Mangoes, Mubarak and the fed up majority

The City has cooled down a few degrees, thank God. The first couple of days I was here were unbearable; it was as if the whole city had been covered by a giant cloche and heated by the sun until the air became like tar, a viscous mass of fumes, heat and muck.

Now, the place has taken on a pleasant, less sweaty feel, and providing you take four or five showers a day, you can stay fairly comfortable, especially if you mostly sit around all day, as I have done.

I am living a very pleasant life - I wake up at noon or one and take a cool shower followed by a cup of sooty black coffee laced with Cardamon. I do an errand or two - I'm just waiting for Monday's batch of favorable emails from editors at the moment (ya reet ya rubbi), so there's nothing much to be getting on with really - then I return to sit in the shade, eat sweet mangoes and discuss politics with a Greek maths teacher.

It's not so comfortable for the average citizen, of course. Life here is hard; as I talk to journalists, politikers and people in the street, the same issues arise time and again. Every day is a struggle for ordinary people; a struggle for bread, a fight for the essentials of life.

The Economist claims that the nidham ("regime" - the word "government" is too gentle a term for this brutal bunch) are pressing ahead with economic "reforms" in the belief that strong growth and an improvement in living conditions will reduce the attractions of fundamentalist Islam, the western-dominated government's biggest fear. Yet nobody here believes that growth will "trickle down" in any real way to the cigarette salesmen, cafe waiters and shoe polishers on the streets of Cairo. The nidham has had so many years to learn its trade, that of siphoning off billions of dollars of American aid, taxes from the Suez canal and income from tourism, that little seems likely to fall through Mubarak's tight fingers and into the pot of Ahmed Bloggs selling sugar cane juice on Talaat Harb.

So the majority, the millions who benefit nothing from the Mubarak tribe's alliance with the US State Department, carry doggedly on with life. Prices rise, wages fall, the heat causes power cuts and incompetent officials accidentally poison the tap water, killing fifteen people. Health insurance scandals hit the headlines, but nothing is likely to change just because the newspapers complain about it. The Egyptian pond is too stagnant for that, and the scum at the top is likely to stay there for a long time to come.

One guy of around my age - at 24, the median average Egyptian according to the CIA factbook - told me yesterday that if the American government were to offer citizenship to Egyptians in return for joining the American army and fighting against their Arab brothers in Iraq, the US embassy in Cairo would be overwhelmed with applicants. Why? Because people need the money. People are sick of Egypt, sick of the regime and they are desperate to find enough cash, either to live on, or to leave.

It could all be so much better! People here are so friendly and genuine, once you get beyond the superficial annoyances, but they have no faith in any change for the better. They simply want to be able to live, to eat, to pay the rent and perhaps have a bit left over for a trip to Mersa Matrouh in the summer. That is a million miles from reality for most Egyptians right now. The weather may have changed, but the likelihood of political reform and a revival in the economic fortunes of the majority seems very slim for the time being.