You should be so lucky

I haven't updated for a while but I'm back now, alright? Want to make something of it? *holds up fists and does boxer style dance.* So, on with the blog.

A place him indoors and I have been meaning to go to for a while is Lucky's Furnitures in Sharjah, home to reasonably priced somewhat eccentric looking Indian and Arab style furniture. It's based on a somewhat non-salubrious industrial estate but, you know, seeking out these hidden gems is part of showing that you're a REAL PROPER EX-PAT now who knows what's what in the UAE and not some fly-by-night who's on a six-month secondment through work who's here today, gone tomorrow.

So off we set, one blazingly hot May day, well, they're all blazingly hot now until Octoberish, on the tandem air-conditioned broomstick for aforesaid establishment. If you think I'm stretching the witch and wizard related analogy a bit far, you just wait.

Lucky's is almost, if not exactly like the Room of Requirement in the Harry Potter books. OK, it may not be quite as complex and grandiose looking as the set for said room in the final two films, but that's what it reminds me of, if, in fact, the thing you most require at that moment is a distressed hand-painted cabinet, an eccentric-looking and potentially lethal cot for your baby, a carved elephant, a selection of antique lamps or a wooden Hindu or Sikh idol.

 
OK, so it's more like the Room of Requirement in appearance than actuality as these rather poor pics show, but you know what I mean, work with me people.

Now this is a garden swing:

It's a bit big for our balcony and heavy to bring up 22 floors, otherwise I would have purchased it, obviously.

We came away with a tallboy that resembles Wizbit, Paul Daniels' yellow cone-shaped pal from the children's TV programme of the same name, but not before we had spent at least an hour getting lost in the warehouse.

There are actually three warehouses which you dart in between to escape into the air con from the blistering sun as quick as possible. We narrowed the choice down to two cabinets - Wizbit or another one which handily had spaces for bottles of wine. Unfortunately, the wine cabinet seemed to disappear. We couldn't find it again. Eerie that, isn't it? We trotted up and down all the rows of the three warehouses returning to the place we thought it was, asked the staff, which was admittedly a bit of a pointless exercise as they spoke very little English and didn't look like the wine drinking sort, so probably had little idea what a wine cabinet was even if they knew what a cabinet was in the first place. But no, it had vanished like Draco Malfoy's vanishing cabinet, and yes, before you say it, I know that it's things or people put in Draco's cabinet that vanish, not the cabinet itself, I told you I was straining the analogy.

So, Lucky's clearly decided it was a Wizbit-shaped cabinet that we really required, not a wine cabinet.  It was probably right. It would probably have just made us buy more wine.

Welcome to the Wild Middle East

I would like to share a little anecdote with you that made me have another one of those: "Oh, Toto, we're not in Kansas any more" moments the other day.

I was casually chatting to a chap I come into contact with at work regularly and he informed me he was on his way to the Marina to sell his boss's boat.

"Oh," I said, "Your boss (who I also meet from time to time) has a boat? I didn't know that." Aforesaid boss was rapidly sinking in my estimations as I had previously thought he was ok but I was now envisioning him being one of those ex-pat pillocks idioting around the World Islands on a boat covered with emaciated bikini-clad promo girls. But that's beside the point.

Well, it wasn't his boat, it was given to him as collateral by a client who couldn't settle his bills with boss's business. The understanding was that it would be given back once the client had settled his bills. Unfortunately the client hadn't settled his bills so boss had dispatched the chap to sell the boat to the highest bidder. I resisted the temptation to ask if previously mentioned client was also currently at the bottom of Dubai Creek wearing a concrete overcoat.

Can you imagine such a transaction taking place in Britain unless you happened to be called Phil or Grant Mitchell and living in a fabricated working class community in the East End of London? Perhaps I am naive but I had no idea such things went on. "How very Wild West," I said. But no, it was a lot worse than that a few years ago during the boom times, apparently.  Another lesson learned. I wonder if our next landlord might consider taking Kevin the Toyota if we find ourselves unable to afford our next rental payment?

Sand Witch's tips for a burkini body

You may remember that last year Nigella Lawson got a lot of flak for wearing what the papers like to describe as a burkini on the beach in Australia. Who knows why Nigella wore the burkini? Was it 1. She didn't want paps snapping pics of her larger than size zero and therefore 'scandalous figure'. 2. Worried about skin cancer as she has beautiful youthful looking alabaster skin and perhaps either doesn't tan well or wants to keep it that way. 3. It was a bit nippy, or perhaps, 4. She's a free citizen of a free country and can do what the **** she likes.

Anyway. Some speculated at the time as to where she bought it. I can confirm that these garments are on sale in The Dubai Mall should you wish me to purchase one for you if the bikini diet isn't going too well and you have an urge to 'do a Nigella' during your summer sojourn to sunny climes.

I am pretty sure it's a swimsuit not a general workout suit as the mannequin is wearing goggles. I haven't seen anyone wearing them on the beaches of Dubai or at the swimming pools but I have seen fully dressed women in their head scarves and robes walking into the sea up to their waists to paddle with their families. There are women only days at the beaches here so perhaps such things are more commonplace then, although, perhaps the women only aspect would negate the need for a burkini in the first place. I have never been to the beach on a women only day because the Sand Warlock's drag act sure ain't as convincing as it used to be.

I have been thinking about women who choose to cover themselves playing sports a bit recently partly because of this story about the debate surrounding women's ability to play sport in Saudi Arabia and compete in the Olympics for their country and because International Football Association Board has just voted to lift a ban on women players wearing hijabs.

I can't speak with any authority about what is going on in Saudi Arabia, obviously, but there are a couple of women who wear hijabs, trousers and long-sleeved shirts who attend my running club from time to time and no one bats an eye lid. Another reason it has been on my mind a bit is my own musings about what I am going to wear to go running once the weather starts really heating up. Although it is a chilly 19 degrees today, it was much warmer than that as well as muggy and humid at Friday morning's session so my gear, some of which was bought for trolling around Ealing's Gunnersbury Park on chilly mornings, is not going to cut it any more. It's a tricky balance between wearing something practical and the very, very slight risk that someone will be offended if your clothing is deemed 'immodest'.  

Who says nothing grows in the desert?

A few of  you may have fallen about laughing at my enthusiastic plans to create a balcony garden detailed in this article which I wrote last year. But, I have been as good as my word and attempted to create a garden on our terrace, although, in not quite the way I had planned. There are two reasons the garden is not quite what I envisaged.  First, at the time of writing, we were living in a tower on the 13th floor and I fully expected to still be living in a tower with a very small balcony as opposed to a low-rise with a freakishly large (for Dubai) terrace. Second, a chance encounter with a fellow Brit ex-pat at Dubai Garden Centre.

The main news this ex-pat had to impart was that he had recently acquired a chicken from a school fete which was in chick form at time of acquisition. Unfortunately after it had grown up a bit, the chick turned out to be a cockerel and his insistence on waking the neighbourhood up at dawn every day from the balcony (yes keeping a chicken on a balcony was probably not a good idea anyway but this is a city in which one sees tigers riding in the front seat of cars so one becomes used to such eccentricities) had caused him to be evicted from his flat.

So, ex-pat, wife and cockerel had moved into a villa with a garden.  The subsidiary and arguably less important bit of news was the fact that ex-pat had successfully grown vegetables in his garden.  So, as we were at a garden centre, I immediately trotted over to the seed stand to see what food growing opportunities were on offer to grow on pots in the terrace with all thoughts of wind, sand and sun resistant plants banished. I guess a deeply English desire to cultivate one's own vegetable patch dies hard even if you have moved to a dust bowl.

One thing they don't tell you at the various garden centres in Dubai is that although one may sneer at the obviously forced grown, regimented lines of plants that line the sides of the city's roads, the heat and the dust is not the only reason that such 'unnatural' gardening practice - of growing in polytunnels then importing to the site before ripping up again when they look a bit tired - is necessary here.

I have found gardening in Dubai to involve fighting off biblical plagues of pestilence armed only with a weak washing up liquid solution. Leaf miners are the chief culprits for the slow but eventual destruction of plants, followed by black fly and then if that's not enough, some weird yellow snot resembling bugs that are currently trying to munch their way through my desert rose. There's not much you can do about bugs eating vegetable plants in Dubai. Pesticides are not widely available because garden centres have to have licenses to sell them because they are of course highly toxic, so not many of them bother, and the high toxicity could of course render the crops inedible anyway.

So, while I have successfully grown beans and tomato plants, others have fallen by the wayside.

Here are aforesaid tomatoes growing in a thicket like arrangement I expect is typical of the inexperienced gardener who was not aware of the triffid-like proportions that tomatoes can reach given the right conditions until it's too late.

Here's a closeup of said tomatoes which are getting quite big now:

They're refusing to ripen at present which I suspect may be due to lack of sun which is not as mad as it sounds given our location in one of the world's hottest places as the terrace is in shade for much of the day. I have ignored the Prince Charles approach of talking nicely to them to get them to grow and instead can be found swearing at them to get the **** on with it because that's a bit more my style.  The white squiggly marks on the leaves are the ever present leaf miners which I feebly spray with water and washing up liquid in an attempt to keep them at bay.  I think the problems with pests are down to the fact that there are not enough cold snaps to kill them off.  They certainly seemed to retreat during the cooler months but as the temperature is creeping back up again I suspect they are now here to stay.

Despite this, we have already enjoyed my first, admittedly rather small, harvest of beans:

Although the first sowing of courgettes succumbed to leaf miner followed by black fly, some of the next ones are looking pretty promising:

Growing all these edible things of course makes growing flowers seem tame as progress is so slow. I don't know if it's my lack of skill but the yield from the amount of flower seeds sown is tiny in comparison. Here's some blue asters that finally look as if they are going to flower after several months in the soil:

My attempts to grow so-called desert friendly plants are feeble. I suspect this Blue Agave would rather be in the ground than in a pot but there's not a lot I can do about that unless I decide to dig up the terrace and create a flower bed which is admittedly tempting considering our landlord's behaviour:

I have been trying to find a position for it on the terrace in which I don't walk into it and damage its spines but have so far failed, hence its slightly sad looking tendrils.

The desert rose did not like the cold (for Dubai) winter very much and is also currently looking a bit sad.

Despite the sap being poisonous to humans, that's not the case for the aforementioned snot-like bugs that have recently started attacking it. I recently pruned it rather haphazardly with some blunt shears so it's looking particularly sad which is a bit galling when I keep seeing flower covered desert roses thriving in flowerbeds everywhere. Over the winter, it sulked and threw off all its leaves if I put even a drop of water near it.  I think it's the lack of sunlight on the terrace that it doesn't like and perhaps it will start looking a bit more cheerful when the warmer weather comes.

I have the Western instinct that a garden should be green and lush so I find the Agave and desert rose's slow growing not so greenness rather uninspiring. I expect the greenness will start to disappear and fall victim to the hot weather soon so perhaps my enthusiasm for desert friendly plants will grow accordingly.

Sandy

I've been whinging at various stages about the sandstorms that swept over the Emirates recently. I have had a think about it and realised, hey it's not that bad. Give me a bit of sand over TfL grinding to a halt at the sight of a few flakes of snow any day of the week. It is, however, quite unpleasant sitting outside in it. I found grains of sand between my teeth when I had to cover a polo match recently (oh, my life is so hard, poor little me) and people with respiratory conditions are told to stay indoors when it's really bad.  Anyway, it's all gone now, but here are a few sandy pics to show you how the desert tries to reclaim Dubai when the mood takes it:

 Sand tries to take over the road on the way to Ras Al Khaimah.

Camels on the way to Ras Al Khaimah. Not particularly sandy, I just like them.

A somewhat bemused poinsettia plant.

Pretty sand patterns near Fossil Rock on the Dubai/Sharjah border:

More sandy roadness:

Another thing I have randomly photographed for your enjoyment is this camel. Yes, I am obsessed with camels but I thought this particularly bling camel sums up Dubai beautifully; Arabian but blingy. She is suspended forever in time near the Emirates Towers which are, surprise surprise, home to a luxury hotel, a luxury shopping mall and some offices and stuff.

There are various decorated and bling camels situated at opportune points around Dubai because we're very interested in preserving our Emirati heritage and reminding ourselves how far we've come. I personally think this camel says a lot about just that. 

Chick with a tick

As some of you know, I have joined a Nike Running Club.



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I've just left a bit of space there for those of you who know me of old to pick yourselves up from the floor and sew up your sides and opt for surgery on the various hernias that you will now have ruptured.

But no, really, I have.

I've written before about the 'Dubai stone' that creeps on many who move to the Emirate and my various attempts to combat it and I shan't bore you again, but after making some pitiful attempts in the gym over the summer, a friend brought the running club to my attention.

How you go from being a misanthropic, social inadequate to joining an actual running club is something that requires background because as is common to all bloggers, I freakin' love banging on about myself, so - my relationship with organised physical activity begun 27 years ago thus:

Five-year-old me at my first PE lesson, (it was called games then) at my village school in a pair of green patterned shorts and, if I recall correctly, a Victoria Plum t-shirt and those marvellous black plimpsolls with the stretchy bit.  There was running, there was jumping, there were things involving skipping ropes, there was running while carrying things.  The distinct memory I have of it is trying, doing the same things that everyone else did, the same actions with the same effort but something wasn't right.  Everyone else's ball would travel metres before hitting the target, mine would trickle a little further on than my feet, everyone else would finish running without breaking a sweat and I would turn up half a minute later panting for breath, everyone else managed the skipping while I tripped over my rope and cried.

There is one reason and one reason alone for this, and that is physical ineptitude - a condition that afflicts the bookish among the population - or so I am led to believe. Or, do we become bookish because we need something to do rather than flailing around while people point and laugh? It's chicken and egg. Which came first? The books or the inability to participate in physical activity?

My ineptitude was and indeed is a bad thing because I am both highly competitive and a bad loser, not a good combination, but I did try at sport. My sister recalls a particularly amusing episode when for some reason I got put in the reserves for a school inter-house cross country competition which meant you still had to run but your time wasn't registered unless someone was injured and dropped out. All the other runners went past, obviously, then a couple of minutes later (well probably more than that) I came past sobbing and threatening to vomit. Dignified. This inability used to really bother me but after a while I resigned myself to being picked last for every single team and hitting the ball about twice in roughly 2,000 rounders matches.

I was pretty glad to kiss goodbye to such things when I reached the end of compulsory education. There is, of course, a problem with this in that you can turn into a right fatty if you don't  move around a bit at least once a week as you reach adulthood and hurtle past 30, particularly when you're in a country where it's too hot to move for a part of the year and getting a takeaway or eating out is cheaper and easier than cooking for yourself.

So, while 10 years ago I would have decked you if you had dared to suggest I would even consider joining a running club, I readily agreed to go along. And, it's not that bad.  In fact I would go as far as to say it is good. Very good.  So good that I don't even mind you seeing this picture:

Who is that idiot?  Jumping in the air (at only just gone 8am on a Friday, I might add) with something resembling vim and vigour as if she hadn't a care in the world?  What on earth is wrong with her? Why isn't she in a darkened room grumbling about anything and everything and pointing out that nearly everything on the planet is rubbish except her? 

The ineptitude has remained.  I do feel sorry for the personal trainers who are syndicated by Nike to train the terminally physically incapable like me. They have their work cut out but if they feel any frustration, they do not show it.  Luckily, there are some genuinely very good runners in the group and there are some good runners in the group, some above average runners and some average runners and some not that good runners. Unfortunately, all of them leave me in the dust and have already started on the sprint training or the situps and spidermans long before I rumble over the hill to the finish in a demented and exhausted fashion.  Yet, because you get presented with Nike gear for regular attendance, I am building a collection of t-shirts. So, I am to be seen, twice a week, shambling around in lycra, yes, lycra, in public, in the environs of Festival City and Burj Park with the hallowed big tick on my chest and something resembling a satisified smile, or more likely an exhausted grimace, on my face.

There is a small corner of my psyche that is slightly perturbed by the fact that despite my efforts, I am still the worst or nearly the worst in the group but I choose to be amused by this.  I persist because the running club is perfect for an impoverished hack like me as it's free due to the training being paid for by Nike. It's clearly unlikely that they are doing this out of the goodness of their hearts and it's safe to say they get plenty of valuable publicity when they hand out free stuff and by people like me blogging about them. I'm not sure that I'm quite the sporty, healthy, wholesome type they have in mind when they design their sweat absorbing, stretchy, brightly coloured gear. On the other hand, perhaps I'm exactly the type. Let's face it, there are more like me - bile-filled inepts who shun daylight, positivity and physical activity where possible - than healthy sporty types on the planet. Wouldn't that be ironic? That my sporting inability has led me to become the precise target audience of a sportswear company?

Although I have hauled my sorry behind around charity races before - a 10km in the fairly pitiful time of 1 hour 12 minutes was my last effort - it's only since I joined the club that I became aware of some of the things I am doing wrong. I chose running as a way to try to get fitter or at least try to remain reasonably fit as I get older because it's a sport that you can do alone and that appeals to me. However, disappointingly, it turns out to be the case that having fellow runners and a mega-fit professional to encourage you does work and that it is true that doing proper stretching will mean you have fewer pulled muscles.  You have no idea how distressed I was when I finally had to admit that those are two true facts.

Meet one of the instructors, Tom: 

Now I've got that gratuitious picture out of the way, all I need to do is say if, like me, you are in Dubai and want to do some sport or physical activity but don't want to be humiliated or badgered or made to feel inadequate, Nike Running Club might just be for you. It meets at 6.45pm on Tuesdays outside the Nike store at Festival City, at 7.45am on a Friday at Burj Park and at 6.45am on a Saturday in JBR. No of course I haven't made it to the Saturday one yet.  What do you think I am? Some kind of sicko? Have a look here and click on Nike Run Club Dubai if you're interested in that one.

Bring on move 15 in 15 years...

I haven't updated in a while because of various things including a trip to Nepal, Christmas, and so on but plan to get back into the habit when I can.  Really must get round to uploading some of those elephant polo pictures.

Anyway, we've been content in this apartment for getting on for nine months now and had hoped to renew our tenancy in April, but alas, we find ourselves preparing to move once more. There are laws in Dubai introduced after the "good" times to protect tenants from unscrupulous landlords who imposed astronomical rent increases. In some ways the laws aren't necessary, particularly if you're just after a flat, as there is a glut available thanks to the out of control construction sector.

Unfortunately, these laws do not protect you from landlords who are total pillocks and living in cloud cuckoo land.  We could fight our case to stay here through various bodies but it would involve time and money which would be better spent finding a place with a landlord who is not a pillock.

Here is a letter that I wrote when it became apparent that we will be moving house again in April.  This will be the 15th time I've moved house since I left home to go to university in 1997 so you can imagine how utterly thrilled I am about this.  Don't worry, I didn't send it and I let the Sand Warlock handle most of the communication side as he is less inclined to lose his temper and start making biological suggestions to people he gets annoyed with.  It made me feel better though.

Dear Landlord

In response to your recent rent increase “suggestion”, we cannot afford to pay 125,000AED per annum rent. We are not sure why you would think we would choose to live in a 85,000AED per annum flat if we could afford 40,000 extra in rent so we are amazed that you would even suggest it. If our circumstances had changed to that effect in the course of the year, we would certainly have been looking for another flat with more space or putting some money aside for our future rather than blithely agreeing to pay 47 per cent extra rent for the same flat to line your pitiful pockets. What kind of morons do you think we are? We are not sure where you get the information that ‘rents are returning to what they were’ before Dubai’s widely publicised gargantuan economic crash but I suspect it was in some kind of psychedelic dream brought on by all the crack you have clearly been smoking.

There are many similar flats in the same area that are advertised at the same rent or a few thousand dirhams more than we are currently paying so we feel that you would be wasting your time trying to impose such a high a rent on a new tenant. Why would any new tenant rent this flat for 125,000 when they can get a similar one for 85,0000 to 90,000AED?

It is illegal in Dubai to raise the rent when a tenant has lived in a property for less than two years so why are you trying to do so? Surely as a landlord it is your responsibility to be aware of the law and adhere to it. If it is the case that you want to live in the property yourself, as you stated on your eviction notice AFTER telling us that you wanted to put the rent up by 40,000, then of course there is nothing that we can do about that and accept that we need to move out, you just need to be honest with us about it.  Why the subterfuge?

We have been good tenants taking good care of the property, giving our neighbours no cause whatsoever to complain and have made minimal contact with you during our tenancy and only when completely necessary. We are residential landlords with property in the UK and do not currently get as high a rent as we would like but we appreciate the value of good, reliable tenants as they inevitably save money in the long term because there are fewer missed payments and the need for repairs is less likely. It is a pity that you cannot do the same.

We will be moving out in April.  Please don’t expect us to listen to your feeble, piffling reasons for trying to impose this rent increase on us. We are only interested in hearing from you if you are agreeing to keep our rent at the same level. Otherwise we will be complying with the eviction notice which you issued when we failed to reply to an email within 24 hours. Considering how long it took you to respond to phone calls when we first moved into the flat and our fridge had broken that was quite frankly the last word in hypocrisy. I hope you are totally ashamed of yourself and your next tenant trashes the flat and never bothers to pay the rent, you total and complete idiotic scumbag.

**** you, you imbecilic plank-brained wankerish d*ckhead. I’ve met some morons in my time but you’ve won the award for the biggest ever.

Sincere congratulations and well done you!

Dubai Sand Witch