Flu with deadline

have flu and horrible chest thing -
also have Flukit, cough medicine, antibiotics-
am totally disgusting swamp creature snuffling & hacking in disorderly nest of bedding and tissues -
am very soory for self and grateful for Habibi -
if survive combined effects of lurgy and medication, will be lurgy-free by 03.30 takeoff a week today -
otherwise could go cargo -
either way, good to go - snrghlfngggghrflnghgh......

totally irresponsible to take lurgy to public place for long leaving do yesterday -
so nice but next victim(s) will be cursing that bloody woman in a few days' time.
Oh dear.

so much to do, so little interest

better tomorrow

This weekend we...

.....went out for lunch on Friday at 2. John did Lamb. With beetroot. And gem squash. Never liked beetroot before. Never had gem squash before. Yum.
Cheryl made The Trifle! .......returned from lunch on Saturday at 12.30 a.m. It was a very fine lunch!
........oh ...... and we packed a bit.

......Actually, I packed a bit, in between cups of tea and forays into Blogger & Facebook, while Habibi got on with his novel - 48,500 words so far - woohoo!

Packing

Home

Sweet

Transit Camp

It'll be fine.......

When did you last see your blog?

Um, May 19th. A month ago!

So, where have I been?
At work.
At home.
At the high school prom.
At the drama group Omars.
On Facebook..........

And what have I been doing?

Having my hair done.
Having my nails done.
Having my teeth done.
Shopping for silk clothes and satin cloth and goddessy gauze.
Shopping for shoes, accessories and jewellery.
Shopping for make-up and nail polish.
Having a ball.
Researching the novel.
Writing the novel.
Writing applications.
Writing references and testimonials (for other people!)
Saying goodbye.
Getting hugged.
Looking forward to leaving Dubai.
Feeling wistful about leaving friends, colleagues, students (interchangeable terms).
Starting the hand-over to my successor at work.
Swapping plans with departing friends and colleagues.
Issuing invitations to mi casa, when I 've got one.
Discovering Facebook as a really good way to avoid losing contact in the blur of ex-pat leaving.
Planning goodbye breakfasts, coffees, lunches, dinners.
Emptying bookcases.
Sorting Stuff.
Taking stock.
Focusing.
Anticipating.
Feeling happy, excited, liberated.
Talking to my family in Europe, where I shall soon be living.
Missing blogging, and bloggers.

We're leaving soon,
Bye bye............... :D

A la Recherche des Taxis Perdus

I find that the process of leaving feels similar to the process of settling. Our imminent departure re-invests the now familiar landscape and personnel of daily life with all the vivid detail it had in the early years; storing faces and places, stirring memories and inviting comparisons. We’ve been here almost thirteen years, and in a few weeks we’ll be gone. Coo!

When we first arrived here from England, everything was new, strange, and full of promise, and I soaked up all the details of my new environment. Riding through Karama, Satwa and Jumeirah with a tourist map open beside me, en route for the personal landmarks of Habibi’s office, Habibibaba’s school, the British Council, Magrudy’s, Jumeirah Beach and Creekside Park, I took in the grid layout of compounds and apartment buildings, punctuated by pastel-toned villas plonked on sandy lots like shopping bags dumped on a kitchen floor; I squinted at street signs, perplexed by the incomprehensible numbering system, and intrigued by the complexities of names like ‘Al Ittihad Street’, ‘Al Wasl Road’ and ‘Khaled bin Al Waleed Street’. What did ittihad and wasl mean? Who was Khaled bin Al Waleed? What a sense of achievement came from getting my mouth around these, and being understood! Then there was the next level, learning the ‘real’ names, all based on landmarks or a concentration of activity: Irani Hospital Road, Bank Street, the plant souk, computer souk, Bidet Roundabout, Budgie Roundabout, Defence Roundabout, Satwa Racetrack etc. One day, to my surprise, the straggling web of one-way streets resolved itself into a mental map of a familiar town that was quite lot smaller than it had first appeared – the way a film always seems much shorter, the second time you watch it.

Since then, of course, the town has expanded into a city, and outgrown pet-names. Ramada Roundabout has become a crossroads, Abela Supermarket, whose memory lingered as Old Abela Supermarket through a couple of incarnations – Habitat & a Natural Health Supermarket – conjures up a time and atmosphere, rather than a T junction on Al Wasl Road, and as for Defence Roundabout, notable for its distinctive cruciform, and a definite military……. absence….., that’s Intersection 2!

We’ve also seen the closure of the small private cab companies and one-man operations, and the development of a centrally controlled, metered taxi network employing thousands of men to work twelve-hour shifts. I’m a big fan of road-worthy, air-conditioned vehicles, and most of the drivers are nice guys, but you don’t get the best out of a driver who’s underpaid, tired and stressed. I used to sit in the front seat because I like an unobstructed view and I like to chat, but these days, it’s more like riding shotgun. Unfavourite experiences on a 10-12 lane highway at 120 km/ph: tailgating; ‘precision’ overtaking, mobile phone use; the driver with one hand on the wheel and the other supporting his eyelids; having the radio on really loud to keep him awake.

Ah, I remember the olden days.

Taxis were safer back then, when they couldn’t get out of second gear without the engine falling out. I remember acetate silk roses, velour dashboard covers and gilded plastic tissue box covers offsetting the general grime of the interiors. Wind-down air-conditioning. Concave seating. Maroon vinyl and transparent plastic. Grey sheepskin on the back sill. The family photos tucked behind the sunshade. I remember conversations with men who’d been here for years, about home, family, and other taxi drivers (‘Too many Irani’ confides the Afghan; ‘Too many Afghani.’ the Iranian grins.). I remember the richly textured olfactory adventure of hot rubber, hot oil, ancient vinyl, carbon monoxide, mildew, My Shaldan in Citron, Rose or Strawberry, and the accumulation of years one man’s sweat, cigarettes and lunchbreaks. Vive la nostalgie…….

Words & Picture

Too busy/idle to read the papers this week, but I can still look at the pictures. See this one in Emirates Today. Just about sums things up at the moment!

........ 1 minute later...... I didn't mean to get the whole paper! (Didn't even want all of Page 4, actually.)

Sigh.... Click on Page 4, Home News, and scroll down. And, for everyone else who can't read the caption at this scale: TRADITION CONTRASTS MODERNITY - Camel trainers run their camels past construction developments opposite the Nad Al Sheba race track in Dubai. Lots of high rise developments are planned in this area as part of the city's growth.

OK Since we've got the whole thing, this is a particularly varied & interesting issue, whether you live here or not, including local & regional news and: P7 ad for 'The Summit' which is fairly typical of what 's going up; p11 feature on falling groundwater levels in the UAE; p18-19 the work of Dubai's censorship department; p20 the deployment of British paratroopers in Afghanistan; p21 Red Bull Creativity Contest; p28 promoting AIDS awareness.

So this is my souvenir copy of Emirates Today.

I've still got a year to get the mosque alarm clock





......and a cuddly plush Modhesh.

....I shall really miss this place.

Vamos! Vamos!

Of the primarily English-speaking nations, only Australia appealed enough to outweigh our desire to be closer to home without actually living there. (We British are famous grumblers – complaining is different, see, not at all British! - but what most home-based English people seem to complain about these days is that everyone in England is so miserable! The ‘Let’s live anywhere but here’ magazine market is huge nowadays.).

Europe then.

Since getting a job in a foreign country is obviously less complicated than setting up a business, we started with me. I’ve run informal drama activities, done productions, and taught drama right across the age groups from four to seriously grown up, so I could go anywhere that requires drama teachers. The only thing is that I am very happy teaching 11-18 year-olds, really love teaching IB Theatre Arts, and really don’t want to give it up!

So I logged on to the International Baccalaureate Organisation, to check out IB schools around the world: it turns out that there are 1,834 of them, in 124 countries.

OK then…. I was looking for English-speaking schools because, although the IB programme is delivered in English, French and Spanish, I know I can’t polish my French or learn Spanish to an appropriate standard for teaching. Still, most of Europe remained open to me, though it was generally private schools, like the one that I teach in now, rather than state schools.

(After posting this last night, I realised that it was actually two posts, so I've removed some IB/education stuff and posted it separately.)

France, Germany, Spain, Croatia, Netherlands, Greece – the list rolled on!

Quite apart from the practicalities of earning a living, I wanted to return to Europe and be nearer family in England, Scotland, France and the Netherlands, but also to retain our links with Arab culture – we’ve been in the Middle East a long time, and our son is more at home here than in England.

In the end, our choice of new pasture came down to a mixed bag of criteria: climate, economic development, culture, openness to foreign nationals, legal and governmental transparency, cost of living, property values, language, membership of the EU (taxes, health, pensions, law, human rights) – and a feeling!

So: Spain. Not sunbaked Spain or wet Spain or tourist Spain or British Spain (Enough of the expat – we wanna feel like pats one day!), but Mediterranean, historic, cosmopolitan, colourful, crazy, traditional, cautiously post-Franco, self-assuredly forward-looking Spain.

So: Valencia. Characterful but not defensive or chauvinistic; thriving and expanding but still a big town, not a vast city; midway between Andalucia and Catalunya, with the heartland of Castilia y Mancha, Extremadura, Castilia y Leon and Aragon to the west and northwest; and the rest of mainland Europe to the immediate north and northeast.

Valencia appeared immune to the corruption apparently endemic on the southeast coast, but there is a serpent in paradise after all, in the form of the now-notorious Valencian ‘land grab’ laws. Still, we plan to give ourselves two years to settle, become reasonably fluent in the language, establish Habibi’s business, my proper job, and a venture of my own, do plenty of WWOOFing, and generally become part of this place we’ve chosen to spend the rest of our lives in: and if the land-grab issue (now before the EU, I believe) isn’t resolved in three years’ time when we’re ready to buy our patch, we’ll be in a position to look elsewhere. Ha!

I remember when ladies of 50+ wore crimplene, carried shopping bags that bulged in solidarity with their ankles, and were definitely set, like over-cooked Yorkshire Puddings, into a shape and state which I knew instinctively would remain more or less unchanged until they got frail and translucent, with white, blue or lilac hair and walking sticks, and lived out their lives in excessively tidy rooms behind netted windows overlooking lawns edged with flowering annuals that no-one would ever be seen to weed. It didn’t bother me. I thought it was normal. Now that I’m older, and still very much alive inside, even if the vital signs have been a bit dodgy this week, my perspective is somewhat different. Vive la différence!

Vamos a la gran vida!

Going! Going!

Habibi and I are not noted for our forward planning, but after over a decade here in Dubai even we thought some sort of exit strategy might be called for, so we scratched our heads and came up with - a date! Impressive, huh?

Habibi does that 24/7 thing that they don’t warn you about at entrepreneur school; but I make up for this with a frivolous part-time occupation called teaching, which, as everybody knows, is all about the holidays. So I picked 07.07.07, or about twenty minutes after the end of the next academic year. Habibi liked it, and thus was born the beginning of The Plan.

Next question: where should we go? Having been disappointed in his hopes of being a kept man by the age of forty two (I have no idea where this came from, but he claims I promised. See what he has to put up with? A dilettante and a fibber!) anyway - Habibibi wanted to move somewhere with a sufficiently developed economy to guarantee demand for his finely honed skills in developing and delivering fab websites on time and within budget (Did I cover everything, honey? – oh –) with proper support and other stuff… (OK - that will have to do….) and where 24/7 actually pays. I wanted to go to Oz and be a permaculture Earth Gardener in a strawbale house with solar power; grow fruit trees, fruit bushes, vegetables and flowers sustained by mulch, green compost, stored rainwater and recycled domestic water; and have chooks, duckies and a house cow. Habibi liked this too because he’s got secret hippy leanings and actually got involved with Liverpool's Rice Lane City Farm, and later with an experimental housing project long before I’d heard of such things. (This article about reduced funding for the farm explains its importance to the local community.)

So: Australia. I liked the look of the area around Adelaide, with its lively arts and sports scene, varied geography and vineyards. Habibi thought we’d do better in Perth or Sydney. Habibibaba didn’t mind because he was growing up fast, and the world would soon be the mollusc of his choice. We were getting quite excited; and then I went online at one of those evaluation sites, and discovered (at the age of forty-four-and-a-bit) that if you’re over 45 you get nul points on the immigration grid unless you’ve got Ozzie blood relatives, or more money than we have, and/or intend to employ more Oztrelians than we’re going to. So that sort of fizzled out.

Still, Oz is even further than the UAE from everyone we love, and distance has been a source of much sadness over the years, so part of me had no problem with the inozpitality of Oz. And Cate Blanchett, Toni Collette, Baz Luhrmann, Heath Ledger, Russell Crowe, Nicole Kidman, Kylie Minogue, and all those sportsmen with the funny shaped balls, dreams of ashes etc. etc. have come out to play Up Top; and I can still get the excellent permaculture and sustainable-living books and magazines online, and apply them someplace else. We’ll get over it!

Ready to WWOOF

In my first post, I wrote about our plans to move to Spain and have a smallholding; and how Habibibaba and I wanted to work on a Spanish organic farm this summer so that I can get some practice, and he can escape London for a while. (WWOOF was started to match green-starved city-dwellers with organic farmers in need of cheap and friendly temporary labour.) We're in the process of applying, and it's remarkable how many organic farms there are in Spain - 171 potential hosts on the WWOOF list alone.

Since Habibi and I want to move to the Mediterranean coastal city of Valencia, capital of one of Spain's historic farming regions, I hoped for a summer placement there, for an induction into local crops and methods. However, the majority of WWOOF farms are in Andalucia, which is further south, hotter and more arid, or further north in Catalunya, around Tarragona, Barcelona and Girona.

In fact, there are WWOOF farms throughout Spain, from Cadiz (Andalucia) within waving distance of Morocco, through sun-baked Extremadura and Castilla-y-Leon to lush green Galicia.

Within that, there are lone farmers, family holdings of one to fifty acres, guest houses, collectives, yoga and meditation centres, a riding school, research centres, arts colonies and hands-on teaching centres in sustainable development and permaculture. Crops include olives, almonds, carob, oranges, lemons, figs, quince, cork, wheat and barley. Vegans, vegetarians and omnivores catered for. According to experience and abilities, WWOOFers can tend poultry, sheep, horses and pigs; rebuild acequias (irrigation channels similar to falajes); weed vegetable gardens, prune orchards, build strawbale accommodation, keep house, press oil and clear land. Up a mountain, by the sea, or on the edge of desert! In return, you get board and lodging, good company, and a complete change from the 9-5 - usually an agreed number of hours' labour per day or week. Accommodation offered includes in-house, self-contained chalet, caravan, tipi and yurt! Well it appeals to me, and thousands of others all over the planet, since WWOOF was first set up in England in the 1971.

On the website, there's a list of countries where WWOOF operates, and lists of hosts. When you join, you get contact details and guidance on what to do and how to do it. Help is needed all year round, and you should contact potential hosts a month in advance.

BTW on one of my applications I happily declared my desire to keep patitos y galletas. I should have said patitos y gallinos, which means ducks and chickens. I seem to have signed up to tend ducks and biscuits. Ah well.