A very wet Wimbledon recently got over. The organizers must be wondering if more of their tennis courts should have a retractable roof like the one recently added to the centre show court after years of typically British controversy over changing anything that has always been done in a certain way. As it is, this summer, there would have been very little tennis at all had it not been for at least one court where rain couldn’t stop play. It is somehow inevitable that our idiosyncratic climate should have provided the driest spring since records began, only for the deluge to arrive as summer and the summer sporting calendar reach their zenith. Our best British hope for a Wimbledon win after so many years remains Andy Murray, who, one imagines, must have looked upon the championship fortnight as one of the worst of the year as national expectations once more fell so heavily on his shoulders as to weigh him down.

I have been in Egypt for ten days and seem not to have missed much in my absence. The famous music festival of Glastonbury also took place with thousands of fans camping miserably in several flooded fields in Somerset for the sake of bands, including Coldplay and U2. U2’s image has been getting a bit of a bashing after revelations that the Irish band and its frontman, Bono, the very public human rights activist often known as Saint Bono, have, like the rest of the super rich, been guilty of tax avoidance through tax havens — so, not so saintly, after all.

Financial matters, mostly Greek, otherwise dominated the headlines over little of note on the domestic front. The prime minister has further reduced current interest in Westminster with the announcement that he will not be reshuffling his cabinet — a regular for storms in press teacups at approximately this time of year. I can’t help but feel he is right to keep people in their posts for a longer time, although the civil servants who run the various government departments may well favour new brooms that lack experience so that they can get on with business as usual without too much interference from their ministers.

In Egypt, people are thrilled with their revolution, although hardpressed to give a coherent answer to the question of what might come next or indeed who exactly is currently governing the country. Friends who have lived in Cairo for more than 20 years believe that Hosni Mubarak’s departure will change very little in reality the way in which the country is run. Plenty of his more faceless cohorts remain in the shadows, in positions of potential power, although no one individual has appeared in the spotlight.

Concerns over Islamic extremism based on the high profile of the Muslim Brotherhood during the anti-Mubarak movement have died down in the face of student union elections in Alexandria and Cairo where the Muslim Brotherhood gained only small percentages of the vote in coalition with socialist and other groups. It seems that most Egyptians fear religious rule would be more repressive than even Mubarak and his ilk; they were shocked, too, by the outbreak of religious violence in tandem with the revolution that resulted in the destruction of both Coptic churches and Islamic shrines. In the end, the highest hopes seem to be for some sort of a coalition of the secular and Sufi movements that are both anti-extremist and tolerant to other religions and shades of religious opinion. If a Christian Democrat coalition can govern Germany, why not a Muslim Democrat coalition in Egypt?

Meanwhile life goes on; in the countryside people still live much as they have for the thousands of years since their lives were first illustrated on the highly decorated walls of the tombs of kings, queens, and, the most revealing, on those of nobles and ordinary artisans with their painted scenes of daily life. Village life is still, as in India, dominated by family, seasons, the land and small-scale economics. The Nile is still the lifeblood of the land, the great river that feeds a country of year round bright blue skies and sun, with almost no rain otherwise to water the green strips of land and the towns and villages that give way after a short distance from the river to endless desert sands. The Aswan High Dam has changed the flow of the river forever, so inundations of the land are no longer a yearly event. But man’s greater control over nature has not reduced its role as the essence of existence in the country.

For those involved in tourism — and there are many in a country where Thomas Cook, to all intents and purposes, invented the package tour, let alone where history is so long that even the Romans were tourists at the ancient Egyptian sites — life is hard at the moment. A few months of greater stability should bring the travellers back en masse in the winter season, but in the heat of a post-revolution summer, numbers are dramatically down, and while it is sheer bliss for anyone prepared to bake in solitary enjoyment on the hot stones of almost deserted temples, the souvenir touts are suffering. There is a half-hearted air about the endless offers of camel rides and carved scarabs for sale and a sense among shopkeepers and foodsellers that it is best just to give up, enjoy the pervasive sense of freedom that Mubarak’s departure has engendered, tighten the belt, drink tea and drift with the smoke of a liquorice-smelling shisha until times get better.

As for me, I can’t help revelling in travel in the aftermath of an upheaval whether natural or manmade. Egypt recently encouraged further planning for trips to Syria, Yemen, where I have always wanted to go, and who knows where else in the Middle East once the dust of the present revolution has settled just a little bit. There are few really hidden places in the world these days and the best one can hope for and enjoy in popular places is a reduction in the number of visitors caused either by extreme weather or human conditions. Fewer fellow foreigners also means greater opportunity to meet local people, one of the true delights of travel.

I have been in a deserted Libya in the days before there was any tourist infrastructure to speak of; in a deserted Angkor Vat as soon as possible after the Khmer Rouge disappeared to forest and mountain hideouts, although a driver offered a visit to a Khmer Rouge camp, but I think the road was flooded; in Vietnam when the Imperial Tombs echoed with emptiness and an ancient royal servant was prevailed upon to unlock doors and gates; and in a few other places made unpopular by extreme weather, manmade mayhem or thoroughly uncomfortable conditions. The alternative, what our grandparents would have thought of as standard travel, increasingly involves queues for every exhibition or major site or booking in advance to get into the great galleries of Europe, where you are given a two-hour time slot at best and woe betide you if you miss your moment.

The worst part of going away anywhere, even for as little as ten days, is the piled high desk on your return and the sense of dislocation from normal life, however moderated by constant internet and telephone connections in all but the most remote places. O well, I am in London for a while now and wet tennis was hardly a distraction from the pressing requirements of my office — although a cheap flight to Sanaa might be tempting.