After 40 days in the wilderness, there is no better way of rejoining the outside world than via a comfortable guest house in one of the oldest places of continuous Christian worship

I finished my recent 40-day retreat in the Sinai Desert with a night in the guest house of St Catherine’s Monastery. I needed a sort of buffer zone between the vast silence of the desert and the messy noise of the airport at Sharm El Sheik – enhanced by the fact that my flight left at 3 a.m. and I had to change in Istanbul, because the British government has banned direct flights to South Sinai for the last three years (a disaster for the region and its people, as it has led to the collapse of the tourist industry).

Also, I badly wanted a shower; I should think this retreat was the longest time I have not washed my hair in my whole life! And because St Catherine’s Monastery – or, to give it its official name, The Sacred Monastery of the God-Trodden Mount Sinai – is an extra-ordinary and lovely place to be.

Outside the guest rooms is a terrace garden where there were roses in full flower – the desert blossoming – and I could dry my hair in the sunshine overlooking the monks’ vegetable garden and the fierce granite mountains. St Catherine’s is a very holy place, considered sacred by Islam and Judaism as well as by Christians. In fact, it must be the only Orthodox monastery, and perhaps the only Christian monastery, to have a mosque (still occasionally used) within its enclosure. And it has a good claim, although it is challenged by the Coptic monasteries of Sts Anthony and Paul on the other side of the Red Sea, to be the oldest Christian site in continuous use in the world.