This is the last bit of this holiday story. I have more - many more - but don't think they are quite so interesting in terms of the things we did. Maybe I will tell you about our year in New Zealand. That is a wonderful place, probably the nicest place in the world, if I were voting on it.

Friday was spent mostly in packing. Those of us who were flying home were supposed to be picked up by a bus at two, but since there were only eight of us, (the others were going on a week's cruise on the Nile) we checked if we could come later to the airport by taxi - and the rep agreed and it meant we had an extra hour in the sun by the pool.

Ann was coming back with us although the rep wanted to take her to the airport earlier - to make sure she got her there okay without hurting her broken leg. But when we arrived later, the rep was only too glad to turn her over to Pat and Dee and disappear herself So we had to take her through customs and such, find a place to park her, make sure she got to the toilets when needed, and find someone somehow to get her aboard the plane.

This proved to be a big problem - as the wheelchair couldn't go in the bus to the plane so they had to push her across the runway, and then she was going to go up the stairs of the plane on her bottom - humping up step by step, but one of the attendants in the end picked her up and carried her to the top of the stairs and she hobbled to her special seat at the front, and Pat and Dee were given seats near her so they could help her. She surely had a rotten holiday but even so was in pretty good spirits.

I think she was somewhat resentful of her friend Hilda whom she had joined the holiday to be with - because Hilda had been unwilling to forego her bridge to sit with her in the evenings - and also Hilda, being old and frail herself, couldn't push the wheelchair and do the various bits of help that Ann needed.

In some ways I felt that I would d have liked to continue for another week and do the cruise with the others, but I was also ready to go home. A week of holiday seems to satisfy me just about right. And I thought that I had seen and done most of what I had wanted to do in the time available. And I had to get back to work.

So when the time came for leaving, we flagged down two taxis. There was a written notice just inside the hotel saying that taxis to the airport should cost £ I7E - which is roughly £4.50 for a half hour trip for three of us and all our heavy suitcases ( a similar ride in England would probably cost £20)- and when we go into the cab, we asked the price. The man said, £E20 and both Dee and Pat said, "No way," we will only pay £EI5 - and he said 20 and I said, "I will pay the 20 - so please stop arguing." But Pat especially was mad at me and said, "it isn't right you know. They are taking advantage of us" The poor cab driver probably earned less in a year than we spent on this one holiday - but she felt that it was important not to be taken advantage of, and she certainly made her point, but I made mine too - and we paid the £E20.

As I mentioned before, Ann at this stage rejoined our group - but I was somewhat ahead of the others (a man moved my suitcase 5 feet and wanted a tip. I only had a £E 10 so he got it and I told him it was his lucky day) and got through customs and such - and went into the packed airport and found that there was really no place to sit for the at least two hours wait we had ahead of us. But Pat and Dee were more resourceful and found some places and saved one for me, and parked Ann's wheelchair somewhere fairly nearby, and we got out the cards and had six hands or so of bridge, balancing the cards on my hand luggage and Dee's handbag.
 
I think people think we are mad - but it passes the time very quickly, and we all must be mad on the game anyway to do what we do with such regularity. There were four plane loads of people waiting - and one by one the planes were called. Ours was only an hour or so late - but when we finally got on the plane, it was sometime before we finally took off. Our pilot apologized saying they were late in due to heavy snow in London, and we all groaned.

I had come through check-in on my own so wasn't seated near any of our bunch, and when I showed the flight attendant my ticket, he said, "You are lucky - you have the best seat on the plane." I was by the emergency exit - so had loads of leg room. A woman sat down next to me, and seemed rather preoccupied by the seats in front of us in the next section. She kept going and talking to the men in these seats. She didn't say anything to me for a long time - not until after we had been flying for half an hour, and then she said, "I thought I might offer my seat to that man in front because he is tall and needs lots of leg room, but he is with someone else and wants to sit with him."

I know what she wanted me to say was that I would move too, but there was no way I was going to be so generous. I'm not all that short (which she was) and I appreciated the leg room nearly as much as the man in front - and if he had been so worried about it, he could have requested a seat like ours when he checked in.

That was my justification for being mean and selfish. Anyway, she didn't move either, and didn't say anything more to me until we were served our meal. Then she started talking and she didn't shut up for the rest of the flight.

She had been married the day before - to the man in front, I wondered, but no, he wanted to sit with another man. No, she had been married to an Egyptian boy. Do you remember me saying how all these boys asked us if we would marry them and I thought of it as a joke. She obviously hadn't seen it that way at all.

She was 40ish, and had two boys of 15 and 17, and was divorced, but her ex-husband lived nearby and was keeping an eye out for the boys while she was off to Egypt.

The men in the front seats were people who lived near her in London - they owned and lived above shops like she did. The men were gay and spent their free time visiting in Aids Hospitals - and the couple next to them were being treated to their last holiday before the man died. In fact for a few minutes of panic there, they thought the man had died on the plane - but when they more or less carried him off to the toilet, he returned looking a bit better, so I guess he had been sick - due to having had too much to drink.

Anyway, back to the story of my seatmate's life. She had gone on holiday to Egypt for the first time in October, and had been introduced to an Egyptian family who live on the West Bank and she got to know this young man quite well - although she was keen to assure me that nothing untoward had taken place between them at that stage.

Then when she returned home, he wrote to her and called her, and she did the same to him. Then a few weeks ago, he told her that he was being conscripted into the army and would probably be in Cairo in the army for at least two years, so she had to move fast if she wanted to marry him. So she . borrowed money and filled her suitcase with things for his family - and out she went.

Her new husband had just finished college, and had been able to avoid the draft so far because of his study, but they were now out looking for him - and thinking of him as a draft dodger. And it turns out she had married him just in time, because on the Friday morning, the wedding having been on Thursday, she arrived at his house to find out that he was in jail - for draft dodging. But when she went to the jail and showed the papers that proved they had just been married he was released "for the time being" but the implication was that as soon as she had left the country he would be arrested and sent to the army.

He, the new husband was about 21, I think and the new bride was on her own admittance 20 years older, but that didn't worry her at all. I got the distinct impression that she had married him because it was a nice kind thing to do. He, as a Moslem can be married 4 times, apparently, and she said that she was already part owner of his felucca (small boat) so the added wealth from the marriage to her would be able to make him afford to take a young Egyptian wife too.

She said he couldn't come to England, because you couldn't get a passport until you had been in military service, and he obviously hadn't done that yet. Also, she said she wouldn't dream of going to live in Egypt as she had her shop to run, but would try to visit four times a year.

She said his mother and others in the family had been very kind and friendly towards her - but hadn't liked it when she ate with them men, and wanted to talk business with them, etc.

She said her boys were quite happy for her to do this - she had discussed it with them before. I wondered what the legal situation in England would be regarding an English woman who had married an Egyptian - who didn't come to live with her. Would he be the automatic inheritor of her shop and money if she died in the plane on the way home? Would England allow him to come and live here, as they had allowed me to come as Philip's foreign wife, with no questions asked, and every freedom and privilege given? (This was before the days of David Blunkett’s nanny - and I was made very unwelcome at that time.)

I asked her why the people were told that they should give pens to the children who begged, and she said that the parents couldn't afford to buy writing implements for the children and they wanted to learn to write and draw, just like any other child. I had assumed that the children wanted to resell the pens and it had seemed a funny way to do things, since it is easier to give a child the price of a pen rather than a pen.

When our plane landed in Gatwick, the new bride and her problem friends got off, and poor lame Ann had to wait for help deplaning. The rest of us sat in the airport for a 1 1/2 hours while another late plane landed and the follow-on to Manchester passengers joined our flight.

But luckily when we finally arrived, Philip, my husband, was there to meet me, and the snow, which was falling fairly heavily by now, didn't mean we couldn't land, or drive home to Mellor. The airport hadn't bothered to tell Philip when he phoned of the extra 1 1/2 hours delay so he had been walking in circles around the airport for at least two hours. What a nice man - I probably would have gone to bed and left a note for him to take a taxi home.

And so ended another memorable bridge holiday. I liked Egypt, and would like to go again and do the things I should have done better, and do the things I didn't do, and make sure I did them better too. I feel that from now on I will understand a bit more when people talk about papyrus and hieroglyphics and pyramids and tombs and temples and things like that. What before was just an item on TV or in the paper about that part of the world will now have more meaning for me.