The Dubai stone

I had another one of those: "You know, this is a rather strange place" moments when I was arthritically lumbering around the gym this morning.

Gyms are not my natural habitat. Tapping away on a computer while slurping six cups of a tea in a row, that's more my usual comfort zone, but you learn pretty quick that the combination of home delivery takeaways, being within walking distance of every variety of restaurant under the sun and it being too hot to set foot outside for more than five minutes means that you'd better do something quick if you still want your buttocks to be able to cram into your plane seat on your trip home. It's known as the Dubai stone. 

So, several days a week I am to be found clad in lycra and ancient running shoes pounding away on the treadmill and lifting really quite pitifully small weights while being bemused by screens showing Animal Planet, CNN, MTV and the like.

After attempting some pathetic situps and staggering to my feet with my usual head rush (low blood pressure, it's a family thing) I spotted a gardener wondering past one of the building's glass doors pushing a wheelbarrow.

This is not unusual as the gym building, like many, is surrounded by lush green foliage which is tended by teams of gardeners who work for the property company Emaar.  The "this is a rather strange place" moment came when I clocked the fact that he had some kind of scarf or cloth draped over his head to protect him from the heat and he was painfully thin, as are many of the manual workers from the sub continent that you see tending gardens or working on construction sites.

"Bizarre," I thought to myself.  "Here I am, having paid for the privelege of trying to burn off my excess calories in this air conditioned environment when I could save myself a lot of hassle if I ate fewer pies and made the effort to brave the heat and go for a walk.  That chap probably gets paid in a month what my three-month gym membership cost, if he's lucky.  The last thing on his mind would be trying to burn calories, just getting enough fluids onboard to survive the heat and enough food in his belly later so he has the strength to lift that wheelbarrow and enough money left over to send a bit home to his family. I am, in fact, a ridiculous person."

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Life here is strange, people. It can be really very nice and easy thanks to the cheap labour represented by my wheelbarrow pushing chum but you're constantly reminded of what a priveleged position you're in as a  European ex-pat as opposed to a poor migrant worker.  I do worry that I will stop noticing people like that gardener if I stay here too long. I hope not.

No woman, no buy

I crawled out of a doomladen weekend of news of the deaths of dozens of people in Norway in a terror attack by some right wing nutter and the inevitable but still miserable demise of Amy Winehouse searching for something to convince me that yes, life in the dust bowl still goes on as normal and the (immensely fierce and really quite burny) sun will continue to shine. Thanks to the Gulf's, erm, most peculiar news source, I found it.  

Any news story that incorporates a play on words into a Bob Marley song title for its headline is alright by me so gold star to my beloved Emirates 24/7, purveyor of fine headlines since, well, probably a few years ago.  

But there's more than just the headline to love in this story about shopkeepers sneakily taking advantage of discounts at the new Union Coop in Al Barsha, Dubai.  The very idea that taking a woman with them will stop these men buying up huge amounts of fruits, vegetables and household goods in order to sell them on at a profit, that a woman will be way too honest to countenance such behaviour tickled me a great deal.  

I am also now entertaining a host of mental images. 1. These men dressing up in saris or abayas, shaving their beards and donning wigs and makeup, such will be their desperation to profit from the Coop's generous discounting. Or perhaps, not because they're not best keen on cross dressing in Dubai.  2. They could send their wives or sisters down there to buy half a ton of onions and tomatos and innocently tell the manager that they're having a really, really big dinner party.  3.  Grab an innocent woman shopper at the doors of the Coop, bribe her and convince her to accompany you on your supermarket discount sweep.  Marvellous stuff. 

I applaud them for taking the really rather forward thinking step of banning men from the store rather than, say, stop people buying up goods in large amounts. No arguments about the reasoning for buying 20 sacks of spuds, just ban the man. Awesome.

They've well and truly got their message across that the Coop is offering really quite massive discounts.  If they weren't relatively innocent in the dark arts of press releases and PR in this part of the world, I'd suspect a publicity stunt.  Oh no.  Perhaps they're not, perhaps the protested innocence is all part of the clever plan to suck you in with their genius PR and I've fallen for it. Argh! *Black hole opens up as the universe collapses in on itself and Sand Witch melts in manner of Wicked Witch of the West in Wizard of Oz.*   

Beneath the veil

I was surprised by this article which I found on the Gulf News this morning as it's by a young Emirati woman who nearly expresses discontent at feeling compelled to wear the abaya.  Expressing discontent isn't really the thing in the Emirates, at least, not that I've seen in the English language media anyway, unless you're a conservative politician quoted expressing muted complaints about the amount of foreigners "coming over here, taking our jobs" (which shows there's nothing new under the sun), or the decline in the standards of behaviour of the youth.

She says she likes wearing it but obviously feels a bit fed up about it when she sees pictures of her mother at her age dressed in Western-style clothes.  She also hints at a double life, the one you live with your parents and the one you live with your friends.

Women's dress in the Emirates is something that is often on my mind because walking around Dubai Mall, which is the equivalent of walking around your local town centre, particularly in summer when it's too hot to be outside, I've noticed more and more women wearing the niqab or face covering.

It's also been in the local news recently that the number of visitors from other Gulf states has risen dramatically thanks to bargain-rate hotel rooms in Dubai.  It could therefore be that they are visitors from stricter states like Saudi Arabia, because, as I've said before, many of Dubai's young Emirati women tend to be beautifully made up with their veils pushed back to show elaborate hair styles and wearing ginormous designer heels.

In contrast, I've noticed some of the younger women still in their abayas but have thrown off their head coverings and stuffed them into their bags.  I think I would do the same if I knew I was going to be walking out into 40+degree heat or if I had made any kind of effort with my hair. It must be the Emirati equivalent of rolling up your standard issue knee-length unflattering box pleated school skirt. 

It's July in Dubai so get your warm clothes out

I haven't gone mad but since the temperature has crept above 40degrees (46 today, 45 tomorrow and 41 on Tuesday) I've had to get the warm clothes out.  The reason being that our block's air conditioning seems to have been cranked right up to cope with the heat.

It's particularly a problem in the late evenings. The humidity ratchets right up after dark has fallen meaning that it still feels incredibly hot even though the temperature's probably dropped a bit. The air con seems to respond to the humidity outside rather than the heat so it keeps on pumping deep freeze into the flat. The other night I had to put on trousers, jumper and pashmina to keep warm.  I also put on socks for the first time since I came here other than when going for a run or at the gym.

I resorted to opening the patio door wide this morning to let some warmth in.  The heat is such that when you stand in front of the open door, it's a bit like being in front of an open oven.  A very odd feeling indeed.  At least the sand storms seem to have stopped for now.  There was a period last week when I felt like I was in Lawrence of Arabia because of the grains of sand blowing into my eyes when I nipped out for a pint of milk.

Maybe that's why some of the women here favour the transluscent, completely covering, black veils over the niqab face coverings which have a slit which leave the eyes exposed.

Still, at least I've got Ramadan to look forward to. Thankfully, it starts the day after my birthday this year.  There have already been warnings in the newspapers that people seen eating or drinking in public during fasting hours will be given a first warning and if they are caught again, they will be prosecuted.  My plan is to stay indoors and out of the way of all that, which is pretty much what I've been doing since the hot weather started anyway.

My farewell to the NoW

Here is my take on the News of the World debacle which was published in the Khaleej Times today. 

I promise I will stop banging on about this shortly because I realise it's of limited interest to you lot but for obvious reasons it's been taking up rather a lot of my thinking time during the past few days. It's not a particularly good scan but I'm sure it's good enough for the two or three of your that may be interested. 

Anyway, despite the fact that Rebekah Brooks is now claiming there is "worse to come" on this, I do still think that it's a bad thing to close the News of the World, not least because it will put good people who have never been near a phone hack out of work.

Well, we didn't expect that, did we?

I have to confess, I had an evening of feeling pretty miserable earlier this week about the News of the World scandal. 

As the week's gone on, I have started to feel that when we return home from our time in Dubai, for me it will be to an unrecognisable media landscape with far tighter privacy laws than I'd been used to in the UK thanks to a surge of public opinion behind harsher controls because of the actions of a few hacks. 

Now it turns out that this alleged problem has been nipped in the bud in a brutal way and I was right that it will be a different media landscape but not for the reasons that I thought.  There's already claims that thanks to the demise of the Screws there's going to be a Sunday Sun of some sort in its place so you have to hope that some of the good people that have lost their jobs will be mopped up by that.

And, of course, there's already claims that the evil Murdochs have been planning this move for a while and it's a way of looking like they're doing something decisive to get rid of the bad apples in order to protect their BSkyB plans while saving themselves a bit of cash in the costs of running a newspaper that had to fight harder and dig deeper and dirtier for exclusives to keep the attention of its readership. 

Still, it's a shock.  I did work experience at the NOTW when I was a green little journalism student (I had my hair cut and lowlighted especially for the job, such was the excitement at landing such a placement. Tragic, I know) and did the odd job for them during my time at a news agency.  I also got to the interview stage of their scholarship scheme, losing out to one Robbie Collin, who I believe still works there to this day. How different my life would have been if Robbie, who was frankly far and away more suited and qualified for the job than I ever was, hadn't applied.

The stuff I did for them at a news agency was relatively low key. For example getting the parents of a child sexual abuse victim to agree to support Sarah's Law, which they did without any pressure from me, I might add, because they were prime NOTW readership.

While on work experience, I was sent to get a copy of the birth certificate of a lady featured in a story from a council office, something I would get used to doing later in my career.  I can't even remember who the lady was but even though it's public information that members of the public are perfectly entitled to, the staff there told me there was a two-day wait for it, something which did not impress the then news editor.

"We can't have it now, we'll have to wait until tomorrow," I quavered down the phone at him.  "We're the world's biggest newspaper, we can do anything we want," he said and told me to go and carry on hassling them until they handed it over.  Unfortunately, the "we can do anything we want," attitude, seems to have permeated through to a few members of staff whose actions have been detrimental to the hundreds of others who've never been near a phone hack. 

I've never worked full-time for the Screws but it's been a presence on the fringes for me throughout my career.  I know that it appears at the moment that some staff were, in fact, out of control, but for anyone working in journalism, it's only bad news when any newspaper rolls off the presses for the last time.

Trout pout

I'm feeling a mixture of disappointment at being away from the UK and out of the loop while all the News of the World fuss is going on and relief at not being there plugging away doing shifts at some tabloid or other while the tide of public opinion turns against the whole bally lot of us making the job harder than ever when trying to convince whichever person that you're interviewing that day to tell all.

It's a strange life, that of a jobbing tabloid hack. Although I was never a paid up staffer I did enough shifts to get a pretty good idea of the brutal pressure it sometimes involves. While thinking about what I would be doing if I were still in the UK, I realised it's actually a pretty strange life I lead here sometimes.  Quite a bit of it is taken up with trying to convince people to pay me for the work I've been doing and them telling me that, for some reason or other, it will take four days for someone to issue and sign a cheque that should have been handed over a week ago. 

This strange life, though, sometimes leads me to be in department stores in Dubai Mall at 11am on a week day.  Not buying anything, natch, my budget still doesn't run to that, but being self-employed, if I decide it's time to not work, it's time to not work.  This gets balanced out by the fact that I sometimes spend my weekends working when I've got quite a bit on, particularly when him indoors is at work.  It also means that when sister of Sand Witch breezed through on a one day visit en route from Singapore to London, I was able to down tools because my main deadline is still weeks away (I love the sound of them as they go whooshing by) and we spent a bit of time pounding the world's biggest shopping mall.  It's rather good to have visitors because it does make you realise afresh that even though it's flippin' sweltering hot here at the moment, it is a bizarre, unique and interesting place we live in.

It's not very, bizarre, this, but it got me thinking when I spotted this mannequin while in Galeries Lafayette.

Galeries Lafayette, for the uninitiated, is probably the nearest Dubai has to Selfridge's without actually being Selfridge's.  What made me snap a pic of her is her trout pout.  She resembles, does she not, a cast member of The Only Way is Essex?  That and the ironed straight hair designed to resemble dodgy looking extension and four metres of eye makeup suggest that's the look that they're going for.

I'm no expert on TOWIE, as I believe you kids call it, as it wasn't shown in Dubai when I first came here and we haven't had a telly since April.  But, in those shameful moments when I sneak on to Mail Online, I keep myself abreast of the apparent all encompassing nature of this show.

BAFTA-winning no less.  And now, the mannequins thousands of miles away from Essex are starting to look like the cast members.  It's said that mannequins reflect the women of the time, ie fatter or thinner depending on the fashion.  God help us if the TOWIE women are representative of us in the early teenies, or whatever this decade is going to be called.