I’ve been away a long time. Put it down to anxiety because that’s what it was. When I was a kid, the BBC had a humorous series called, “Much Binding in the Marsh.” I didn’t understand the title then. I think I do now and there’s way too much binding in the political marshes in Cairo these days. Stops one from thinking. Today I decided to do something about it. Actually, I decided last night as I put my head down to sleep. “I am 11 years old again,” I told myself, “and tomorrow I’m leaving for Wujdan.”

Why 11 years old? Because that was how old I was when I learnt how to get to Wujdan. It started with learning how to get up at 5am without using an alarm clock.

Whenever the family had to go on a long car journey, my mum would want my brother and me to get up at five in the morning. Early morning journeys didn’t agree with me. I was okay for driving around at any other time of day, but early morning drives brought on motion sickness. It got so that as soon as the alarm clock rang I woke ready nauseated for the trip. So, what I did was to hit my head on the pillow five times and say, “I’ll get up at five.” And that’s what happened. I’d wake up at exactly five and slam down the bell on top of the clock just as it started to ring.

I don’t remember who or what put me on to this trick. It certainly wasn’t Alroy. Alroy isn’t really full of great advice.... It could have been Pericles, our gardener. But I can’t say for sure.

Eventually, after I had been through the pillow banging bit and woken at 5 am a number of times, waking up at a precise time became a doddle. Many years later I used the trick to wish away a wart that had appeared on the forefinger of my right hand.

My mum, who was a doctor, had removed it with an electric spoon but it came back again and she removed it once more. When it returned for the third time I whispered it away as my head lay on my pillow. It took a week to disappear, but, after that, it didn’t return.

More years passed. I had started smoking when I was eleven, sneaking cigarettes out of my mum’s packets. I eventually became a chain-smoker. Then, years later, a heart attack hit a friend who also chain-smoked. It panicked me. I began whispering to my pillow again. I said things like,” I do not smoke” and then, more positively, “I have taken up non-smoking.”

Self-suggestion brought the number of cigarettes I smoked down, from 80 a day to about 20. But I wanted to stop really quickly and cheated. I found a Chinese doctor who cured me of the habit in five days by acupuncturing my earlobes.

My pillow-whispering experiences, however, led me to Wujdan by way of pleasant semi-waking dreams. Perhaps my trip there was akin in some way to Alice’s experience of falling own a rabbit hole, but I didn’t feel myself to be falling, still less to be in a hole. I would find I was in a small house with an internal garden full of flowering shrubs. I would be sitting in front of an enormous picture window, a table between me and the window with my computer on it and I’d be wittering away at a story.

That translated into reality when I had had my morning shower and got down to doing my stint of producing, or trying to produce, a daily quota of five or six written pages however nonsensical their content.

Am I nuts? Definitely, I’m at least half nuts. In hindsight, I laugh over much that was hurtful to me in life. There seems to be nothing else to do. Perforce of the greying locks and deepening lines of creeping decrepitude, one abandons the stance of the angry young man and laughs. Which seems to me an acceptable way to move ahead in life. But nothing, so far, has explained to me why I have a desire to try to reproduce on paper so much that was, after all, well nigh a horror show.

I do not even pretend to know the answer to that. But let me say in my defense of wanting to write that the scenery that enters my head when I do write and eventually surrounds me, blending perfectly with the objective scene, is more than beguiling. It calms my frequent panic attacks.

Wujdan is an amalgam of places I have visited and fallen in love with. At the centre is Granada surrounded by the snowy peaks of the Sierra Nevada, whose mountain passes take me to other places for a change of scenery. Southwards, I walk on marl white roads under the green hush of bamboo naves in Jamaica’s St Elizabeth Parish and swim at Montego Bay’s Doctor’s Cave.

South East, I visit Jalali and Moroni, the guardians of Muscat’s sickle moon bay and journey to Yitti’s pink lagoon of flamingos.

When summer temperatures rise to unbearable heights, I sometimes catch glimpses of children skating on the lakes round Oslo.

Then, as dusk falls, I return to Wujdan’s entry point at El Ayn El Sukhna on Egypt’s African coast with views of Gebal El Galala (Majesty Mountain) inland and out across the Red Sea to the Sinai desert.

It’s a good place to write. Nobody knows you are there. So the doorbell doesn’t ring, neither does the telephone. Nobody knows the number.

How do you eat if you spend the day writing and you happen to be the family cook? Easy. You have three slow-cookers (crock pots) going at it while you write. One contains the beans for several Egyptian breakfasts. That one you plug in on the terrace so that the smell of cooking fava beans, not a pleasant one, wafts away to sea.

The other two you plug in anywhere convenient. One cooks the rice and the other a somewhat exotic dish of stewed leg of lamb. I’ll share the recipe with you next time.

That way you only interrupt what you are doing in order to turn off the rice when it is cooked and to make a salad.