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.

"I had that Sheikh Mo in my shop the other day..."

Well gor blimey guvenor but who should pop into me old man's shop this afternoon but HH Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai.

He was on some kind of visit to the airport and he poked his head into the Sand Warlock's shop.  Apparently he didn't seem hugely impressed by its contents but, you know, there are reasons for that that we need not trouble ourselves with.

Actually him. Not me thinking I had seen his car when it was in fact the car of someone who just had rather a lot of money.  You don't see that every day.  Gor blimey strike a light.  *turns off forelock tugging mockney mode*.

The fog

It's all gone a bit dusty in the air again in the UAE. I think it's been worse than I first came here.  Maybe the heat makes it worse.  According to the ever reliable Khaleej Times, sand and dust blowing in from Iraq is responsible for the current haze. 
Here is a picture taken yesterday just around the corner from the flat showing the reduced visibility:

Makes the Burj Khalifa look even more like an alien structure that's forced its way out from the centre of the earth.

It's confusing for the senses because being a Brit, I associate fog and mist with cold. It's a bit odd driving through it in an air conditioned car to then get out into the sweltering heat. It's effectively a cloud cover which means the temperature has dropped a bit but it's still fairly toasty warm. 

In other news, there's a story doing the rounds, presumably provided by WAM, the Government news agency, telling parents not to lock their children in their cars in 40degree heat while they nip to the shops. The story crops up because a large proportion of emergency calls in summer are from people saying: "Erm, I've just seen a child locked in a car and it's like 40degrees. Er, they're probably going to die, hlas." Apparently no kiddiwinks have suffered any ill effects yet but obviously the authorities are worried enough about it to issue a warning. 

I got used to writing up releases from the RSPCA saying "don't leave your dog in a hot car" when I worked for British newspapers.  It's a bit of a worry that people have to be told it's a bad idea to leave their children unattended in a hot metal box during an Emirati summer. 

O false apothecary

Growing up with the good ole NHS, however you feel about it, means that when you move to a foreign country there's a period of adjustment to a new healthcare system.  Luckily for me and the Sand Warlock we're insured through his work but that in itself can take some getting used to. 

Visiting the doctor usually means you pay about 100dirhams for the appointment and everything else is covered by the insurance.  Dental treatment is a different matter as you pay up front and then recoup 80 per cent of the cost but only basic treatments are recoverable.   Anything cosmetic or preventative you have to stump up for yourself from what I can tell.

The result of this is there's a limit on how much you can claim for on your health insurance so for things that you wouldn't normally think twice about visiting the doctor for in the UK, you tend to go to the pharmacy first.  After all, they sell antibiotics over the counter in the UAE so it's possible you can bypass the quack altogether.  However, the pharmacies are probably the most stressful places to visit.

Generally speaking, chemists have a limited range of what's available in the UK plus some strange foreign stuff.  The real difference is teams of sales assistants stalk the floors and in the quieter ones, they ask what the problem is and try to convince you to buy the most expensive product, presumably because they're on some sort of commission.

I don't know about you, but when I visit the chemist, it's usually because I have something a bit odd going on.  In the heat that can typically mean some kind of infection, a strange skin or hair issue, things that I would much rather not discuss with a sales assistant who speaks limited English because I don't enjoy shouting things like: "Yes, it's really flaky, yes flaky, F - L - A - K -Y!" to all and sundry.  The way around it is to smile politely as they point you towards the most expensive thing in the shop (example, £40 for sun cream) then say: "Have you got anything else?" and they'll show you where the rest of the range that you don't need to remortgage the house to buy.  This is normally fine but when I went into a quiet pharmacy yesterday I had to say: "I'm fine, I don't need any help," to four different sales assistants and then finally stormed out in a huff when I was approached by a fifth. 

Oh, how I wished for a giant Boots or Superdrug with rows and rows of products of every description for me to browse in peace.  Luckily there is a medium-sized Boots in Dubai Mall which did the job.  I hate to say it but a little slice of home is what you need when you're under the weather.        

Taipei Sand Witch

I've been on a bit of a jolly trip to Taiwan covering a healthcare trade show in which various manufacturers tried to convince me of the merits of their prosthetic legs, facial-muscle controlled wheelchairs, pill boxes and such like. It was an interesting experience not just because I found out about how wireless technology is being applied to healthcare but also because Taiwan isn't somewhere I would have thought about visiting had I not gone there for work. Having gone there, I would like to go back one day and go outside the city to visit the Sun Moon Lake and check out the beaches.

It's a melting pot mixture of indigenous people, Chinese and Japanese.  I had a little bit of time for sightseeing in the evenings. I steered clear of the art galleries and museums and instead went down to the night markets which are packed with stalls selling incredibly cheap snacks such as fish dumplings, fried chicken, chicken feet, Chinese stews with rice, shellfish, water melon juice, tea and tons of other stuff.

The Taiwanese people are incredibly friendly and kind.  My map reading skills are not legendary and I found myself in an interesting situation when I hadn't learnt the Chinese words for the name of my hotel and had forgotten to bring the piece of paper with it in Chinese characters that one of the trade show press officers had carefully written out for me.  The idea being that I could show it to taxi drivers.  The Metro signs are in English as well as Chinese so I managed to get within half an hour's walk of my hotel but unfortunately the street sign system is laid out in a way that's confusing to a European.  Luckily, as I was standing on the corner of various streets clutching my Rough Guide and looking bewildered, people stopped and helped me find the way. 

It may have been due to the fact that they wanted a favourable write up for their trade show, but I had to just express the slightest interest in something, ie some Taiwanese wine to take home for the Sand Warlock to try, and it would turn up gift wrapped.   

He carried a water melon

Other things I learned about Taiwan include:

1. Taxi drivers and professional drivers love instrumental versions of soft rock and easy listening.

2.  No one has told the Taiwanese that things like God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman and The Little Drummer Boy are generally played in the run up to Christmas rather than in June.

3.  If you order "field chicken" you will be eating frog.

4.  Taiwanese people voluntarily eat pies filled with minced pig eyes.

5.  When Taiwanese people refer to China, they will point upwards and say "PRC".

6.  Taiwanese people, in common with Chinese people, will choose an English name if they are going to be in regular contact with English speakers.  I met one software engineer who told me his name was Mr Lu because he didn't have an English name and he thought I wouldn't be able to say his first name.

7.  Taiwanese manufacturers are very worried about being undercut by cheap Chinese products.