We were on our journey back to Cairo airport where our flight would be delayed by the simple mechanic of a very small door through which to send too many people bound for too many flights scheduled to leave at the same time.A sight caught my eye. Many sights caught my eye, in fact, because it's that kind of city, but this one caught my eye because it was so out of place.
Three men were painting railings by the side of the road. The railings, for the many miles of their length, were a battleship grey.
As the fierce sun set and the potholed main road was bumper to bumper with mangled Nissans and de-mirrored mopeds, the men were painting the railings a municipal green.
Not particularly noteworthy, except a tour of Cairo would accord with a view that this was a bustling, energetic city that teetered just this side of anarchy.
Indeed, not too far away an encampment in Tahir Square embodied that tension.
To paint railings in the midst of this mayhem, of tumble-down houses, feral dogs, waste-choked waterways, pollutant-filled air and jallopy-jammed roads seemed both futile and wonderful.
There were so many jobs to do - build houses that were perpendicular, pipe water that didn't poison, for example - that a new coat seemed deliberately obtuse.
But, the journey of a thousand miles starts with a single tin of Dulux Teal Tension, I suppose.
And who am I to complain? A couple of columns back I lamented the overbearing bureaucracy that acquired unregulated arenas of our life, surrounded them with bollards and tape and filled them with the implacable rubble of clipboards and tick boxes.
Cairo is the opposite. There are no rules. Anyone does anything and, unless it violently impedes a fellow citizen, they get away with it. It works. It muddles through. There is a liberty of sorts that is invigorating.
Of course, there is also the freedom to fail catastrophically and sink into misery, so let's not romanticise poverty but also, a dollar for the knock-off onyx pyramid is hard-earned, not given.
No-one would wish the poverty, chaos, disorder and discomfort of an impoverished people on anyone. But those who were able to strive were driven, tenacious, hungry, ingenious, crafty, alive and engaged.
There is no denying the driving power of aspiration, even if that aspiration is as pitiful and unambitious as getting a bite to eat or a place to spend the night.
Of course, the free-form, safety netless, tightrope society of Egypt is no great model. It demands too much of its people and offers too little in return.
But there is no escaping the uneasy feeling that the UK isn't the model either, for opposite reasons.
Easy to be smug in Africa. Easy to be wrong too.
