when she is busy, she is very busy.

In Cairo I stayed with an old university friend called Andrew, who had done a Cat Stevens. I had to come to terms with calling him Osman, and being greeted by a bearded kiss on both cheeks, and Gen had to be dissuaded from jumping on Osman’s back when he prostrated himself at odd times of the day, but Andrew didn’t mind, and was delighted with Gen’s wailing impression of the Islamic call to prayer. Overall we had a tremendous time. Gen shouted his head off inside Tutankhamun’s tomb and inside the Great Pyramid of Cheops, where, being only three foot tall, he could charge up the tunnel inside while I was on my hands and knees. He might also be the youngest person ever to have visited the top of one of the great pyramids illegally (the small one on the left of the Benson and Hedges advert, jolly big when you get up it). The only hazardous moment came when we got lost in a Nubian village on Elephant Island in Aswan, trying to find a shortcut to the five star hotel to watch England vs West Germany on the lobby telly.

A friendly young man in flowing robes approached me, and seeing Gen perched on my arm, pointed at some mangos in a tree.

‘Third World interacts with First World in harmony,’ I thought. ‘We are going to have a beautiful experience.’ When he had got me round the corner he leant on my shoulder and gave me an enormous kiss. ‘When in Nubia, do as the Nubians,’ was not my first reaction, but although disconcerted, I remained polite. To make his meaning less ambiguous the young man then attempted to mount my leg, like an untrained male Labrador excited by the sudden arrival of, say, Joan Collins.

I didn’t stay to discover where the mangos fitted into the man’s imagination. Gen and I made it to the hotel where we settled down with a group of bricklayers from Hackney to watch the match. West Germany beat England on penalties. Gen was not as concerned with Chris Waddle missing the net as he should have been. He kept asking in a loud voice, ‘Daddy, why did the man in the nightie kiss you?’

I had a one-day attack of the Pharaoh’s Revenge, but Gen was fed for the sake of his health on Fanta, bananas, peanuts and crisps and was fit throughout. He has been asking to go back ever since.

I started at Merrill Lynch in the middle of July.

Two weeks later, on August 2nd, 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.