west london tales 12 - egypt

Playing on my laptop, beside this screen, a woman with a blue scarf talks from Tahrir Square. The noise from the square slips down cables, slides through oceans, emerges through speakers, sings in my sitting room. Everything connects?

I took the lift this morning and saw my downstairs neighbours for the first time since I got back. More often than not the reason we talk to one another is because there's been a leak from my flat downstairs to theirs. (Generally arising from the Ethiopian couple who live upstairs.) In spite of this, I get on OK with my downstairs neighbours, an old man and his middle-aged daughter. But today, in the lift, they were distracted and made little attempt to communicate. The daughter was on the phone, talking in Arabic and her father, a hunched man with big specs who's always in slippers, looked concerned, trying to work out what the person on the other side of the phone line was saying.

Then I remembered. They are Egyptian Copts. They had bigger things on their mind.

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