‘Twas brillig’ on Monday, May 6.

I love Sham El Nessim, the festival for everybody!

You go out in the very early morning for a picnic on the Monday after the Egyptian Easter Sunday.

Go to the Cairo Zoo, to the Alexandria Corniche, to the banks of the Nile in any town as far south as Aswan and you’ll find hundreds of thousands of people having breakfast in the open air.

Who are they?

Egyptians of all walks of life.

What do they eat? The picnic fare is usually boiled eggs, the shells dyed in bright colours, spring onions, fisseekh, a special salted fish for the occasion, mish, a rather pungent cheese and aish balady, unleavened, whole-wheat bread.

Sham El Nessim, which means something like ‘sniffing the breeze,’ is the Ancient Egyptian spring festival with which the legend of the resurrection of Osiris is associated.

Osiris’s brother Seth had envied him his popularity and murdered him, hiding his body. Osiris’s sister-wife Isis found the body and hid it. But Seth struck again, stealing the body from her and this time dismembering it and scattering the parts throughout the country.

Undeterred, the faithful Isis searched for them, found them, put them together and restored Osiris to life, bringing spring back to the world.

I regard the day as one of solidarity with all my fellow citizens of ‘Om El Dunya,’ the Mother of the World, as we like to call Egypt. For, as a relic of our very ancient past, it belongs to everybody regardless of their religion and I like that.

Then, it reminds me of the history of the world’s oldest national state and makes me wonder how things were in ancient times.

Sham El Nessim is always “brillig” for me. Remember? “Twas brillig, and the slithy toves/Did gyre and gimble in the wabe...” I don’t know what Lewis Carroll meant, but whenever his word “brillig” comes to mind I remember the rest of the phrase and I see in the mind’s eye saucers of golden light shimmying on the surface of the Nile

This time, though, I must say, the day was tinged with sadness, thinking of the young people who have died since the revolution began.

My blog has lain fallow for a long time. I guess many must think that I am pretty hopeless at the game. I don’t dispute that. But, in my own defence, I must say I’ve been in a well nigh paralytic shock since January 2011.

There was one day early in the Midan El Tahrir Revolution, that a personal ‘darkness at noon’ befell me. I was, at the time, teaching a journalism class and had sat waiting from 9am till midday for the students to turn up. Nobody came and a tiny newspaper filler I had read some years previously about a prank played on a teacher sprang to mind.

It had made me laugh whenever I thought of it. I had, of course, never imagined that one day I might become the target of such an escapade. But on this day, as I waited for the students, I struggled with the awful thought that perhaps they were fed up with me.

The story told of a university professor whose students found him a crashing bore. On entering his lecture theatre one day, he found all but one of them leaving. Then, as he began his lecture, the solitary student ran round the room, turned on a dozen or so tape recorders on the benches and left.

A couple of days later the professor had to deliver another lecture to the same class. He went early and again found his students leaving their tape recorders and departing.

But this time he had come prepared and he turned on a tape recorder he had brought with him to deliver his lecture and left even before the lone student had finished his job of turning on all the recorders.

Had I, I wondered, become so tedious? Perhaps my students were too polite to think of tape-recording me but had decided to boycott the lecture.

So I was greatly relieved to find a full class the next time I had a teaching session. They explained that the time before there had been a demonstration which had blocked the road to the university.

As the term progressed, however, there were mysterious absences. Certain students had been involved in demos and for one reason or another couldn’t come to school. Once I was told so-and-so had been injured; another time so-and-so had been detained.

One lad, arriving late one day, suddenly frowned hard and clutched his forehead. He had, it turned out, birdshot or bits of shrapnel in his head that the medics couldn’t remove. The injury gave him spasmodic headaches.

These students, though, were the lucky ones. The true shock—one that has escalated day by day—has been delivered by the price in blood so many have paid. Some 2,000, at least, have died throughout the two-years-plus of the revolution.

Who killed these people? There are accusations and counter-accusations. There have been inquiries and inquests and trials but little has emerged from it all.

Rumour has it, meanwhile, that we have transited from a dictatorship to a democracy; which should mean that we are in an era in which there is an agreement to disagree. Remember Voltaire?"

I disagree strongly with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

There is, however, mighty little evidence that such a miracle has occurred and I would like to place on record my profound admiration for those risking so much—broken bones, blindness by birdshot and their very lives—to ensure that ordinary Egyptians have a say in their government.I would be with them, but I am not of an age to join in demonstrations.

My days of “Jack be nimble/ Jack be quick/ Jack jump over the candlestick” have ended. I can only pray that it will soon be recognised here, as it is in democracies worldwide, that peaceful demonstrations are an institutionalised part of the democratic system.

I was in a demo once, more than 50 years ago in an English university town. A number of students from various countries in Africa and Asia, some of which were then colonies in the British Empire, wanted to demonstrate against Prime Minister Anthony Eden’s Suez adventure of 1956.

I happened to be the secretary of the university student union’s Afro-Asian Society and, along with other student society officials, had to contact the police on the matter.We explained at the police station that we wanted to walk in silent procession through the town and return to the university campus carrying placards which read: “HANDS OFF EGYPT!”

The police were perfectly affable and readily gave permission. We would , they said, be the first to demonstrate in the town since Sir Oswald Mosley’s Black Shirts had goose-stepped through it before World War II. They mapped out a route for us to take and, on the day, police constables stood guard along it.

On the day, we started off from the university as a relatively small band of both foreign and British students, but our ranks swelled considerably as we proceeded. Numbers of townspeople joined us. Most notable amongst them were several mums pushing prams

On our return to the students’ union, various student officials delivered speeches for and against the attack on Suez to an audience of approximately 5,000 gathered in the union’s great hall. The students then voted for or against the military action and voting slips were gathered at the door as the students left the hall. An overwhelming majority was against the attack on Egypt.

Similar demonstrations followed by votes that gave similar results took place throughout the universities in the UK and must have served to influence the government of the day.

I am not saying that all went off absolutely swimmingly. There was a certain amount of violence.

In Hungary at the time, a students’ demonstration against the communist government had sparked a revolution that threatened Soviet control of Eastern Europe. This inspired a Hungarian student at my university to lash out at a counter-demonstrator who had torn off one of our posters. He knocked the man to the ground and jumped up and down on him, shouting: “England eez democracy!”

We had to pull him away, help the victim to his feet and take him into the union to gather his senses before we set out for the town.

On the route, moreover, counter-demonstrators threw thunder-flashes (extreme fireworks that make a loud bang and give a bright flash of light, used in military training exercises) at us over the heads of the police despite the presence of mothers and babies. At the end of the demo I was in a cold sweat over the thought of what would have happened to a baby if a thunder flash had landed under the hood of a pram and I swore never again to have anything to do with politics or demos.We were fortunate, I think, not to have had casualties.

Nothing to do with humans can, I suppose, be perfect. There is a need here, however, to recognise that democracy enshrines the right to disagree with a government and to demonstrate, albeit peacefully, against a government. There is even a country where the constitution allows for the collection of a certain number of signatures on a petition against a law or government project to oblige the government to abolish the law or abandon the project.

When will we have something of the sort?

Okay, sneer: “Foreign ideas! Too idealistic! Imagine asking the police for permission to demonstrate!”

What is wrong with useful foreign ideas? The West hasn’t ever had any hang-ups about adopting Middle Eastern ideas. Much of Western civilisation is based on ideas from Ancient Egypt and today people there are sampling Middle Eastern food with relish. Sandwiches with taheena,hummus, felafel or shawearma fillings are readily available in many Western cities today.

Millions of people here drive motorcars, commute on trains and buses, watch television, use computers and are daily on the internet, firing off emails, tweeting on Twitter and facing off on Facebook.

We didn’t invent cars, trains, TVs, computers, the internet and on-line social networks, but we use them.

And what is wrong with being idealistic

The revolutionaries of 2011 are demanding the democratic freedoms that millions in many other countries enjoy.
All I am saying is that for those to take root, officialdom needs to develop an entirely new outlook. And the idea of agreeing to disagree is far from foreign to Egypt.

In many other parts of the world when two men quarrel in public the crowd that gathers often encourages the men to fight.

“Go on! Give him one!”
“Great! Lay into him!"

But here an astounding non-violent spirit of conciliation prevails.

Not often, but on more than one occasion, as I walked through the city on my way to work, I came across men quarrelling vehemently and working themselves up to come to blows. As soon as the disputants reached out to grapple each other, however, men from the crowd would throw themselves between them and stop the fight

A signal example of this occurred one day in Sherif Pasha Street. Two enraged men had stripped down to their under vests and were facing off, fists raised when one suddenly turned to the crowd and shouted: “Is nobody going to stop me from bashing this chap!”

Volunteers were quick to thrust themselves between the two while I cracked up.

I pray that answers are found in this spirit that cries out for conciliatory—rather than forceful---intervention and that it eventually permeates political debate.