In Khartoum, you could get decent food, whether cheap or expensive. One might go to one of numerous outdoor restaurants. Or to the airport restaurant, which had the disadvantage of the VC10s arriving and departing (extremely noisy but efficient British jets of the time), but the advantage that you could get pretty good ‘flimineo’ and a glass of wine or Camel beer. ‘Flimineo’ was the rendering of ‘fillet mignon’. The beer was called ‘Abu Jamal’ (this was grammatically questionable, since ‘birra’ is a feminine noun, so that arguably the beer should have been called ‘Umm Jamal’ — literally mother of camel — rather than ‘Abu Jamal’ — father of camel; in fact, ‘abu’ and ‘umm’ can be used to mean ‘characterized by’, so that I was known as ‘abu ’l-kadous’, since I smoked a pipe, and ‘kadous’ means ‘pipe’.)
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