About

My name is Nick Rowlands, and I’m a writer and editor based in Cairo. I’ve lived here since 2006, and have worked as a tour leader, EFL teacher, Managing Editor of The Croc (a Cairo city guide), and Cairo Local Expert for NileGuide (an interactive trip planning website).

I’m currently Editor of Matador Abroad – part of the Matador Network – and Contributing Editor to BETA Magazine – the new print magazine from Matador. I also produce video news packages for Reuters.

This blog is… a work in progress. Still. Even though I started it back in February 2010. If you poke around the site, you’ll notice a few things. 1 – I’m the world’s laziest blogger. 2 – The first five posts were uploaded within days of launching the site. Yep, they’d already been written. In a few cases, years before. So I suppose that might make me even lazier than the world’s laziest blogger. 3 – Most of the posts are about Egypt in one form or another.

Point 3 is easy to explain: I live here. (And before you ask – nope. Fate pitched me a curve-ball, and I managed to miss the revolution. Not that it’s finished. Whatever “it” is.) And in case you care, Delicious Chaos is how I’ve always thought of Egypt in general, and Cairo in particular. I believe it also refers to life in general, and – with my conceited hat on – my life in particular.

Points 1 and 2 are harder. Call it laziness, busyness, unwillingness…to spend all my time behind a computer screen, or to put out words I’m not 100% happy with (not that I ever am, but that’s a different story). Call it an ongoing evolution and yet-to-be-resolved crisis in my writing aims and interests. Or in my life.

Fuck it, call it laziness.

This is the third About page I’ve attempted over the last year-and-a-half. The first was pretentious crap; the second was a different flavour of pretentious crap, garnished with meaningless promises of the will-do-better kind. This one, well, this one is me throwing my hands up and admitting that for now, I still don’t know. I don’t know how the site will develop. I don’t know if it will develop. For now it’s on hold. I’m sorry.

All that said, I am open to feedback, and to ideas for collaboration. I’m also available for article commissions on life and travel in Egypt. Nothing like a good old deadline to help you batter down writer’s block.

See you at About part IV.

[Quick note on photos: If I've lifted the feature image from Creative Commons, there will be an image source link at the bottom of the post. If I've used one of my (inevitably crappy) pictures, there won't be.]