Waggish friends suggested there might be a subtle plan to be shot of me when I was invited by our travel editor to join a cruise to Egypt. But I seized the opportunity gleefully, never having previously been on a cruise or visited this country. While it did cross my mind that I might find myself filing reports from the hot spot in the less than competent fashion of, say, Evelyn Waugh’s William Boot, I felt confident that the Oxford-based company Voyages to Antiquity would not be placing passengers at risk.

Thus it turned out. Though we had been scheduled to visit the pyramids at Giza on a coach trip from Suez, a flare up of trouble in the city prompted the captain of the Aegean Odyssey to give it a miss. We sailed on up the Suez Canal — as shown in the picture — and out into the Mediterranean bound for Lebanon.

There were naturally a few grumbles from the less nervous of our shipmates, but as Captain Panagiotis Giakoumatos sagely observed the cancellation, if nothing else, supplied an excuse to visit Egypt again.

My description of our eight-day adventure (as it was for me, having joined the cruise when it had already visited Oman and Jordan) will be offered to readers in the New Year. Meanwhile, just a few unconnected thoughts on the subject suggested by the accompanying pictures.

The main one shows that Tesco culture has reached as unlikely a place as Luxor. The Yorkshire Shop offering “Tesco prices” was right outside our hotel, the Steigenberger Nile Palace. Was it a joke — like the ‘hot nuts’ and erotica display on the right, photographed near our last port of call in Cyprus? I had thought so, until I spotted what appeared to be a Tesco store — “Every little helps,” and all that — on the way out of Luxor the next day.

At the Valley of Kings, I was amused to find a significant aspect of the supermarket chain’s ethos was in place. Among the “lively offers” (© W. H. Auden) made by the many young men peddling their wares among the tombs was a “buy one, get one free” deal on guide books. I wasn’t tempted, though I could not resist a comfortable white Egyptian cotton shirt which I obtained for $7 from a teenager outside the Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut.

Though I saw no pyramids and (surprisingly, I thought) no camels, these were present and correct in one of the many pictures decorating the walls (if ships have walls) of the Aegean Odyssey. They were all the work of Alan Halliday, an artist specialising in the performing arts who now lives in the South of France. In Oxford as a student (St John’s) at a notable time for the stage, he acted with the likes of Rowan Atkinson, Richard Curtis and Tim McInnerny, and created the designs for the student revue After Eights. This was the show for which Rowan received his first rave newspaper review — from me.