Egyptian cotton memory.

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A chance reference to Egyptian cotton on TV tonight sent me on a trip back in time and conjured a life lived a long time ago. In 1969 an American friend from Greenville Ohio gave my mother a stole made of Egyptian cotton. He’d bought it in, well Egypt, on his way back from the US to where we lived half way down Africa. Now my mother was never a stole-wearing kind of person and never went to any stole-wearing places, but she was quite proud of her stole. The only time she got to wear it was on her wedding anniversary when she and my father took me and my brother to a fancy hotel for dinner - the Mount Soche in Blantyre, Malawi. It was the only posh place in town, in the entire country so everyone who was anyone went there. It was a magical night and I got to see people dancing and drinking beer at the bar. And the president was there so the atmosphere was a bit tense because if he didn’t like something about you you would be out of the country in 24 hours. That’s if you were white: if you were black you ended up in jail or in the river. We all knew not to look his way. And all that from an innocent reference to Egyptian cotton.