Eliza Carthy -- the most beautiful voice in Britain

You're supposed to remember fateful events -- the first time you fell in love, the first time you won $50 at poker, where you were when Princess Diana died.

But I don't remember how or when I first heard Eliza Carthy sing -- even tho, in many ways, this had a more important influence on my life than any of the major upheavals mentioned above.

All I remember is that, some time in 1998, I found myself in Cairo, Egypt, in a small slightly rundown flat in a slightly rundown neighbourhood a stone's throw from the Nile, trying for the first time in my life to make a living by writing, and with only a PowerBook, a black Korean-made boombox (this was in the days before everything was made in China), and Eliza's double CD Red Rice for company.

All through the two years I lived in Egypt, the memory of home for me was inextricably mixed up with my friend Mansoor upstairs, who had moved from Brixton the same time I left Newcastle, the first creaking steps of the internet that kept me in touch with family and friends (over dial up, and in black and white), and the sound reverberating round the tiled rooms in time with the muezzin and the barrow boys outside of the woman with the most beautiful voice in England...