A LONG AND OCCASIONALLY BUMPY DRIVE OVERNIGHT AS WE CAME BACK OVER THE ROCKIES AGAIN. I WOKE UP AT EIGHT THIRTY AS WE PULLED INTO BOISE. MIKE AND ’LISH LOOK TIRED AND THEY ARE TAKEN OFF TO A HOTEL TO RECOVER. It’s an intermittently rainy day and we hang out on the warm bus watching soccer and making porridge. There isn’t anywhere else to go. Jen parades around in her pajamas and silk dressing gown, becoming increasingly frustrated by requests for her family arrangements tomorrow. Her people are coming out in force in Spokane.
This is a tough stage of the tour for us. Five dates in a row, each separated by a long drive, but today in Boise is the real challenge. The good news is we are sold out. The bad news is that we are playing a cinema. They are building a temporary stage but there are no wings, no dressing rooms, and no depth to the stage so we can’t bring out the twelve-foot-high lyrics for the “Bruces’ Philosophers Song.” Still, we are a well-oiled machine by now and our gang are in there solving the problems. We plump for handing out lyric sheets rather than cutting the Bruces’ sing-along, and tonight we will be using the buses for dressing rooms.
The temporary stage worked great and made a very intimate space to play. I like the audience that close; it’s great for comedy. You can get a laugh from just raising an eyebrow. It’s far less exhausting than the huge two-thousand-seaters where you have to really work hard. The Egyptian, as you might expect, had a Nile-themed interior, decorated with brightly colored birds and sideways-facing ladies in three dimensions. It had large painted columns flowering at the top into palm trees, and between these columns squatted a larger-than-life-size Pharaoh with pert golden breasts. I don’t recall ever seeing a Pharaoh with breasts before.
“Titankhamen,” said Jen wittily.
The color scheme was thoroughly authentic, as I can verify from Major Cleese’s expedition up the Nile. In the spring of 1991 a most generous John and Alyce-Faye Cleese invited a party of forty friends to celebrate their joint one hundredth birthday by going up the Nile by boat. It was the most amazing trip, with some very funny people along, including Peter Cook, Stephen Fry, and Bill Goldman, the screenwriter. We slid quietly up the ancient river at twelve miles an hour on a luxurious, flat-bottomed boat with comfortable air-conditioned bedrooms below. On the top deck was a Jacuzzi. Can you imagine sitting in warm water surrounded by bare-breasted American ladies watching the ancient and unchanging Nile slide by? Now that is the way to travel. Forget bouncing about on the back of a grouchy camel. Egypt is the Nile and we floated gently through it, between the most amazing rocks and hills, past people in brightly colored robes winnowing, an entire village flailing corn, looking like pictures from the pages of an illustrated Bible.
At sunset I would sit on deck playing guitar while the banks of the Nile slid slowly past. Each afternoon we would gather in the shade of the deck while Stephen Fry read a chapter of the British schoolboy classic Bunter on the Nile. In the evenings the great Peter Cook would hold forth in the bar, spinning fantasies of comedy out of his own brilliance. From time to time we would stop at an ancient city and go ashore with two guides who would tell us two different stories about what we were looking at. One was an authentic Egyptian guide from the Cairo Museum and the other was a New Ager and revisionist who wore authentic Hollywood Egyptologist costume complete with mustache and pith helmet. He held alternative theories of the age and significance of everything, increasingly frustrating our Egyptian guide with his wild theories—he was even banned from one or two archeological sites, where he would hide behind pillars and tell us not to listen, that they had got it all wrong. He gave lectures every evening on the boat and I felt vindicated in my choice to avoid them in order to play a selection of Beatle songs to the sunset when Stephen Fry burst out of the lecture room with a great snort of derision, cursing out loud about his latest “theory.” He had just revealed that the pyramids had been made by spaceships. I still see this man on the Discovery Channel breathlessly revealing more “discoveries.” By the end of the tour he had tried even John’s patience when he escorted them to the center of the Great Pyramid, told the local guide to leave and turn off the lights so that they might experience the silence and the darkness and then after about twenty minutes announced he had come without a flashlight. John sent him back for one, and said with glee he could hear him crawling up the tunnel, banging his head and cursing all the way.
The temples and palaces on the Nile are the most extraordinary remains on the planet. Perhaps fortuitously they have been covered in sand for centuries so that their recent excavation has left the paint as bright as when the craftsmen first applied it. You feel that the decorators have only just left although several thousand years have elapsed. But we’ve all felt that way about contractors, haven’t we?
Before leaving England, John and Alyce-Faye had organized a private after-hours trip to the British Museum, so that we could visit the antiquities, and at the end of our fantastic journey they arranged to open the Cairo Museum early, so that we could see Tutankhamen and his treasures. When I got back from Egypt, my mother, who was given to creative malapropisms, asked me if I’d seen the tomb of Carmen Tutu?