For those with a sharp eye, and who care about such things, you will notice many things about GSC that have now changed. You see the old kennels, which were destroyed to make room for the ridiculous amount of cars now allowed in the club. Speaking of cars, the clip opens with my family's old 1954 Humber Hawk Mark VI, which is the car I learned to drive on. You don't see any mosques on the premises, or fast food concession stands, which deeply compromised any remaining elegance of the GSC. The Ahly Club had not yet further mutilated the race track at the far area of the club by the "borg"; there is no October 6 Bridge to ruin the skyline over the already reduced (thanks to what we referred to as Nadi el Shabasheb: elitism, then, as now, was rampant) golf course. There is no small pool behind the diving tower in the new pool, and no chains to prevent access to the balcony of the building that housed the pool's pumps and filtering system. You can see, briefly, the ice cream stand that was at the top of the stairs leading to the new pool; this shop is no more, despite the fact that it carried a fantastic pistachio-flavored ice cream. There is no sign in the distance of an enclosed track with fencing, which destroyed the great lawn in front of the open air stadium, and you glimpse the old carousel in the Jardin des Enfants, now unrecognizable, particularly as the ancient Banyan trees which many of my generation climbed to play Truth, Dare, or Consequence, are no more. For those who are used to what the club membership looks like today, the appearance of the club members during that era is probably unnerving: it is the Egyptian elite of the time, most of whom no doubt would have found the ethos of the new class of Egyptians that soon replaced them grotesque, and it demonstrates that there was a possibility for an Egypt that allowed for the easy intermixing of the sexes without burying grown women in swaddling. Finally, I call this clip Fear in the Snooker Club, a reference of course to Waguih Ghali's excellent Beer in the Snooker Club, published in 1964 (I still have my father's first edition). In the early 90s, the Gezira Sporting Club no longer served Stella, in those famous frosted aluminum ice buckets, or any alcohol for that matter: a sign that confirmed the reality that the Gezira Club as it was now had died, and that the suffocating religiosity that permeates Egypt today, which often seeks to impose its particular, myopic view of the world on everything around it, was already in ascendance, even in the club that I grew up in, where I once knew everyone by name, and where everyone knew me.
