The wrong trousers.

Abstract

Admittedly, I did not look like a doctor. For one thing, I had just spent ten days on the Nile in a felucca with eight fellow travellers. (Feluccas are primitive sailing boats that look highly romantic in travel brochures but lose much of their allure on closer acquaintance). For another, when we reached Luxor, I had been struck by one of those acute delusional shopping disorders that so often afflict tourists, and purchased a pair of baggy cotton trousers with broad black and yellow stripes. I wore these for the rest of the journey south, so that by the time we boarded the overnight train from Aswan to Cairo I looked more like a dishevelled and overgrown bumble bee than a doctor. ‘Is there a doctor on the train?’ The message came over the public address system in Arabic, then French and then English. Aswan was a couple of hours behind us. I felt a strong a desire to deny my profession, but in the past two weeks I had already attended most of my fellow holidaymakers for the usual unpleasant ailments that go with so-called ‘adventure travel’, and they all knew what I did …