So, dear reader, this is another old and interesting, and surprisingly funny, cookery book – and it is long read of what the author wrote, so dip in and out – think stealing a leftover out of the fridge now and then, a snack to return to.

Well it was interesting to me anyway. But if you are about to heat up a Waitrose’s curry for Friday night’s supper, or make yourself a fish finger sandwich (nothing wrong with either of those), you might want to get on with that.

If you are still with me, and in case you need reminding/informing, a chafing dish is basically a metal dish which has a mechanism to keep food warm.

If you are old enough, think predecessor to the hostess trolly – and who isn’t ( if you are old enough) now thinking Alison Steadman in Abigail’s Party – start hearing Demis Roussos everyone.

Anyway, this is well before any of that.

But back to basics.

Modern chafing dishes are for keeping cooked food warm. They are not going to reach a temperature to cook, nor should food be kept at lukewarm temperatures for too long lest bugs start breeding and poison you and your guests.

But the very jolly cookery writer of 1905, Frank Schloesser had other ideas and to be fair, what he describes might be a chafing dish with knobs on.

Just to make things clear, he has a name for his, Chaffinda:

Though, again in the spirit of making sure that any reader doesn’t get the wrong idea, using an asbestos tray over a chafing dish flame to make toast is really not a good idea.

It turns out on close inspection, that even for enthusiast Frank, the chafing dish is not always an alternative to cooking. Quite a lot of the recipes require you to have pre-cooked meat, vegetables and other stuff.

So, think of it this way – as he does. When you are returning from the theatre with your friends, here is a way to have something ‘cooked’, on the table, for a late supper, relying on what you (or someone in your pay) has cooked before and you can heat up into a tasty, light morsel.

It is rare that a cookery book makes me laugh but this one did.

He is a man who thinks eating less is good, some condiments (mayonnaise) are an abomination in the sight of some god or another, and things should be done in precise and small quantities – a walnut of butter, three chives, three drops of tabasco……

He is not a man to think that a recipe unlike the food, plain and simple, needs nothing more – Frank is a man with history and anecdote as garnishes.

I will just leave you with some more tasty morsels…….

I educated myself ( a bit ) on holiday but there is no need for you to do the same and, of course, indeed you may not need educating as much as I did.

There is not much I can promise in terms of levity, it turns out this part of the world doesn’t have much of that.

So, we went on an excursion from our luxury bubble of a hotel resort, to see ‘the mosques, churches and old town of Sharm.’

Well….

Sharm el Sheik dates from the 1980s and its history and politics explain why.

Suffice it to say that the excursion meant we saw a large but I have to say ugly, church finished in 2010, and a mosque finished in 2017 with an ‘outdoor’ market which was a series of tacky tourist shops overlooked by a fake waterfall.

Enough said on that.

We also saw kilometres of low level apartment blocks which are there to house the some 70,000 workers from all over Egypt who make life so easy for the tourist.

Now, according to Wikipedia the population of the city is about 73,000 and we were told this immigrant workforce numbered 70,000 – yes, that leaves 3,000 locals.

And the tourist numbers?

‘In 1976, tourism was a focal point of the Five Year Plan of the Egyptian government, and 12% of the national budget was allocated to upgrading state-owned hotels, establishing a loan fund for private hotels, and upgrading infrastructure (including road, rail, and air connectivity) for major tourist centres along with the coastal areas.’ Wikipedia

Things moved on apace and the number of hotel/resorts increased from three in 1982 to ninety-one in 2000 and, we were told, just over 300 in 2023.

Between 1982 and 2000 ‘guest nights’ went from 16,000 to 5.1m.

In 2010, the then peak tourist number, there were 14.7 million tourists in Egypt as a whole.

But revolution, a few terrorist attacks and of course Covid did huge damage to the tourist industry with numbers in 2020 down to just 3.5 million.

In 2023, 14.9m tourists visited the country.

Enough statistics.

So, I was wondering how Sharm El Sheik came into existence as such and overwhelmingly tourist place.

Nothing here dates back before the 1980s and precious little is even that old. It is all geared around us visitors.

The six lane highways, the airport, the immaculate compounds/resorts with desert rubble everywhere else.

Sitting in the minibus I wondered how this unprepossessing bit of land ( the sea mind you, is blue and turquoise and very lovely) came to be such a massive tourist town.

See sentence above, I can hear you say.

But this wasn’t a lovely little fishing village around which tourism grew, this was boom development.

And boom development on traditional Bedouin land. Now, I may not see it as very attractive but I am pretty sure the Bedouin may beg to differ.

So, Sharm ( as we get to call it) is at the bottom of Sinai – which is turn is the non-African bit of Egypt, bordered, not least, by Israel, also Syria and Saudi Arabia.

Its strategic importance meant a small fishing outpost was transformed into an Egyptian naval base.

In 1956 during the Suez Crisis, it was conquered by Israel and then returned to the Egyptians in 1957 with an added UN peacekeeping force in place.

Ten years later President Nasser ordered them to leave and that triggered the Six Day War with Israel who again occupied the peninsular.

In 1982 there was a peace treaty and Israel withdrew, dismantling all their settlements except the one in Sharm El Sheik.

So, the Egyptian government who already had its eye on tourist dollars, pounds, roubles, and more ,started making life easy for developers.

In 2017, the first group of Israelis visited the more popular tourist attractions with the aid of strong security. It had been 18 months since any group of Israeli tourists had visited Egypt. Wikipedia ( I am not sure when that was written but you can bet your bottom shekel, there aren’t Israeli tourists here now.

You can and many millions do, spend a very pleasant time on holiday in Sharm El Sheik without knowing any of this, without thinking about any of it. 

And I wouldn’t blame you but there is a bit of me thinking there should be just a smattering of knowledge about the historical and human hinterland which makes it all possible.

Lesson over.

We had assumed that on our holiday we would meet people like us – semi-retired and taking a lucky break to the sun away from the miserable British weather.

Well, there were lots of people taking the break but they were not all like us – young couples, couples with small children, couples of friends, family groups …….. and not many of them were British.

Not that that would have mattered but getting to meet people – if you don’t have kids to pull adults together – turns out to be hard on this holiday.

For example, the hotel’s restaurant was not conducive to mixing. It was a rather vast, airy room but as it was made of marble and stone echoey and noisy.

Think posh marble canteen with a seriously extensive buffet. 

We have so far spent a lot of time talking to each other.

On our boat trip, we met a lovely family. He was an award-winning Indian restaurant owner, and he and I talked about what spices he used to make just the right sauce for scallops or venison.

His wife was a primary school teacher and we talked about their Bangladeshi parents’ roots, how she was bringing up the children with their traditional family values, and also how she was making sure their children knew they had to grow up and get their life’s path sorted, so they could do work which helped other people.

I asked if customs and ways of thinking were changing with the generations and she said, ’not much’.

(It reminded me of someone ( an Indian) I heard speak once who said that the 1960s and 1970s immigrants to Britain brought with them the values of the time when they left India or Bangladesh or wherever.

Some of those customs changed over time back in the home country but tended to ossify in the immigrant community.)

We also talked to our excursion guide and the hotel barman, both of course, very nice young men with very good English.

So, as I said in a previous piece, no one in Sharm is from here.

Of course not just the thousands of tourists, but also everyone who works here from cleaners to cooks, to gardeners, to coach drivers, to waiters, to shop keepers to pool lifeguards, from spa staff to reception staff.

They are all young Egyptian men away from home.

(Inside the resorts/compounds, all is immaculate and very pretty but outside the perimeter walls, things are mainly just rock and no one seems to mind/bother.

This is just next to our hotel and you can nip out through a gate to it or along the beach. I think it might be a place where off duty staff can hang out together and have some time away from the guests out of uniform, not having to smile at every passing guest, and just relax. I might of course be wrong.

I know there is another town of worker accommodation – of course there is because there is a large town’s worth of staff to accommodate.

Mahmoud was our lovely excursion guide.

( I am not identifying anyone without their permission here because many Egyptians seems remarkably unimaginative when naming their sons – our hotel’s staff name badges suggest that most are called Mahmoud, Muhammed , Yousef or Hussein.)

He told me that people here work on average three months seven days a week, get about two weeks off and then back to work.

There is no overtime so in the summer he gets about 4 hour’s sleep a night at really busy times.

His rota includes being in charge of transfers from the airport, camel ride trips, boat trips, trips around the old town to see churches and mosques etc etc.

He speaks English, French, some Italian and a little German and his nickname is Mahmoud French to distinguish hime from all his fellow Mahmouds in excursion company.

He earns £100 per month.

He like everyone else in this place relies on tips to make a halfway decent wage.

‘Its our culture,’ he said.

We have been asking about the tipping protocol – and it is a complex business.

We were advised to bring lots of £5 notes by a Sharm el Sheik old hand. 

We didn’t bring enough it seems, as they are much more popular than the equivalent in Egyptian pounds.

I was told clearly that for our room cleaner you gave him ( of course it was a him) some money at the start of the holiday and at the end.

You had to hand it in person because he would never pick up any money from your room even if you had packed and left.

You tip the barman at the end of your holiday, likewise the waiter who has looked after you and your table for the majority of your holiday and it is tactful to sit in the same seating area for meals so that there is one waiter who knows he is likely to get a tip rather than sitting in a different place every night and not getting to know and therefore, tipping anyone.

I didn’t know what happens about the many gardeners or other ‘invisible’ staff like the kitchen staff so I asked at reception if there was a tip box which could then be divvied up.

And no there isn’t.

You get to learn a lot when you don’t have ‘people like us’ to talk to, and very instructive it is.

One of the things I like about working in an Oxfam bookshop is the fact that you never know what is going to be donated.

(Mind you it was rather a surprise when a woman came up to the till and asked if we take books – mmm, yes otherwise we would not be a bookshop at all….’Well, lots of charity shops don’t take books these days, you know,’ she said.)

I am convinced if you wait long enough a book on every subject under the sun will pass through our hands – we have recently had a small book on the history of barbed wire and another on Estonian lace knitting patterns just by way of example.

But there are books of which I will have handled hundreds over the years – thankfully the stream of Jeremy Clarkson’s has dried up, but there are many, many regulars which come in with such regularity they are old friends.

We get bouts of best sellers – about two years after they have become popular – Eleanor Ferrante for example, and the once very popular Fifty Shades of Grey – there was one Oxfam bookshop which made a child’s fort out of spare copies of that.

Don’t get those hardly at all now. 

Many of our books come from people downsizing, or moving, or from adult children clearing their parents’ house and that means we get collections – the cricket mad father-in-law’s, or aged travel guides to far flung places once visited, or the complete oeuvre of John Grisham.

And every week or so we have to change the window displays to keep our shop looking good.

So, with no ability to order any books, or even know what is going to come through the door, we are mothers of invention, making do, lateral thinking, etc.

I had what I thought was rather a good idea. 

In the coming months we will be doing a window display on travel – we keep donated Rough Guides because although dated a) the covers are attractive and b) whilst hotels and restaurants will change over time, monuments and natural wonders do not.

We also have an old oak table in the window and I thought, to compliment the travel guides and travel writing in the window, I would do a table on fictional journeys:

Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, Murder on the Orient Express, Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, Space Odyssey and indeed, The Odyssey, Huckleberry Finn, Around the World in 80 Days, Alice in Wonderland ( though that might have to be kept back because I am planning a table based on the Mad Hatter’s tea party.)

We could have Robinson Crusoe, Life of Pie, On The Road, The Time Machine, Journey to the Centre of the World, Canterbury Tales, Treasure Island, Swallows and Amazons, The Phantom Tollbooth, Gulliver’s Travels, The Wizard of Oz, His Dark Materials trilogy.

Well, you get the idea and indeed I was rather chuffed by my idea. Not least because these are not rare books on the whole.

We always have at least some of these books but when I went to look I found one copy of Gulliver’s Travels and a colleague suggested Passage to India. 

Now that is not a book we have very often but in the space of two days had three (albeit a bit dog eared) copies.

No Life of Pie though. We have had hundreds of them and always seem have one on the shelves.

No Canterbury Tales, no Treasure Island, only one of the Philip Pullman’s, no Orient Express, indeed not much at all.

That, dear reader, is what comes of having a good idea and having to learn patience.

Likewise, a friend contacted me looking for an old book on botany with lots of colour plates but in bad condition because her mother-in-law wanted to get such a book and have it professionally re-bound for her botany-mad grand-daughter.

Now we often get these. The illustrations a lovely but the plain board covers are not enticing.

They are often half falling apart. I must have handled hundreds of them.

Did we have one, no of course not.

Likewise again, I have dispensed with more Dickens than I have had hot dinners.

The success of the (great read) Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver and a re-writing of David Copperfield means that we have had a good dozen requests for the Dickens original.

Bleak House, Pickwick Papers, Great Expectations of course we have those but we are a Copperfield-free bookshop at the moment.