Cowabunga

For some, maternal stirrings are as foreign as a KFC Rounder backstage during fashion week in Milan.

I don’t know. Sometimes I feel the tug pretty strong.

Right now I’m feeling maternal towards some unborn turtles. In fact I have named the first three hatchees (hatchlings?) already: Leonardo, Raphael and lastly, Little Splinter, for good measure. I haven’t seen them yet, but I know they are going to be bloody cute.

We are off to Muscat, Oman, this weekend to watch some nocturnal hatchings, and well as getting trousered at the poolside bar of the Shangri-La hotel.

During the summer in the Middle East, most people with half a brain make like lemmings and disappear for cooler climates. Reprobates like us stick around and sweat it out. And occasionally take advantage of summer rates specials at various hotels in prime locations. Hence the Shangri-La deal of the century. We’re staying in the Superior Suites for the pisswilly price of 500 Dirhams for the weekend.

Last night I loaded up my i-Tunes and we shall be bopping and grinding like Paul van Dyk’s entourage for our 5 hour road trip. We’ll need it - Kotters has a hangover and our lives are in his hands as he is the one with the 4x4.

Just realized what a dorky headline this post has. Sorry.

Coming of age

Another year down. Looking back to 31 July 2006, would I change the way things have gone these twelve months for all the shisha in Arabia? Probably not.

This time last year, my minxy friend Christina and I had a combined birthday ripsnorter at the sweatiest, smokiest, commercial-dance-and-R&B-playing basement club we could find in inner London. Why? Because we wanted to flick a hoof. Hard. I had my a rather fit head-hunter (with a six-pack and an Arctic Monkeys hairstyle) on the scene back then. He gave me a card saying “Happy Birthday. I hope you dance your fucking tits off”.

This year, things have taken a far more mature direction. I went to a civilized Italian restaurant with the 12 of the 13 core people comprising the Dubai Expat Unit (High in Dubai of course, was hugely missed). Why? Because they have the most insane breadsticks.

Call me an extremist.

Thankfully, all the maturity was watered down with large quantities of Chilean wine and later, with a healthy helping of smut. I got a card which only Jeanpant could have picked. It says, “What is your favourite type of birthday cake? Angel-food? Chocolate?” On the inside: “BEEF?”. It also has a pull-out poster of a naked torso of a body-builder: “I saved the biggest piece for you”.

This year was also the first birthday since my varisty days where I haven’t been woken up by morning-breathed digsmates singing the Spur birthday song in my ear and dropping cake crumbs on my duvet.

Wild or not, there is something marvelous about birthdays, even though they are undoubtedly “I-Specialist” occasions. The event itself is saturated with disgustingly high doses of attention.

But frankly, we love them.

The Lays guy, of all people

I don’t know what it is lately about blonde, spanner, rugby players. Not my usual type, by any means.

My thing for Schalk worries me slightly, especially when people make ork comparisons. But I put this little crush of mine down to that whole hands-on, fearless, being-his-own-man vibe he has going on.

But last night I had a dream that I was smooching Francois Pienaar. The Lays guy.

Shit.

I am gob smacked at how F.P. even crossed over into my sub-conscious frame of reference. Let it be known that I have never, not even vaguely, found the man attractive (which is more than I can say for my mother).

Francois came round to my folks’ place, and I was interviewing him for some magazine article. A few things, as is customary with dreams, were amiss. A) he was smoking, and B) there was a rugby field in our lounge and we was watching the Boks in their training routines … live. (Sadly, this must have been before Schalk’s time).

F.P. was, at that time, obviously, unmarried.

Anyway, he kept answering the questions I was throwing at him about rugby, his career etc, with really personal insights into his private life. It was like he wanted to convey his inner self in the article. He just kept opening up, and I just kept writing.

At one point he did ask that I specifically mention the impact that some of the rugby development clinics the squad was involved in had made on his life. He invited me to come and watch one of these … clinics. It turned out that the ‘development clinic’ was actually a full-on rugby match of Boks vs prisoners. They were in black and white stripes and covered in coal … like some kind of Laurel & Hardy/chimney sweep/miner from the 1920’s setup). They were pretty evenly matched. After the game the prisoners went back into their prison cell which was a hell-like flaming inferno.

Anyway, after I had felt sorry for them, Francois again showed his sensitive side. [I can’t believe I’m writing this].

There he was, lying on our couch, just talking, talking, talking. The next thing he started holding my hand, and then lunged. It was a surprisingly gentle kiss.

Rather disturbing.

Goon antics

While it buckets down in London, the Goons keep themselves amused by lighting bits of toilet paper sticking out of their bums. While it looks as though 500,000 English people in the Cotswolds region may soon be deprived of electricity and are stockpiling tins of baked beans and long-life milk in anticipation of the next wave of floods, there the Goons are … singeing their butt-hairs and taking drunken photos.

I should have known that there was no point in worrying about the wayward London tribe I left six months ago. Yesterday, out of concern (after having watched 40mins of Sky News footage of waist-deep Thames water engulfing cars, trains and cats) I emailed the little blighters. Are you all OK? Are you all putting around the city in inflatable life-rafts?

Responses varied from sarcasm to abuse. Mostly, the replies I got blatantly ignored my question and fired off details of the past weekend – who lunged at who, who lost their wallets, etc.

I gave up. As long as the smut and booze reports keep coming, I know none of my mates have drowned.

Reports of the Goon Golf Day, the Ride Her Cup (yes, they had T-shirts made, and yes, one of them played the full 18 holes in a Spiderman outfit) have begun to trickle in. I will believe it when I see the visual evidence on facebook.

And while it continues to pour on Mud Island, the Middle East is as dry as the bottom of the last keg at a beerfest. I cannot lie, it is McSteamy. Being outdoors in heat like this should be a crime. We are sweating, to coin a phrase I read somewhere recently, “like a Premiership footballer at a spelling competition”.

Money STINKS

I have just been informed that UK Inland Revenue wants my ass. I got an SMS from my housemate in London who says they are charging me GBP 100 for not completing my tax returns. For crying in a bowl of cornflakes!

Perhaps I asked for it … but I am just so naive when it comes to matters of a financial, or even numerical nature. I want to tell them to make like a polisiekar and VOKAF.

It is simply ANOTHER reason why Mud Island STINKS. I have LEFT that building, just let me be. Stop hounding me. Fair enough, I will do the return and I will pay the 100 smacker penalty. Yet that, apparently, is not enough.

I also have to fill in a ‘leaving’ form and dispatch it via the postal system to stop them from continuing to send me future demands of my 2029/2030 tax returns, even though I have not worked a day since December 2006. Let alone not having even set foot on a miserable tube full of ponging, pasty, newspaper-reading, form-loving, Royal Mail-worshipping, flapjack-eating POMS.

Imagine I didn’t fill in the leaving form. I can picture some revenue clerk named Winterbottom (with a form fettish), wearing the same brown suit since the day he bought it at a Debenhams January sale in 1983, with Earl Grey-stained teeth and Tesco cream cake wrappers cluttering his desk, deriving great joy as he robotically types out annual letters addressed to me until reaching his retirement age. DESPITE getting no response, as time drags on, the penny still won’t drop.

Perhaps he’ll hum as he licks and seals the envelopes year after year thinking some day, I’ll eventually cave in and send him a UK tax return although I will have been neither living nor working there for 23 years.

They crave mail, not email, but envelopes that they can open with a letter opener. This qualifies as the only viable proof of anything. The printed, physically transported word is gospel. The emailed word, and even the spoken word over the telephone to these people has about as much credibility as Busta Rhymes giving a seminar on flower arranging.

Anyway. In keeping with last week’s happy theme, I am actually not mortally wounded by this.

Scissorhands wishes he had a bag like mine

Thursday night kicked off with a rather extravagant dinner and several whiskeys with the folks at Mina a’Salaam hotel overlooking the Burj al Arab. Colonial-style. In the nick of time I managed to identify the camel’s milk crème brulée and give it a sufficient wide berth.

On the way home we had a spur-of-the-moment tour of the Palm Jumeirah, the man-made island in the shape of a palm tree, extending 8km into the sea. We kicked around on the ‘trunk’ (the ‘fronds’ of the palm are nearing completion), pretending to understand the Hindlish commentary spewing forth from our cab driver, and stared at the uninhabited apartment blocks, illuminated, shiny and beautiful. Rather eerie.

On Friday my brother and dad played golf with a hungover Liverpudlian and I, for no real reason, watched Edward Scissorhands. It was my first time. I felt really bad for the guy for a while, and then went to get a Starbucks. There must be over a billion American movies about bullying.

In the evening my little boet came out with my friends for Aussie-Aussie-Aussie-OY-OY-OY’s birthday. I was aghast at the speed at which the six-pack of Fosters we brought for him were dented at Peggy’s house. The poor guy had to endure vulgar accounts - largely untrue - of his sister’s lunging career. Later we joined several genuine cabin crew members for a jovial meal at the Meat Company. At this stage, Korn’s eyeballs were swimming after the heavy-handed tumbler of whisky he had poured himself at Peggy’s. He was as silent as a Vietnamese sniper throughout the remainder of the evening. We successfully managed to smuggle Heddles Jnr, a man who can handle his liquor, several double brandies (the legal drinking age here is 21) to have with his cokes.

Unfortunately the 19-year old got bounced from Bar Zar thereafter, despite some quick calculations and telling the doorwoman/bus that he was born in ’85. And yet Korn made it in. Why is life like that.

On Saturday we watched the Springbok B team get crushed by the All Blacks (you expect a win without Schalk?) and then headed out to Al Karama for some bargaaaaiiining. The keyword to remember: Haggle. Don’t back down. Be a demanding, haughty expat and you’ll get a fake Prada bag for 200 ZARs. Damnation it’s a hot bag. I now have two of the beasts: a black one and a white one. My girls. And, thanks to my bulldozerish price-slashing ways, my brother now looks like a souped up little indie punk. Love it!

Am I bovvid?

Heddles Junior has had his earmuffs pruned. Still looking a bit like John Lennon when he got out of bed after a week, but his general appearance is more to my Dad’s liking.

It’s THURSDAY. Out of high spirits and to welcome the weekend in (Woza, you good thing you), it is as opportune a moment as ever to give thanks for life in general, which has been on the upswing at least for the past 6 weeks.

Even potentially MAJOR setbacks - such as the departure of my wingbitch High in Dubai, my gym-buddying, fellow BodyPOMP class attendee, my multipurpose strap-on, Devil-Wears-Prada-reading, leather-jacket wearing, salmon pasta magician and jolling mate, purveyor of religious experiences at Faithless concerts, Starbucks-guzzling carer for unwanted, ugly and obese babies (like the project he has unwittingly taken on in Jozi) – have been taken in full stride.

Even flu. I laugh at it. Even though I was on death’s doorstep, aching, nauseating, and leaving work early on Tuesday, I raged against the dying of the light and I am here. I finished reading Scar Tissue, FINALLY, and realized by comparison, I lead a fairly uncomplicated, healthy existence.

We can find a LOT of shit to whine about. Yet often I get the feeling those irritations/hardships (Salik tags, Dubai traffic, the heat, stress at work, rude bastards jumping queues and being general dicks generally) exist more as general hype than being essentially real, or capable of actually irking me on some deep level. Maybe we all feel these things should piss us off, because they grate everyone around us, so we all get caught up in a negative spiral.

Maybe I am just a punk rocker with flowers in my hair. Example: yes, it is annoying having to pay road toll and topping up your account and getting fined, and yes, it is not ideal sitting in an inferno that is a black car in the Middle East in the middle of July in five lanes of traffic that are not moving forward for over an hour, but although I moan about it (and we all love moaning about it), it really doesn’t affect me as much as you’d think it does from the way I vocalize it.

My office is big on collective bitching about the above kinds of issues, especially how inefficient and incompetent the agencies and individuals we have to deal with can be. My personal annoyances for 2007 are Polish wallies and Irish twatts. We all chip in and swear a lot and say how indescribably annoying these things are that we have to deal with. It’s quite crazy though the way that even though I go through the motions, thinking I feel, on a superficial level, as irritated as everyone else, I am actually not. If I really ask myself, in all honesty, it doesn’t get on my tits that much.

When you widen your perspective and acknowledge your life on earth as impermanent, finite, you can take it less seriously and realize you can actually enjoy it all the time if you want to.

There is far too much good stuff going on if you actually look for it. Pollyanna, rock on.

Back in the fold: the prodigal son returns

I’m ashamed of myself. While I was bandying about shopping malls and bonding with the lounge suite this weekend, my two managers were behaving like new arrivals to Spring Break in Cancun.

One was bounced from Bar Zar on Friday night for being on her ear. She’s ten years older than me. The other one went ballistic in Ibiza for the weekend. He is close to my dad’s age. And is clearly on a come-down today.

My family was reunited yesterday with the arrival of my (formerly) little brother, newly transformed from six months of freedom at Rhodes University.

Fresh from the plane, my mom brought him via my office on their way home. Firstly, I did not recognize him. He now looks like a giant galloping tapeworm, towering at least 4 metres above me, with a haystack of unruly, bushy, long hair. I almost walked past him and wondered how this gigantic string bean came to be transported to Dubai all the way from Woodstock.

He is super chilled as ever, and looking pleased with himself. He was wearing a graying Rhodes Rats cricket shirt. I think he slept in it last night too.
To extract all of the dastardly stories and smut reports of the past two terms in Corey res, philanders in the Rat and Parrot and escapades in the bright lights of Friar Tucks, the sole nightclub in Grahamstown, may take weeks. But I am going to keep on truckin’ and get all the good stuff out. My dad expressed distaste for a) the bloke’s ‘earmuffs’ (coils of unmanageable hair enveloping his ears) and b) for his declining a beer with us at supper. I remember those days well. You have been bending it for weeks, caning every drop of alcohol in sight, inhaling booze like some kind of human dust-buster, and you come home to rehabilitate, only to have more of it thrown in your face.

He hasn’t said much, but he needs time.

So far, this is what I know:

He doesn’t yet have a handbrake, although a few birds have clearly had their heat-seakers on him if his Facebook wall is anything to go by.

He has played one round of golf on the Grahamstown goat-track (compounding my dad’s distaste as membership fees were paid upfront).

He has made it to the Rhodes gym twice this year (compounding my dad’s distaste as membership fees were paid upfront).

The call from faraway corners of the Earth

I had to delete some texts in a raging fit of jealousy as I woke up this morning to some beauts in my inbox.

Exhibit A: “Oh fuuuck. Madonna is INCREDIBLE! Possibly THE MOST AMAZING concert I have ever been to. WISH YOU WERE HERE. You would LOVE this!!!”. STRAIGHT to the recycle bin.

Exhibits B through to E: Further Live-Earth-concert-related, expletive-riddled reports from Wembley Stadium. Delete delete delete.

Exhibit F: “Sitting at Joe Kool’s [Durbs – that would be my hoof-flicking ground] watching the rugby. Man I could move here, it’s awesome”.

Exhibit G: “The July has been INSANE. We were all over the place!! You should’ve been here!” Naught boet. Canned it in the blink of an eye.

Chunder, chunder, cotch and spew. If there is one thing I cannot handle, its feeling like I missed out.

When I lovingly turned on my radio this morning, I was lambasted with live recordings of the Chili Peppers, Foo Fighters and Razorlight from Wembley. On every channel. With no regard for my feelings. Fergie was indiscriminately peppered all over the airwaves. I felt nauseous.

The next installment will come later today, yes, as I sit at work, as the London contingent heads for the Henley rowing regatta piss-up of the century. I hope it BUCKETS down and their stilettos get sucked into the muddy earth.

Despite these personal trials, I still had a rather marvelous weekend in Dubai. It began with a solo wine-saturated viewing of The Age of Innocence on Thursday night, because I was so torn out after my 6-day working week I could not possibly have heaved my rear off the couch. It is an insanely romantic, haunting, and infuriating movie. I recommend it.

On Friday I burned plastic at Top Shop and River Island like a crazed woman. And THEN – this is where it gets even more SJP – I went for a massage. Unfortunately they couldn’t fly Schalk in for the job, but it was fabulous anyway. Korn, Peggy and I dined on Moroccan braised lamb and couscous at the Madinat and talked smut. Most guys (including Korn) would never admit it, but they love being ‘one of the girls’ from time to time.

Saturday kicked off with a callous spinning session, followed by a facial. Stop it! I’m becoming a koegal in front of my own eyes.

Then watched the Wimbledon Ladies final (unlike most of London, who were all at Live Earth). Venus you biscuit.

Some say she could take on Schalk.

Making a meal of it

I’ve developed a weird infatuation with a food reviewer. Call me cooked.

James Brennan in the Dubai TimeOut magazine absolutely tickles me. Who would’ve thought it was possible to turn a review on INSTANT PORRIDGE into pure quality entertainment.

Instant Oatmeal – French Toast flavour – Quaker
Dhs 21.25
Rating: 1 star

French toast? Now this is a touch ambitious. It’s also a bit bonkers. The very idea of an egg-soaked fried bread and porridge partnership is up there with Ginger Rogers and R2-D2 for the honour of the dumbest pairing ever. Once you boil the contents of a sachet in water, you know its sillier than a chimp in a waistcoat.

The cinnamon and caramel flavour is so sickly and overwhelming, you’ll be glad there’s only half a bowl’s worth in each portion. But if you want to live to see Paris Hilton’s great granddaughter win the Nobel Prize in literature, you could do a lot worse than holding your nose and piping this glutinous muck down your neck without it touching the sides.

This is the bloke who reviews Dubai’s poshest 5 star dining joints. And here he is, taking the piss out of oats. I love it.

Show me the weekend

It is extremely humid in Dubai (today and yesterday) - its condensationsville. The air is so thick it is like walking into a wall of hot seawater. Actual temperatures this week are deceptively Durban-like at around 35 to 39 degrees, but the humidity is a joke.

On Tuesday this week there was a lot of expat eyeball rolling when construction workers from Dubai Marina attempted a strike. They tried to block Sheikh Zayed road (one of the main highways). They did pick possibly the worst week of the year to make a statement, just as Salik (the money-grabbing whore of a road toll system) kicked off. But I guess you don’t give a flying squirrel’s ass when you are being exploited to within an inch of your sanity. It didn’t take long before the main instigators were in the slammer.

What is frightening is that although a compulsory break during the hottest part of the day (12:30 to 15:00) has been enforced as of this week, their working and living conditions are still appalling. As are their salaries – 400 to 500 Dirhams / R800 to R1000 a month. It reminds me of the Laugh it Off Black Label T Shirt “Black Labour, White Guilt”. These are the guys who are behind the insane growth and success of Dubai after all. Yet it still pisses on our cornflakes when they cause a traffic jam. It is blatantly wrong.


And now for something completely different: the Ellen Degeneres show. Shit. That bird is possibly THE funniest woman on the planet.

Christina Applegate was going on about her mortifying moment when she showed up at some A-List function and Rachel Griffiths was wearing the same dress as her.

Christina: It was a beautiful dress and it looked just as good on Rachel as it did on me. Rachel came over, and we're laughing about it. We're laughing and inside we're sobbing. Oh my GAAD, it is like, your worst nightmare! You are dying!
Ellen: [wearing chinos, and a collared golf shirt] Yeah … That is. My worst. Nightmare.

Woza weekend. It has been a 6-day week from the pits of Mordor. I am going to milk it for all the kip its worth, shop like I’m on Bonny’s Best Buys and avoid springboks and suitcases in all forms. TGIT.

To err is human

Being a team player in the web department of a large corporate body requires one to simply suck up and do certain distasteful things.

Such as writing the error messages that will appear on user’s screens when their online booking payment fails. It’s the stuff we all love to read. The words are so compelling I think they should replace the text on those little white sweets that say “Be mine” or “You’re sweet”. In our hearts of hearts, we’re just gagging to hear the words: “Sorry, your payment failed. Please verify your card details and try again. If the problem persists, please check with your bank or card issuer”. Go on, admit it makes you weak at the knees.

The best part about getting to write such Pulitzer worthy schpeels is learning to decipher the developer’s phraseology and then turn it into something accessible to the common man.

“THERE HAS BEEN AN ERROR <#>No. 37868!>!?!!!” can be softened with the less offensive “Sorry, the online booking service is currently unavailable. Please try again later. Apologies for the inconvenience”.

“Please Enter All details for Kin Contact Section, &! OnRecord will not be acceptable !!” That’s a corker. No idea about that one.

I’ve spent the last two days trawling through pages and pages of fucked up IT jargon and trying to put it across in a way that is pleasing to the English-speaking eye. It’s insanely stimulating.

Chicken Soup

Jeanpant and I flock for canteen soup every day to have with our crudités. Yesterday she made a keen observation: “This is all congealed like snot”. I dropped my spoon.

There’s a thing or two you should know about JP. She works those kitchen staff. It took her a while but now one can safely call her the Canteen Dominatrix. Normally the inflexible serving staff don’t alter their industrial converyor-belt style of dishing up, producing a standard pile of rice, 3 blocks of chicken and a litre of sauce, 6 frozen carrot disks and a kilo of green beans. There are specific starch and vegetable accompaniments per each protein item on the menu.

But not for her.

“Lewis, I will have the veggies that go with the roast beef – those ones – and the fried rice, and a bit of the spinach”. Her mix-and-matching-bucks the system. The first time she did it there was a deathly silence. The clatter of cutlery on trays ceased. The till stopped ringing. Employees in the queue held their breath. Confusion reigned behind the serving counter. Who was this woman, treating the set menu like a buffet brunch?

This works for Jeanpant and Jeanpant alone, because she has the right amount of giggle to go with each demand. Her outright dissidence is tempered by her charm. And Lewis is her puppydog.

Anyway, yesterday, the thought of that soup being the result of some collective honking back of mucous by Lewis and the Philippino bird who does the microwaving was too much for me. I would rather starve. JP was all over it. “It needs heating up, bloody hell”. Next thing our soup was being nuked and it returned to us bubbling at the edges. And it had lost a lot of its elasticity and had de-thickened. It turned out the snot effect was a red herring.

In the end it was a fine chicken soup. And then it dawned on us: that translucent stuff in which bits of chicken are suspended, looks and tastes EXACTLY like the filling in Spar chicken and mushroom pies in SA. It’s like the pie, without the guilt.

Punchdrunk workerbees

The weekend was far from Zen-like.

It kicked off with a gargantuan display of first-year student-like behaviour involving:

Blue punch (like being ankle-tapped by a Smurf)
Michael Jackson “Heee-HEEH”
Running around barefoot on wet tiled floors. Result: swart gevaar soles.
Fireman-lifts around the kitchen, up the stairs, ad hoc on the dancefloor
Bum-dancing
6 Springboks
Peggy in the pool, fully clothed
Lunging, and some blocking of lunges
Unnecessary aggression over music choices. What sad farker puts Snow Patrol at a house party?

It was extremely huge. I woke up feeling like a bergie had left his blanket in my mouth. Opened my eyes and saw Peggy face-down on her pillow. I briefly wondered whether the bird was even breathing. She’s a small person, but turning her over required an enormous effort.

It was High in Dubai (my wingbitch)’s last day in the UAE. Fortunately all of our sadness was numbed by the hangovers engulfing our senses. Some of us drank through the pain at a 5 star Dubai brunch (merlot). Others, like Swamp Donkey, simply watched. And felt sorry for themselves. Anyway, H in D had a fine send-off, and we all went and saw The Good Shepherd. At first I thought the Artic air in that cinema was some kind of April fool’s joke. Then I realized it was June, and I was the only one curled into a ball with two pashminas wrapped around me.

Saturday was a day of colossal Admin. I am fortunate not to have been on the top of a seventeen storey building, as the temptation to end it all may have won in the end. Salik, that son-of-a-tollgate-system-byatch has come to Dubai. So I started out queuing for half an hour with my fellow man at a filling station for a sticker that would save me a 1,000 Dirham fine.

If that was bad, work was stinking. Yes. Work. On a Saturday. Panic stations have set in and I was obliged to make an appearance at the group IT office, or sweatshop. The place is a 24 hour frenzy of programmers and developer worker bees from India. Unfortunately I was not feeling their buzz. After a 6-hour mental teeth-pulling exercise, I was home free. Then two bad things happened. 1) My parking had expired. 2) My front left tyre was sagging, deflated, lifeless. If this was an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, the implication would be that I was feeling the same as that tyre. Minus my wingbitch. Tired. Hungover. Disheartened.

Anyway, I found a new mate most likely called Mohommed, who fixed it and got 20 Dirhams in return.

You could say I got some Yang with my Ying and no sleep.

Sticks and stones

Being a long way away from one’s friends makes one vulnerable to attracting bizarre and absurd nicknames. A) Living in the desert and B) working for an airline (albeit in the communications department), you could say I’m asking for it. At another level, I have in many ways (to draw upon a phrase exhausted by my media theory lecturer) become ‘exoticised’.

My ex-housemate now calls me Sand-Pimperoo. Greenpant’s new name for me is Turbinfanny, and he wants to know whether I am working for Al Jazeera yet. Camel-jockey - I’ve heard more than once.

Racoon: How many towel-heads are you pulling?

C4: So tell me Heddles….you selling cheap flights these days…?
Me: No. I'm afraid I only point out emergency exits.
C4: And the brace position? That’s my personal favourite position….

I get the ‘beef or chicken’ line rather a lot.

Because I am a good sport, I let all this slide.

Last night I had the most entertaining long distance chat with my ex-roommate in from varisty. I had a missed call from her and immediately I panicked. Call me dramatic. Either something horrendous must have happened, or she was going to tell me she was gestating a child (which some would argue amounts to the same). So I phoned her back.

Me: Speak to me.
Response: [Crazed laughter]

90% of the call, we cackled like two old sissies dishing up mixed grill for res students. I blew 40 Dirhams in 5 minutes to listen to her absolutely pissing herself, while I did the same. We wheezed. We guffawed. We choked. And in between, asked eachother the same question repeatedly, “how ... thefuck ... are you?!” [Haaaaaa ... hahahaha!] “No, no - how are YOU!?”.

She’s a fine beast of a woman.

Look, we had our highs and lows during that colourful year of practically living in each other’s armpits in the room we named The Petting Zoo (for various reasons). Her lighting up a Stuyvie at 8am on a Sunday morning in bed, didn’t sit so well with me. I’ll reserve the less savoury details of our outlandish existence in that cesspit of laundry tubs of cane and cream soda and the results thereof for another post. In short, our res warden hated our living guts. We have a shoe box full of fines and disciplinary hearings summonses and a trunk full of … repossessed … clothing, which speaks for itself.

It is great to know that not even a continent, a marriage, and dramatically divergent lifestyles could come in between that good old-fashioned hysteria.

The long distance call

I love the drive to work. Generally I crank up my aircon, followed by my radio. And I sing at the top of my lungs and in between I swear a lot, at bus-drivers overtaking in the wrong lane.

On Sunday and Monday’s trips in this week, my eyes were still half-closed, (see previous Insomnia posts), but today I am fresh from last night’s nine-hour vrek. At 06:25 am this morning I hit Sheikh Zayed Road in a splendid mood.

Sometimes I tune into the SA Radio 2000 equivalent, ‘The hooooome of classic hiiiits’. This only happens occasionally, when I am not into the R&B / Dropthapresshaaaaaa vibe of Radio 1.

It is the stuff my moonbag and rockies-wearing aunt and uncle would listen to. Dubai’s ‘hooooome of classic hiiiits’ plays a lot of Roy Orbison and Cliff Richard. If you’re lucky you’ll get some Bob Marley or some Fleetwood Mac.

Anyway. This particular morning, this Paul Simon song came on, when out of nowhere, I got these goose bumps:

It was a slow day,
And the sun was beating
On the soldiers by the side of the road,
There was a bright light -

So I turned down my aircon. Still had the goose bumps. So then I turned the radio up.

These are the days of miracle and wonder,
This is the long distance call,
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all,
The way we look to a distant constellation
That's dying in a corner of the sky,
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don't cry baby don't cry
Don't cry -

And I was crying. Crikey. My eyes welled up with the emotion of it all. All of a sudden I was back at age five, at one of my folks’ raucous parties and Paul was pumping from the hi-fi and I was skipping around the pepper tree dodging the cans of Amstel and the potjie pot, wearing my grandmother’s long silk gloves and shorts and my home-made cardboard tiara, singing like a banshee and I was so damn happy.

There is something SO nostalgic about that song. It’s amazing. It is so growing up in South Africa.

Last time I heard it I was on a mate’s i-pod on a grey miserable day on a bus from Leeds to London, packed with unhappy looking northerners, and someone in front of me was eating these offensive-smelling cheesecurls, (but the prawn version).

Man it makes me homesick.

Gallupping Giddy Aunts

Hold the phone.

A Gallup poll in 2006 found that only 49 percent of Americans believed U.S. Muslims are loyal to the United States and 44 percent believed that the entire religion of Islam itself is inherently extreme. [P.W. Singer: Salon.com article War of Ideas, 26/06/07]

Shocked? Not really. Try this:

Likewise, in the 2006 poll, 39 percent advocated that all Muslims in the United States be required to carry a special ID.

Special IDs … read: dompas. Rather frightening stuff. Singer’s argument is that what is required is an ideological shift. It is clear as day that the election of a new US president alone will not provide the much-needed fungicide to this mushrooming narrow-mindedness.

An overhaul of deeply entrenched belief systems requires an understanding of what they hinge upon. Undeniably, it is the unadulterated, burning bonfire of fear, onto which Dubya, Condi, Cheney, continually throw more lighter fluid, (and Qurans).

Singer’s article concludes:

America provides a model of what citizenship and integration are all about, presenting an example that shines brightly compared with the autocratic regimes of the greater Middle East … Yet we seem to be on a path to repeating the worst of our periods of prejudice of the 1960s, or even the 1940s.

In full agreement with the broad argument, at the risk of offsetting another double-pronged insomnia attack, I will state my argument that living in the UAE has dramatically shifted my perceptions of ‘autocracy’. In some cases, it can work.

Ruled by His Heighness Sheikh Mo, Dubai is progressive, open-minded, and arguably, all-encompassing. It is a success story because it has recognized the need to draw upon foreign input and accommodating foreign influences. Mo is highly respected and loved by nationals and expats. His is an open office policy where ideas and suggestions from the average bloke or bird on the street are encouraged. He is generally philosophical and aims for the betterment of his nationals and Dubai and everyone in it. He allows expats their freedom of religion, has allocated land for churches, and tolerates boozing. He is a fair guy.

In 1999 the United Nations Human Development Index (HDI) placed the UAE forty-third in its list of countries with high human development. The HDI measures overall achievements in 174 countries on the basis of life expectancy, education and general standard of living.

The UAE is, in a lot of ways, the antithesis of the Western perception of the Middle East as backward and oppressive.

The philosophy behind the UAE is outlined in a statement released in 1971 as the new state was formally established:

The United Arab Emirates has been established as an independent
state, possessing sovereignty. It is part of the greater Arab nation.
Its aim is to maintain its independence, its sovereignty, its security
and its stability, in defence against any attack on its entity or on
the entity of any of its member Emirates. It also seeks to protect
the freedoms and rights of its people and to achieve trustworthy
co-operation between the Emirates for the common good.

Among its aims, in addition to the purposes above described, is to work
for the sake of the progress of the country in all fields, for the sake
of providing a better life for its citizens, to give assistance and
support to Arab causes and interests, and to support the charter of
the United Nations and international morals.

I think Dubya and his lemmings could learn a thing or two.

Insomnia please release me

I’m less awake than a sea cucumber slumbering on the barrier reef.

Insomnia Part II got me. There is absolutely nothing worse than desperately needing to drop a Z and not being able to. Last night’s mind interference was akin to having Motley Crue jamming (unplugged) in my room.

Struck up a reading session at midnight. After an hour or so of this I generally begin to feel like Silvia Plath. Disembodied. Dislocated. Out of synch with the world. It is weird being awake when everyone else is out for the count and you just wish you were too and instead you have a family of wraiths breathing on you.*

Then I started thinking about that reality show in the UK, ‘Shattered’. I think the poor sod who eventually won it by staying awake for the longest made it to 11 days minus his forty winks. Personally, I would rather be forced into cannibalism.

Despite the exhaustion, I am a human production line. Cranking out decisions, dominating meetings, churning out concise, informative emails. It may be the detachment that comes with being worn out. Margaret Thatcher said that to operate at one’s optimum, one should be ‘a little tired, and a little hungry’.

Bugger that. Tonight I am going to snort a Somnil.


*In keeping with yesterday’s Adrian Mole theme, my mind was a Pandora’s Box. Whaaaahaaaa.

Bushed

Cripes. Feeling like I’ve been hit by a Bundey’s Ball of Fun tour bus.

We’ve shown Miss Reginald Dwight and Miss O a fair bit of Dubai this weekend, but due to the stinking weather it was more an immersion into the lifestyle experience than a jam-packed sightseeing extravaganza. It’s been marvelous. One more of these tours and I will dethrone Robin Leech as the best host in television history.

Sleepless in Seattle

Man I am dog tired. You know that under water vibe? Today I am a salmon, swimming upstream in an inbox full of inane Polish query-mongering. Insomnia is something I would only wish upon All Blacks supporters, and maybe Mugabe.

Arbitrary thoughts, normally tossed aside, always seem worth exploring at 01:30 when you are lying awake like an ADD child on a glucose rush after a Fizzer binge. Underlining most of them is a pressing need for decisiveness. Ironically, at 02:00 you are no longer decisive anyway. Pros become cons, cons become neutral, and the bastards wash indiscriminately over your conscious mind, which by now has become as unruly as a Russian shot-put champion’s bikini line*.

Daniel Carter vs Schalk
What to wear to work / what not to wear
[Shit it’s late. I am going to DIE at work tomorrow.]
When to take leave for which trips. Trips vs other trips. SA in September VS London in October, or both? Skiing vs Sri Lanka, etc.
[I love my life.]
Is my current job worth a damn in the scheme of things?
This week’s gym timetable. Spinning vs yoga. VS VS VS.
[Intermittent analysis of the weekend. I love my life.]
Analysis of Scar Tissue and Anthony Kiedis’s farked up life. Imagining I am him. Realization: I’m not an addict, it’s cool …
Pondering Life as a Polish salmon.
Was Blood Diamond another one-dimensional Tears-of-the-Sun-in-sheep’s-clothing / Ra-rah America load of horse poo, or a fair attempt at least, at telling the African story. I suspect it was the former. But it was worth it to hear Leo call some chap a doos.

*I always feel like Adrian Mole when I write these posts about the inner workings of my mind. Sue me.

Great words

For unknown reasons, certain words hold immense appeal for me. Mention one of them, and it is all I can do to prevent myself from cracking apart at the sides with pure mirth.

Sometimes it is not even necessary for someone to even physically utter the words to induce hysteria. There are days when I will be brushing my teeth/applying mascara/pulling up to a four-way stop, and out of NOWHERE a Tourettes-like guffaw will escape me at the mere thought of any of the following [note: disturbingly, most are Afrikaans]:

Boep (SO much better than ‘paunch’)
Possum (the creature)
Vatlappie (oven gloves – shit what a pearler!)
Boskak (why, why is it such a funny goddamn word?)

Maybe my subconscious dredges up associations based on memories of funny farkers actually saying them with particular relish.

In the same way, it is amusing calling people by other people’s names.

From: Heddles
Sent: 21 June 2007 07:52 AM
To: mate
Subject: Dank Die Here Dis Donderdag

Hi Bob Marley

Thanks so much for a smashing dinner, I swear that was the best lasagne EVER. Garfield would have DIED!

Once I was called Bok van Blerk before I even knew who Bok van Blerk was. I laughed for days.

It is hilarious to throw random names like Salman Rushdie/ PJ Powers/ Kenny Rogers / Queen Latifah into emails/texts. The good Lord only knows why.

Life Scrabble

Bless my mother’s dear little cotton secret sockies. In the midst of my sorting out visit visas (AGAIN) pandemonium, answering inane Polish queries, taking mind-numbing inventories of lists and lists of word documents, and keeping my social email banter up at a respectable tempo, I received the most delightful interruption:

Email Scrabble from my mother, sent to all our relatives.

>
> CHANGE ONE LETTER OF THE BOTTOM WORD POSTED AND SEE WHO GETS STUCK AND
>
> CAN'T CONTINUE!
>
> RULES:
>
> YOU CANNOT ADD LETTERS
>
> YOU CANNOT USE FOREIGN LANGUAGES
>
> YOU CAN ONLY CHANGE ONE LETTER
>
> Send it back to the person that sent it to you, plus 10 new people.
>
> STARTING WORD: foot
>
> Hannah - boot
>
> Mary -bout
>
> Dan - boat
>
> Taylor- coat
>
> Nat - coal
>
> Brian - cool
>
> Bryan – fool

I will leave it at Bryan. What a rockstar.

I particularly enjoy the CAPITALISED instructions. Just makes me want to get stuck right on in.

Anyway, severe dehydration has set in as I have now retuned to my desk after hoofing it to the Arabic Typing Office. It’s a 10 minute walk in the sun and it’s got to be at least 100 degrees out there, and I am pushing beads like an Arabian mare at the Desert Classic.

So I have now got Miss Reginald Dwight’s visa application form in right-aligned, illegible italics. And because my A-rab Sugardaddio is in Hong Kong this week, Kotters is her proud sponsor. He has kindly agreed to meet me at Immigration to sign the form. He is now classified in my books as indispensable.

The Goose

My friend (my special friend) is getting hitched.

The Goose and I have known each other since we were size 0’s with grasshopper legs, sliding down muddy banks in cardboard boxes. We were both accompanying our Heroes (hers, her big brother, and mine, my two big cousins). At first I eyeballed her with suspicion. She wore a floral skirt. On a fishing excursion. I was muddier than she was and wearing boy’s shorts.

I warmed to her when I discovered we shared the same interest in dressing up (me in my grandmother’s crimpalene dressing gown, silk gloves and high heels 5 sizes too big, her in a silky blue number and kilos of lipstick, fanning herself with a feather duster). We looked like two emaciated, underage drag queens.

Our pursuits gradually became more versatile – we played with dinkie cars but we also had dolls. Baked cakes but rode BMXes. Barbies and pool-cricket.

We were conned into hours of tickling the Heroes’ backs for zero payment. It was a slow learning curve – the R2 coins we were promised per ten minutes’ graft never materialized (we were so happy it didn’t occur to us to toyi-toyi).

Goose did ballet and I did horse-riding. We created the best damn hotel in KZN at age 10, for her little sister and her friend to come and stay in: Hotel Pearson. We made the most killer promotional video for it. It was Freddy Mercury meets Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous. The service was astounding.

We waitressed together. We went to Westville Boy’s High socials together, not knowing a soul, and would end up slow dancing with the same two dorks every time (me with waistcoat-and-glasses boy, her with a little child-gecko who came up to her shoulder, transfixed by her beestings).

We painted our nails Tippex-white and read Blush magazines and talked about boys. A lot. Ad nauseum.

Then we went to Varisty and held each other’s hair while we chundered. Ever the control-freak, she insisted on having a bath once when we were 17 sheets to the wind. I demanded that she sing to me so I knew she wasn’t drowning. She picked ‘I luuuurve Paris in the Springtiiiiiiiiiime …’ Special.

After Varsity I missed driving around Grahamstown in her hunk of junk listening to tapes. The Goose went to England with her family and I moved to Jozi. That didn’t really separate us, in fact, for a while, we were closer than ever. We both found ourselves in the stinking armpit of hell regarding the men in our lives at the same time that first year, and there were large quantities of mutual snot and trane spilt down various cathartic channels (phone/email/text).

Since then it hasn’t really mattered how often we’ve spoken/emailed/texted. We still see each other’s inner grasshopper every time we meet.

And now she is getting married. I suppose this is where our parallel lives dramatically diverge for the first time. She has found a wonderful, crazy, funny, intelligent guy who adores the pants off her. And I can’t think of anyone who deserves it more.

Stop the fun bus Dubai City Tours

Peggy and I are insanely good entertainers. Besides our enormous capacity for partying, we are in touch with what the people want when they come visiting the Middle East.

We gave the Racoon and the Boxman the tour of their bleeding lives earlier in the year. They arrived from Mud Island pasty and wide-eyed (Bless them, we said). They left tanned, kitted out in designer gear and henna tattoos - generally far cooler beings. In four days we had covered it all – camel rides, boat rides up the Dubai Creek, kayaking attempts, golf, belly dancing, shisha pipes and hummus, and managed to flick the odd hoof on the odd dance floor.

This weekend we’ll be called upon to cook up an itinerary for the arrival of Miss Reginald Dwight and Miss O, this time tailoring a summer package to allow for the current outdoor discomfort levels as the region becomes increasingly inferno-like. We will be accommodating both ladies’ fondness for the acquisition of goods and chattels by providing access to a cross section of UAE malls. Like Trinny and Susannah we’ll able to provide advice on What Not to Wear in certain parts of the inner city (all feminine flesh should be covered).

If we don’t say so ourselves, we are ridiculously adept at providing the fullest possible tourist experience - from the planning stages (designing itineraries) to hands-on execution (providing accommodation and personally guiding the tour groups) - all while paying special attention to the varying tastes and special needs of our visitors.

Hence. We have conceptualised a new, soon to be outrageously successful, entrepreneurial foray into the world of adventure and explorations of the UAE.

We’re calling it Bundey's Ball of Fun Tours.

We'll have our own Jeep Wrangler (lumo orange), which will be able to ramp pavements better than any Hummer’s wildest dream. There will be flame-throwers and shirtless man-bitches in the back. We'll be blaring Busta Rhymes tunes from our 6 x 9’s and our logo will be a camel with a bottle of Crackling under its armpit.

Sweet titties. It’s going to be a killer!

Die Burger

I’m in love with Schalk Burger. He is THE hottest spanner. AND Man of the Match. None of my mates get it. Hell - neither do I. Love is crazy like that though.

Wearing it today like my Grade 2 school blazer. Most of us are taking serious strain after a barely legal triple header. I’ve lost my brain. I think it may have been trampled on (on the dance floor at Bar Zar) and is now stuck like a piece of gum to the bottom of my new Egyptian gay best friend’s size 12 tap-dancing shoe.

Thursday
Attended a FRAT party. For the first time in my natural life, I felt OLD. Crikey - my mates and I brought the average age up to 20. Picture a college jol in American Pie (the movie), and imagine being one of the oldest cheerleaders there. Funneling. Dancing on the lawn. 44 degrees. Sweat – LOTS of it. Pool-throwing. A near arrest. Tequila shots through hole in a gigantic slab of ice. Three of us passed out in Peggy’s bed. Two on the couch.

Peggy and I were operating below the intelligence level of sea cucumbers on Friday.

Friday
Attended Whose Line Is It Anyway, the live show. Almost ejected myself into the row in front of me I was laughing so hard at the five John Cleeses just pulling one beauty after another out of the bag. It was pure quality. Later I was plied with red wine containing a hidden shot of cane (apparently). This led to bum-dancing (and maybe some Latin American combo’s). Superb evening all round.

The fun burglar pulled in around 9am and a tactical chunder was the order of the day ahead of my compulsory spinning class. King K’s phone was mangled and therefore I had no means of cancelling. What a godsend though. We proved that gym is the new fry-up of hangover cures. Bongezis leave the building while you sweat. You like that?

VIVA THURSDAY VIVA!

It’s Thursday and I am flaming thrilled.

My head would probably be hurting less now if I was banging it against a wall. My pet woodpecker is hammering away at my left temple and I would pay someone a lot of Dirhams to end its life.

Last night the Expats found the most smashing Italian restaurant in the heart of Deira (central Dubai). We knocked back one or two breadsticks, followed by 6 bottles of wine. Then we got into an exhilarating Mars/Venus-type debate. I think it was mostly about the best way to meet decent men in this place. Maybe I started it. Kotters confirmed that no man worth his weight in beef would be likely to approach one of us birds in our usual intertwined koeksuster formation on the dance floor, cackling like sari saleswomen at the souk, gooi-ing suitcases down each other’s throats. The lady-clique is impenetrable, fair enough. But we have fun that way.

Everyone is hanging like bats today. Most have had their A game on in the email banter thus far. Kotters reckons he has Cosatu toyi-toyi-ing in his head. Peggy Bundey nearly coughed up a lung on the treadmill this morning. King K had to do an emergency Starbucks run, Jeanpant is sending filthy jokes, and no-one has heard from the Paki.

Besides my mini hangover I can hardly walk - delayed reaction from that BodyPOMP class day before yesterday. I’m currently stalking around like I have a pool-cue down the leg of my pants.

If it wasn’t for my restricted motor abilities I would break into a toyi-toyi. Since Agent mentioned it, I’ve been craving one.

I know tonight’s going to be a biggie cos Peggy has deleted some key men’s numbers from her phone. That is of course, and aggressive Dop ‘n Dial precaution. Out of respect for ourselves, we don’t want to be sending SMSes to people we shouldn’t be thinking of.

TGIT everybody.

Pour some sugar on me

Yesterday I bumped into my A-rab Sugardaddy while leaving work. Special K was standing there in his finest army general’s kit, smoking with his dish-dash wearing friend.

SK: Come here [grabs my hand]. Tell me, what do you have a mobile phone for?
Me: [Blushing. Last time he called me was at 10pm on a Thursday night. I didn’t answer.]
SK: I theenk you have a phone to receive the phonecall. And to make the phonecall. But your phone it does not work. It must be broken because you are never answering me when I call.
Me: Rubbish. I do answer my phone, but the last time you called, I was out with my friends. [Lie: I was watching a DVD with Peggy Bundey. And did not feel like a chat with the A-rab].
SK: I don’t theenk so. I theenk your boyfriends is not happy I am calling you and he is trying to control you. And that is why you are not answering me.
Me: No, no. It’s not like that. [Instantly regretting saying it].

[SK eyeballing me]

Me: I’m really sorry, I am on my way to gym and I’ll be late for my class [Truth].
SK: Wait. Let me look at you. [Grabs my hand, spins me around. God]. You are not needing the gym my darling. You are not fat.
Me: Ha. Ha. [What the faark to say to that. Knowing that I will be needing to call on the guy for a mate’s Visit Visa sometime next week].
SK: Listen, I am off to Hong Kong next week. I will give you my other mobile number. Call me and tell me what I can bring back for you.
Me: Ha … Ha. [Oh, holy smoking sheesha pipes].

The afternoon’s BodyPOMP class was like being hooked up to some kind of medieval instrument of torture. The instructor is hardcore - on all levels. It has a spikey, grey crop of hair, army-style. It wears rugby shorts and barks at the class with a demonic smile plastered to its face. Frightening.

At any given moment it may drop its’ weight bar like a red-hot poker, come crashing down off the stage (lunging 1000 horsepower hulking quads), and loudly identify what you are doing wrong. “Fuuurzer aparrt, keep your hendz fuuurzer apaarrrt!”

Apparently it once it had a twin sister. Which it ate. Walking up the stairs this morning to the 5th floor – I was slower than a three-legged llama with Parkinson’s making its way up the Andes. Good pain though.

Whacked

Today I’ve been talking like one of the Wayans brothers. Man I love that shit. That shit’s whack. W.H.A.C.K. brother.

It was brought to my attention that I dig this shit so much, that few would be surprised to learn that my ancestors were chilling on the beach waving at the ships when Jan van Riebeck arrived. Personally, I would not be shocked to discover I was part hottentot. Not in the least.

The degree of my shit-talking today is directly proportionate to the number of Nescafe (yes, you get it in Dubai) double-scoop instant coffees I have thrown at my face this morning.

My love affair with caffeine is comparable to Elvis’s relationship with peanut butter and bacon sandwiches during the latter part of his life. Much like being in love, abusing the beverage both raises my heart rate and keeps me awake at night.

I was dangerously close to rock bottom back at Varisty when someone slipped me an ice-cold bottle of Bioplus during exams. During my Philosophy 1.0 paper I felt like a band of circus mice were holding a kung fu demonstration at the back of my throat and my eyeballs were being inflated with a bicycle pump. NEVER again.

Caffeine and I patched up our differences when I became part of the working world however. Nothing beats the black filter coffee I used to abuse at Sunday Times. Those moon-bag wearing, grubby-fingernailed emaciated jounos inhaled the stuff like it was oxygen, along with their 60 Camel filters a day. I swear it was hallucinogenic.

God I miss it.

Young guns

My friend Queen Latifah likes 'em young. Sexy, strapping, and obedient. But what self-respecting woman doesn't? There is something to be said for the respect and yes, adoration, a lightie will bestow upon a more mature woman.

To schnack on a boy-child, four years your junior, barely out of University, wide-eyed, untamed: there is something so wrong, (yet so right) about it all.

The pluses are multiple. There are those toit abs. Surplus carbs from years of beer drinking have not yet taken hold on these chiseled packs of muscle. The boyish charm. Put that down to relatively less life experience in which to accumulate baggage. The reckless abandon - read: excitement factor. The freshness of it all. The general absence of cynicism; the as yet un-jaded world view as a result of not having egos broken by the steely corporate system. Essentially, and in a non-condescending way: his idealistic bubble is still intact. As is his spontaneity. These boys are keen to tackle the world (and you) by the ankles. ARRRRR!

Susan Sarandon did it and has not looked back.

I’m a quarter of the way through Scar Tissue, Head Boy of the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Anthony Kiedis’s biography. There is a poignant moment between his eighth grade self and Cher. She’s babysitting him. After a semi-innocent, voyeuristic moment where she whips her kit off, leaving the bathroom door wide open, she climbs into bed with him. Nothing happens, but the boy is in awe. AWE. Fair enough, the age gap is extreme, and yes, Cher remains a transcendent, archetypal feminine form, ageless, and hot. Still, it illustrates the point.

Real life example. Varsity, for most of us, was one gargantuan display of childish behaviour, but Rhodes Formal Dinners took lack of restraint to a whole new level. Absurd outfits. Blind dates, bottles of cane. Ridiculous games. Name-throwing. There was an Understanding that regardless of mutual levels of attraction between you and your designated partner, that by the end of the night, you would be smooching like sucker fish. Tongue-slapping guaranteed.

My all-girl digs in third year hatched an ingenious plan involving a group of hand-picked first year seals for our own clubbing purposes. Our blind dates were cowboys. Hot ones. Damn. We pulled it off. We had water pistol fights. Spin the bottle wasn’t even necessary. Most importantly, we got great pictures.

The romance of it all began to wane when at least three feisty young bucks were still lurking around the next day at 3pm. Night of wild abandon – yes. Daycare – not so much.

Stars in my eyes

I have this daily compulsion to read my horoscope.

Fair enough, it’s as tacky as reading You magazine. Fortunately I’m rather discerning. I screen the ones I don’t like. If Yahoo! or iVillage (God I’m ashamed to admit I’m an iVillage user) tell me anything less than ‘today, the sun is going to shine on your Leonine ass’, I feel obliged to hit Google until I find a half decent one. My loyalty to a single horoscope provider swings like James Bond in the 70’s. I risk the possibility of the negative forecasts leaking into my subconscious, influencing my mental state and thereby affecting my actions, resulting in a self-fulfilling prophecy of some kind. Yet the rush I get when I eventually stumble across a goodie outweighs what’s at stake. I am crazy like that.

Today’s overall outlook is less than satisfying.

Yahoo!

Emotional matters could hit the fan today at a social event or group meeting of some kind. Those around you are apt to be feeling especially stressed out and volatile, dear Leo, so be prepared for anything. Try to stay out of passionate confrontations yourself, and don't try to spread oil on troubled waters. At times like this, such attempts only cause unwanted attention to be focused on you! Stay centered.

[i.e. hide in a cave for the day, don’t speak to anyone. Today you are a shit-stirrer by default. Your presence among friends and family will be as well received as that of Idi Amin jumping out of the Queen’s birthday cake armed with a machete].

Today’s iVillage one was more helpful:

Feelings are just that - feelings. They're a type of information and should neither be condemned nor elevated. Learn to sit with what comes up and you'll find a whole new arena of possibilities.

Clearly, I will go with the latter. In fact, it’s pretty timely advice. I realize I have been in need of some rational, left-brained, male perspective right now after the last few days’ veritable smorgasbord of emotions.

I find the Onion.com always offers practical advice for daily living.

While there's no doubt that plastic collar stays have their place in the fast-paced modern world, Jupiter ascendant in Leo means it's time to invest in a set crafted from old-fashioned brass.

In keeping with my selectivity, although I am partial to my daily bullshitting from Yahoo!/iVillage, I wouldn’t go so far as to visit fortune teller for a one on one. That would be taking it a bit far. I don’t think I could stomach having some money-grabbing ho telling me my future self is a barren spinster earning a living from crocheting doilies. Digestible daily chunks I can handle. But a life forecast – never.

I did once have my “colours read” by an absolute ripper at a cricket day in Cambridge. I felt like I was surrounded by the cast of Dead Poet’s Society, with English accents. A bunch of toffs organised the most tremendous cricket match with entertainment for the WAGs - jumping castles, coleslaw and Andy Pandy the Colour Reader. Andy and I connected immediately. He told me I was wasted as a telesales person and it was time to get the rock out of England.

Which I did.

Gmail

My dear mother and I have this inside joke. She calls me Cabin Crew (drawing on my platonic liasons with my A-rab Sugardaddy), and I affectionately call her the Q-Tip (referring to the pale guy in Me, Myself and Irene. My mother is not pale, nor does she have milky-white hair or pinkish skin. The name just cracks me up).

From time to time I am required to provide technical support to the Q-Tip as she is faced with the daily intimidations of Gmail. The diverse range of her queries never fails to surprise me.

From: Mum
Sent: 05 June 2007 11:00
To: Heddles
Subject: Email
Hello Cabin Crew

As my technological adviser, can I send an email with 9 attachments, or would it be better to send him 2 or 3 separate ones?

(My personal opinion is that as Gmail is so whizzy, it should be no problem! but I know some people have a problem receiving so many attachments at once...)

Yours in eager anticipation
Q Tip


From: Heddles
Sent: 05 June 2007 11:10
To: Mum
Subject: Email

QT

Oh, bless you!

What we have learned is that Gmail is almost as boundless as the good Lord's love for us. One can send numerous attachments at once. The beauty is that Gmail will inform you should there be any sort of problem.

Kind regards,
Cabin

From: Mum
Sent: 05 June 2007 11:12
To: Heddles
Subject: Email
You little beauty!!! Damika [our Sri Lankan domestic helper] is wondering why I am shrieking hysterically downstairs...
xx


She’s a keeper for her raw entertainment value.

Like sands through the hourglass …

The word ‘Dubai’ should come with the tagline: Sand, sand everywhere.

As Dubai residents we live in an urban development, a burgeoning concrete jungle. Yet like most desert locations, it is not without its sand.

Every day I park in it. I must jostle with another 2,999 irritable, teeth-gnashing staff members for a spot in a litter-strewn, street cat-infested powder-pit. I normally pull in around 06:42 am. Most days I get to squeeze in right up close to the rubbish skip overlooking the mosque. If I arrive at 06:44 I’m screwed. 20 minutes of wild zigzagging, some creative maneuvering and a 12 minute walk (minimum) will ensue.

Walking through sand can be image-damaging. My pointy black shoes are permanently white-tipped. It irks me. Footwear must be removed and pockets of residual particles tipped out.

Look, no place is perfect. In Tooting, London, the pavements were a minefield of chav vomit, Staffordshire terrier coils and crisp packets.

David Banda, my black car, needs a wash twice a week to avoid looking like he’s wearing a cashmere jersey. He’s a lucky bastard if gets one. I know people that have let their cars gather layer upon layer of dust until it is too late to do anything about it. The Paki once had a team of Philippino car washers refuse to even have a go at hosing down his vehicle, it was that dirty.

Sand does have its uses.
• Sand-blasting.
• Manufacturing glass.
• Burying people.
• Building obscenely expensive islands.

It does hold some aesthetic appeal; making the place appear exotic (I’m trying). Airborne sand makes for bizarre sunsets of muted tones – the Jarhead Effect, which I quite enjoy.

Write-hoff

There are days when I long to be locked in a darkened cell wearing a pair of orange overalls, Hilton-style. Devoid of human contact. Minus a driver’s license. I am living through one of them today in fact.

I think my occasional antisocial leanings stem from my days as a telesales person in London. 1) I was conned into it. 2) I hated it. It made me more uncomfortable than Dubya Bush attending a Greenpeace bring 'n braai. My employers must have thought I had a bladder the size of a sesame seed what with the number of trips I made to the ladies to avoid striking up yet another arduous conversation with a self-important marketing prick I imagined wearing a salmon shirt . I just could not stand selling advertising over the phone. At least I drew the line at the headset.

Even though I have long since kissed those torturous, telephone-chord strangulating days goodbye, I am sometimes transported by some nightmarish time machine from a Stephen King novel back to that emotional state of flatness. I feel the familiar signs of impending reclusiveness coming on like a game ranger senses a fresh rhino dump over the next koppie.

• 90% of all verbal emissions and written communications are junk
• Speaking of junk (in trunks) the only conceivable remedy is to throw a Mars bar at the problem, though this is in most cases, on a once a month basis
• Spoken and written junk induces withdrawal

Wallowing never helps. Tantrums sometimes do (Hilton again). Ill-equipped with the Queen’s illustrious ability to get stiffen her upper lizard lip, I usually just wait for a day or so to pass and the Fun Police to return my personality.

Hometalk

Last night I accompanied Peggy Bundy, who has been squatting at my folks’ place the last few months, on a digs recce. A mate of hers’ former manager has a room available in his flat. Three minutes from Jumeirah beach, infinitely accessible, en-suite thunderbucket.

Invariably these occasions either feel like a) job interviews or b) blind dates. Stressful. Peggy needed a wingbitch. I was her Added Confidence.

When we hot-footed out of there 90 minutes later, who would’ve thought we’d both be grinning like ama-Lotto winning ticket holders. Housemates Merv and Mandy* are a damn hoot. Merv has done considerable time in I-raq, has a Caribbean tan and washes Mandy’s G-strings for her. Mandy is pissed off with Dubai, has a Welsh boyfriend whose accent she can’t stand, and is never home (except to collect her clean underwear). It’s a winning formula.

You can learn a lot about someone over a glass of Australian box blend.

On the way home Peg and I concurred that we felt no ill-feeling towards either Merv or Mandy. In fact we digged them. The house is P.I.M.P. too. So today she’s going to confirm that yes, she would like to ship in there.

Success.

Sometimes life throws us in with randoms. I say, variety is the spice of life. Decent living arrangements are hard to come by in Dubai, what with ridiculously rocketing rent. Not only is the package watertight (the insanely reasonable monthly fee covers bills, maid, gardener, stylish interior, great garden with rolling lawn by Dubai standards) … I foresee Peggy’s new place as a solid braai venue, a haven where I will book in on weekends to escape my folks. We can hang like bats and lie in our PJs all damn day without an ounce of guilt. We arrange cocktail parties featuring flame-throwers, dwarf-jugglers and bowls players with reckless abandon.

Regarding the age difference (OK, M & M are well into their 30’s) … we factored it in. We decided we are both pretty much over coming home to a digs of 20-year old louts where inevitably there are colonies of mould forming on the is a load of wet laundry still in the washing machine. We’re over shared environments in which your leftover pizza would have been smashed by some midnight prowler, the fridge contains a sole mayonnaise bottle and one egg, and socks, cigarettes, dried Two-Minute Noodles and half-empty beer cans cover all available surfaces. Environments in which there is no toilet paper. At any time.

We did that for six-odd years, got the T-shirt and it was great. Now, moving on.

*Bridge-burning protection. Names protected in case we become good mates in the future.

Fleeing the herd

Two fundamental questions pertaining to my current existence in the UAE and the global dispersal of my friends have been hounding me. Like carnivorous seagulls. Swooping. Pecking. Shitting everywhere.

I decided to sounding-board it with one of my trusty sounding boards, King K.

1st Burning Question

Me: Don't you wish you could FFWD a year or two just to check that everything is going to be OK? I am tired of being a grown up and being in charge of my own life. SOMEONE ELSE DO IT FOR ME PLEASE! [flashback to 1986: tantrum in Checkers. I threw a tub of chocolate yoghurt on the floor. Seconds later: got the hiding of my life].

KK: I feel like that, more often than not … I don’t think we ever truly feel equipped to deal with all the drama that comes with being an adult. I think some people just fake it well.

Me: Shit. That’s that one answered. God Dr Phil - you're good!

KK: Thanks – but I also think that sometimes we don’t realise how much we are taking on [being overseas] and then can’t understand why we feel down. Thing is human beings are averse to change so we resist it… The fact that you have been through so many changes, with relative ease – doesn’t mean it hasn’t impacted you.

Me: You could sell this.

2nd Burning Question

Me: Don't know what is up with me today, but I feel excommunicated from everyone [meaning, all my mates in Jozi and London] even though I am in touch with them all on a daily basis … do you know what I mean?

KK: I think it is totally normal… You feel like you’re out of sight out of mind; even if it is normal, it kinda feels weird when people are out and about doing stuff that you would usually be doing with them. Some days it can feel like a slap in the face if you are really missing those people – there are days I can’t even reply to mails because I feel as if I have totally missed out.

I don’t think it’s ever easy… But I also think, on the whole most of your mates have done the same; so while you might feel out of the loop now it will all return to normal when you see them, because most of them can deal with that type of thing. I think for people with few friends who haven’t done the whole travel thing – it’s more difficult.

Me: Fookmi.

You are all over it. I am keeping this email as a self-help reference manual ...

Not to sound like a martyr … but some days, being overseas is more difficult than others. Right now, 90% of my best mates are painting London red, 10% jolling in Joz-town.

Faark it. I am not an exile for life fergodsakes. I chose Dubai for now and, much like Detroit, “I love this city”.

Action in rollers

Last night’s Culcha-Club was a rip-roaring, raging success. We all emerged more enlightened free-thinkers after sampling the delights of ‘Pussy cat got wet!!’ (stir fried chicken), ‘Thai Me Any Way You Want’ (prawn salad) and ‘Hit Me With Your Best Shot’ (deep-fried Morning Glory … yum). I will let King K fill in the blanks as he so eloquently did in this morning’s post.

In Kotters’s words, it was ‘a barrel’.

The sound of my alarm this morning stirred up latent thoughts of suicide. It has one up on the Oirishman for Irritant of the Century. Being woken up forcibly by incessant clanging has never been one of life’s pleasures. Most mornings, I am a cow.

Excuse me, I am being disgustingly rude. I am probably offending the Suffragettes … Yes, thanks girls, I am grateful for the fact that I don’t need to have a full face of makeup applied and my hair in rollers once my dear husband, the stirrings in his loins successfully seen to, has fallen asleep. Failure to look permanently hot and put out in silence: supreme neglect of one’s marriage vows. Have a gander at this 1960’s women’s guide to bedroom behaviour. It’s a gas.



According to Cosmo’s forerunner, should your man experience a particularly violent loin-stirring, (suggesting “any of the more unusual practices” perhaps), you should “be obedient and uncomplaining but register any reluctance by remaining silent”. Sounds like a guest appearance by the Fun Burglar.

Paddywhacking

In general, I love Oirland, and all Oirish by-products.

River Dance – go on, ‘twas grand in its day. That Michael Flately could flick a hoof with the best of them.

Give me an Irish coffee and I’ll smash the thing.

Circle of Friends: once a favourite of mine. Chris O’Donnell with the whole accent going on was off the perv charts back when we were in high school. At sleepovers we’d work ourselves into a lustful frenzy over the man.

Once I even schnacked an average-looking short-ass barman in Dublin because he asked me so nicely: “Excuse-meh, do’ya mind if-a kiss ya?” Hell no.

I even learned to appreciate the quirky humour in Father Ted after my mother subjected me to series after series of it. She gets rather misty-eyed and plays The Corrs a lot.

Unfortunately, that’s pretty much where my infatuation with the leprechaun nation ends.

The last few months at work have forced me into a situation in which I am compelled to to dispatch strongly-worded emails to a certain Irish IRRIT. Delivery of copy is undoubtedly two to four days late.

There is almost always a panic spree on a Monday. Panicked conference calls ensue with the bloke invariably ending up in an emotional breakdown and his green underwear in a tangle. I wish his manager would administer a Guinness intravenously to put him out of his woe.

The potato farmer cannot for the life of him begin to fathom the time zone phenomenon. Bad move seeing as we, the client, are operating on Dubai time, and Dubai weekends apply. It seems the learning curve is a steep and insurmountable one: “We’ll deliver it for’ya on Friday” [No, you won’t. I will be hanging like a bat. At home].

Today he’s done it again. Get off my tits won’tcha Paddy.

Being a Goon in London

Dedicated to the Goons I love and miss.

Goonhood isn’t a brand. It’s a lifestyle.

Some say it’s something you’re born with. To them I say, ‘INCORRECT’.

It takes a special kind of man to fully embrace the way of the Goon.

Before you can even think about aspiring to become one, you need to be accepted into the clan. Given the size of Mud Island, the number of chavs and the delicate socio-economic balance between native Englishmen and Saffa imports to London, there are limited positions in the Goon camps. New joiners are sought out and hand picked.

Being male, having a background in University Drinking (preferably Rhodes, although a rogue Stellenboschian has slipped through the cracks), rugby appreciation and uncouth behaviour (an ASBO is always a plus) are fundamental. Anyone too eager or ambitious will be dropped like the extraneous salad accompanying a 3am kebab. Once selected, the process of attrition begins. Slowly, the fiery furnace of collective experience moulds, hones, sculpts average, upstanding men into real Goons.

Goon Law

1.0 Rule number one of being a Goon: behave as if you are civilization’s worst nightmare. Don’t grow up. Grow down.
1.1 Demonstrate brotherliness towards fellow Goons by forcing them to get plastered within a quarter of an inch of their lives (twice a week as a bare minimum). Goon-plastered: 110% motherless / legless / speechless; wrecked to the furtherest extreme, the outermost limits. i.e. the road less travelled. At times it will be tough. People will ostracize you. But you can do it.

2.0 Crucial to the survival of the camp is the Head Boy. Our Goons call theirs The Uncle. It operates on a system not unlike that of The Godfather. After the Head Boy, there are intermediate Goons who are frightened of him. And then there are the lowest in the pecking order – these are typically your Bad Drunks. Whatever shame you may have brought upon yourself, you can guarantee that one of the Bad Drunks did worse. Their Sunday Night Bongezi’s will be twenty times worse than yours. They will have blown more cash than you. In fact, their credit cards will be in the red and their savings accounts will be in overdraught curtailing any trips to Europe in the near future. They will have gone home with someone who was not only hit with the ugly stick, but spanked with it. In the face.
2.1 Burn (mock, ridicule, humiliate) the Bad Drunks regularly by replying-to-all on group emails until burnees want to hurl themselves in front of an approaching South West train.

3.0 Hold bi-monthly meetings at restaurants serving red meat or chimmichangas, where items on the agenda range from topics as diverse and profound as sex and general smut to infinitely amusing booze consumption stories.
3.1 As a Goon, the frequency with which you are frog-marched / thrown / kicked out of pubs should increase with age. Should your track record begin to disappoint, you will be excommunicated.
3.2 Beat the shit out of fellow Goons while dressed in gorilla suits at least twice a year. Other Goons should cheer.

4.0 It is OK to still have traffic cones in your bedroom at age 27.
4.1 Like the folks over at Nike, constantly strive for innovation. Come up with new ways of being destructive. See potential in kitchen trays, pots, pans as vehicles on which to descend flights of stairs.
Don’t be afraid to abuse a vuvuzela on a quiet afternoon at a chilled out braai. Break, bend, destruct …

Double-decker fun bus

Spent a large portion of last night wrestling with a few bongezi’s. No, not literally. Another disgustingly enormous weekend, double-pronged attack of epic, varsity-like proportions, predictably trails off into a cesspit of psychological restlessness. Some call it Sunday Night Demons - except in Dubai, Saturday is Sunday so you don’t have the soothing voice of David Attenborough to make it all better.

In Jozi, some call it the Ponies. The Goons in London call it bongezi’s because we once thought it was hell-uva funny when someone suggested putting bricks under your bed as a one-time cure. Anyway, last night, that frikken Rihanna/Umbrella song was ricocheting around in my skull until the early hours.

Flashback to Thursday. Korn’s Night of Sleaze was cancelled. So Peggy, King K, the Paki and I headed to Trader Vic’s for a quiet tikkapukka/heavy-handed daiquiri/unnamed drink out of a porcelain vase or four, and watched some salsa dancing. There was one Swayze impersonator throwing women across that floor like human ragdolls. We were loving it. Sexy mover, face like an Alcatraz escapee.

Next thing I knew we had a phone call summoning us to Zinc and were off like robber’s dogs. Now fully out of my starting blocks, I announced that I was going to crack open the dancefloor ‘like an egg’(?!). As you do.

Somehow we smeegled our way in to the VIP lounge and were throwing free Jack Daniels into our faces. It then got gory. Trance music. A live demonstration of how to use a giant pair of hedge clippers. Peggy clutching a bottle of wine on the dancefloor. There may have been some lunging of minors. The VIP Viper-lounge setup had those schnacky-coated spotty peanut things resembling quail’s eggs – boet, HELL-uva funny … Bum-dancing to trance music (?!). As Peggy lay comatose on my lap in the cab home, King K and the Paki yapped like abandoned SPCA specials over the driver’s tunes.

Unsurprisingly, Friday’s recovery was pretty miraculous. Hangovers are halved when you have a significant build-up. That night the Faithless concert, as King K repeatedly bellowed, was almost “a religious expeeerience!”. Hell’s teeth. They are that good. Skinny-ass Maxi Jazz, you king. The craziness was epic. Admittedly, I want to be Sister Bliss. Some random chap dancing like a wild tumbleweed in front of us asked me whether I would give him my “real” phone number so he could take me on his 40,000 dirham boat (but later confessed it may have been a jetski). Bless him – clearly used to getting fake numbers. Armin van Buuren, although a little heavy-handed with the trance-button, is one hot DJ. As in, good-looking. Ridiculously. Not hit with the ugly stick. Shame.

Weekend drew to a pleasing close with the Springboks plasteration of England in the rugby. Victory, to quote a well respected Dubai journalist, was “simpler than Paris Hilton, and twice as satisfying as her prison sentence”.

Phuza Thursday

TGIT.

It’s the Weeeeeekend, BABY. It’s times like this that the UAE is ahead of the rest of the world (by a whole day).

Tonight’s Sleaze Party (or ‘Night of Sleeze’ as Korn so endearingly put it in his appropriately tasteless PowerPoint invite) will be a messy one. What it essentially involves is everyone dressing like slags and getting absolutely trousered around his bar. Too early to say whether it will culminate in anyone wrestling in a blow-up pool filled with KY, but if we all get out alive I’ll be shocked. We’ll tell filthy stories and I might throw in the bum-dance.

The theory behind it all is that we’re deprived of smut because of the apparent lack thereof in the UAE. It wasn’t so long ago that the bioscope censors here pounced on smooching scenes in movies, extracting them like they were erupting goiters.

The Fun Bus is simply refusing to stop thereafter. On Friday, Faithless, fun suppliers to people everywhere, will be playing in Dubai. The last time I saw Maxi Jazz and Sister Bliss dropping the pressure like it was illegal, was at V Fest in the UK last year. I was wearing a black bin bag. 100,000 pissed poms in a downpour and I was on the Boxman’s shoulders. My mates The Goons were dancing like praying mantises that had been sprayed with Doom. It was crazy.

Anyway, I’m more excited than an SA health minister in a garlic field at the thought of flicking a hoof with those bad boys on the decks.

VW 1, Heddles 0.

Yesterday things weren’t looking so hot for mine and David’s future relationship.

The 3-year warrantee is about as useful as an ashtray on a motorbike. Yip, looking back on those crucial pre-purchase visits where I enquired about the full service history of the vehicle, I now distinctively recall the salesman (let’s call him Shabir Shaik for their shared truth-manufacturing abilities) doing the Dubai Head-Wobble [impersonating of one of those annoying ornament dogs accountants or admin personnel have perching on their desks, which if tapped or bumped, will wildly begin bobbing/nodding their heads. When people do this, it usually means they’re lying].

Anyway when Shabir’s head started dipping and bobbling around on his neck, I should have seen the writing on the wall. ‘Yes it has a full service history’ should have translated as ‘you clueless chump, I’m taking you for a ride and this yarn I’ve been spinning you is TEXT-BOOK stuff’. The fact that he could only deliver me the service book weeks after I’d purchased the car … inexcusable schoolgirl error on my part.

On the phone with Shabs yesterday, he assured me that VW’s repairs would be covered by Warrantee and that he was straightening the whole thing out with them over the phone. ER, WRONG. Man alive did I look like a tool when I arrived, indignant, at the workshop, confident in the knowledge that Shabir had sorted it all out for me. Truth is, he did a runner and bolted for Sharjah yesterday.

So I fumbled for the next grand in my wallet (freshly drawn for long-awaited purchase of Faithless concert tickets) and, through the tears (yes, I pushed out a good few salties in front of the service manager, service assistant and new arrival, the head of Customer Services). All my emotional breakdown got me was a 10% discount.

Tears and feelings associated with martyrdom morphed into white-knuckled anger as I sped down Sheikh Zayed, driving like I owned the fast lane, and no BMW with tinted windows and flashing headlights was going to stop me.

Next errand-call was Mall of the Emirates, for Faithless tickets and Sheikh al Snake (dad)’s birthday present. After a Jumeirah Jane behind the wheel of an SUV with her cellphone grafted to her ear almost ripped off the side of David’s face, I finally got a parking after circling ground-floor car park for a solid 20 minutes.

Now here’s the amazing thing. On entering the air-conditioned, marble-floored sanctum of MOE, my tension headache began to diminish. Walking past Mango, D&G, Louis Vitton was like a balm to my anxiety. In fact as bling levels in the window displays increased, so the debilitating effects of my strangulating vile mood lessened incrementally. Like a horse-whisperer, the Mall was calming me, with the same effect as 30 minutes of meditation, or an hour of deep breathing whilst listening to pan pipes.

It wasn’t an illusion. In fact I was in such a good mood by the time I reached the Virgin Megastore that I smiled at the ticket man. And then bought the Madonna Dancefloor Confessions CD.

Kulcha Club

There’s this knock you’re supposed to take on the chin after your first 6 months in Dubai. Expats here talk about it. It’s called Kulcha Shock.

The whole thing is well documented in leading expat literature (of the variety that is humbly minus-the-pith-helmet). Jeremy Williams wrote this handy manual, Don’t They Know It’s Friday: Cross-Cultural Considerations for Business and Life in the Gulf, basically giving practical advice on how to deal with it. A lot of folks hit this psychological wall as they battle to come to terms with living in an alien social matrix with a very different set of codes and understandings than they are used to.

The weird thing is, Dubai is quite like SA in terms of lifestyle. There’s the whole sun, sea and sand vibe (OK, more sand). Supersport and Carte Blanche are on tap: Saffas living here have their satellites hooked up to DSTV via Zambia (oops). Spinneys, the Spar equivalent, is better stocked up with Mrs Balls, boerie, and a myriad of rusk varieties, than Makro. We get on with our lives here as we would at home with almost no interruption: work, gym, beach, and on the weekends, we like to booze-it booze-it.

Same-same, but different. We’re living in a Muslim country, ruled by a Sheikh after all.

I discussed this with Jeanpant. While the majority of your time is a cruise, there can be this uneasy, queasy, inexplicable feeling the other 10% of the time. Which, given the situation here, is hardly surprising. “There are men walking past you in dish dashes and women in abayas everywhere you look fergodsake!”. We’re just not used to it.

Against this back-drop, we become the ‘uncovered’ women. I can’t really say that driving behind a bus bursting at the seams with exploited construction workers is always a comfortable experience.

There’s always the one watcher in the back row, craning his helmeted head for signs of a pair of mammary glands on the roads. With his heat-seeker smut-gaze successfully on lock, his compadres immediately sense it, and within seconds another 27 heads have swiveled. Some get out of their seats and blatantly turn around to face the back. Seriously, uncool.

That said, I’m aware of the risk taken and that in some contexts I may have just sounded like an ignorant, culturally intolerant tosser. Throw me a bone. It happened to me yesterday and so I am still freshly pissed off. Yet it is a reality, that 10% of the time.

My daily interactions with such a diverse spectrum of people is something I wouldn’t swop for anything right now. What is so amazing about Dubai and the UAE is that Arabic culture has fully embraced foreign influences, without losing any of its core beliefs and traditions.

The explosive expansion of the place demands skills and labour from abroad. For the most part, the needs of the imports are not only accommodated, but are of interest to most UAE nationals. Speak to a national and when they hear your accent it’s all about “how do you find Dubai?”

I haven’t hit my official 6-month wobbly yet but if and when it comes, I’m all over it.

The allure of public transport

Just took 90 min out of my day to take David to the doctor. It is well known that Admin has always been a preferred pastime of mine (it’s listed as a hobby on my Facebook profile). But car issues in particular have got to rank up there among my top three favourite types.

1. Red Tape / Relocation Admin (sorting out visas / cancelling Barclays accounts via Royal Mail because that is how it’s been done in England since Jack the Ripper)
2. Mate Admin (not pitching up where one should have / not emailing / not calling / not answering calls)
3. Car admin (all types: buying / services / maintenance / changing tyres / filling up).

Putting it mildly, today’s instance of Admin was pretty fantastic as far as admin goes. It ticked all the usual irritancy boxes, and more. I’ll start from the beginning:

Apparently whilst I was frolicking in Oman this weekend - snorkeling, day tripping in a wooden dhow alongside dolphins, making friends with a local tour guide who introduced himself as Malala, but changed it to Mandela when it clicked that we were Saffas (biscuit!) – David’s left-hand passenger window simply slid down of its own accord.

As luck would have it, there was a well-orchestrated mini sand-storm in Dubai. There David sat in our driveway, ingesting gust after gust of sandy wind, while his mother was sunning herself at a poolside resort 3 hours’ drive away.

Upon arriving back home in time for the Sharks game, I tried to patch things up with the little guy. Literally. “I’m sorry I neglected you” [wrestling with a rubbish bin liner and a piece of cardboard to act as a sand block, sweating, vloeking, hating life]. I’m not really good at this kind of maintenance stuff. Far better at breaking things.

Literally seconds after I had ‘fixed’ the window, locked the car (why? – SA habit), the opposite passenger window squeeled. Slid down. Could not be closed by any amount of button-pressing or tantrum-throwing.

Kiff, so, taxi it to and from work yesterday for a small fortune, to avoid leaving car with gaping holes exposed to the sandpit that is the staff car park. Book an appointment at dealership at fittingly inconvenient time – noon - for today.

While David spent the morning parked in the baking desert terrain parking lot, I prayed to Margaret Thatcher that one it wouldn’t occur to any of the worm-riddled street cats inhabiting the place to climb in between the plastic and the cardboard. I can’t really imagine much that would scare the bejesus out of me as effectively as the hiss of a slum-cat as I was accelerating out of there.

Anyway, VW ‘service assistant’ (whatever that is) Mr Robby (in Dubai you automatically get a Mrs or a Mr in front of your first name), flipping through the Warrantee I thrust at him, is not so “100% sure” whether the required operation will be covered because my service history is looking a little patchy.

Funny, considering I bought the car in Feb 2007. Even though I love David, cars aren’t my thing, and I’ll be blown if I picked up that the 15,000 km service wasn’t stamped into his book.

Now here I am waiting for the damage report like some crazed bus lady.

What bugs me

Was it Plato or Socrates who enlightened the world by saying that when it comes to relationships, you’re either the bug or the windscreen?

Anyway, the source of that little nugget of wisdom is irrelevant. For all anyone cares, it may have been a Chappies wrapper. The essence of the principle lies in the knowledge that the last thing that goes through the bug’s mind as it hits the glass, is its own naught.

Like most philosophies, the law applies to anything in life. This Super 14, the Sharks were the bugs. What makes this hard to accept is the fact that in this case, the windscreen was a brandewyn & coke suiping, boep-flashing Steve Hofmeyer enthusiast with a pair of horns protruding from his cap and a ring through his nose. It’s a damn joke.

A concrete illustration of the bug/windscreen concept is available to me on a daily basis. This is in the form of the desperate, mangy pigeon (let’s call him Bruce) that makes a bee-line for my window on the 5th floor from which I can survey Dubai’s bustling city centre. Bruce, poor bugger, was born without a learning curve.

I cringe every afternoon when I hear the thud / see the feathers flying / watch him scramble again and again against the too-narrow windowsill, clawing at the impenetrable surface. It might be a bad avian Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds flashback that’s the cause this behaviour, but it’s painful to watch. In Dubai they hire falconers trained to put birds like this out of their misery. Clearly Bruce slipped through the net and there’s nothing any of us can do to prevent this cycle of self-harm.

Anyway, daily Bruce viewings are almost result in the same kind of raw anguish rendered by sight that was one horned piece of excrement lunging across the try-line in the 79th minute. One day, the Proteas, the Springboks and the Sharks will all harden the hell up and become the windscreens they have the potential to be. Til then I don’t think I can stomach hearing ‘Rooi Rokkie Bokkie’ blaring victoriously from the speakers at King’s Park again.

Speaking of glass, David Banda is giving me shit. No sooner has my 3-month old vehicle been for a service than the rear passenger window refuses to close.

Keeping up foreign relations

I have landed myself a platonic A-rab sugar daddy.

Bear with me through the details. To cut a long, tedious story short, 2 months back I found myself having to do what I hate most in life – Admin – albeit for one of my best mates, Peggy Bundy.

The deal with Green Mambas (SA passports - useful only for jamming under a table leg to stop it wobbling) is that visitors to Dubai require the sponsorship of a resident. I soon discovered that my ability to sponsor Pegs (due to arrive on an under-cover work-seeking ‘visit’ and inhabit our long empty kennel in our back yard) was not doable as I am classified as a dependent on my biological Daddio’s resident’s visa.

Anyway, in stepped a knight in shining dish-dash. Let’s call him The Dish. I made a desperate call to the Immigration Office, and instead of issuing advice/instruction, he said he’d come and me on my work premises (warning bell?). Lengthy banter and a wink (unprompted by any hair-flicking, eye-lash fluttering or tears from my side) ensued. Before I could say “Sweet Kebab”, I was being introduced to a former colleague of Dishdash’s, Lieutenant Special K. In full army regalia.

I was frog-marched to the front of the queue at Immigration where the average length of a wait is equivalent to SA Home Affairs. In two shakes of a camel’s tail, I was being handed a double mocha choccachino and a glass of Evian followed by stamped Visit Visa. Double-take: Peggy’s new sponsor is one times A-rab trading company. Ghalas [done and dusted, paid for by Dish].

Apparently it is an embarrassing Western reaction to refuse a gift, or to bubble over with effusive thank-you’s. Both of which I did of course. My dear old mother’s eyes nearly bungeed out of their sockets. Visas ain’t cheap. Who were we to this guy anyway?

We have subsequently met the Dish for coffee and presented him with a coffee-table book of SA trivia to prepare him for his visit to Viva World Cup 2010. He wants to give us a tour of the desert and organize us a free pass into the Burj al Arab hotel to check out the marble work.

I have also in the interim received countless phone calls at ungodly hours from Special K. (Dodgy?) Now, feeling kind of guilty at the thought of using these guys for admin purposes, I had to pay a friendly visit to the guy. The two were comparing notes and K felt dissed.

A few weeks after the Dish / Special K Act of Magnanimity, I popped down for a mandatory cup of tea and a catch-up and the next thing I knew, a banquet was foisted upon me. Traditional pastries, tea and coffee – unfortunately, no shisha. Accompanying the snacks was unbridled flattery. “Oh my Cinderella, why do you never visit?” Blonde hair is the best asset a gal can have in this place.

Yesterday I had to suck it up and return to Immigration (with Peggy in tow) to renew her expiring visa. K launches into an account of our first meeting with Peggy: “My gaaaaad, the first time I saw your friend I thought, she must be cabin crew. I’m getting sick of her, visiting me three times a day, bothering me at my house, security is beginning to become an issue” / “I’m going to Hong Kong next week, what can I get you Cinderella?” He sped us to the Arabic typing office to get our extension form filled out (usually a ball-ache – but he made a call to a friend beforehand), and got us a discount.

The amazing thing about the whole scenario – and Pegs and my mother can confirm – is that not once did this all feel sleazy. In all seriousness. They are genuinely cool human beings with wives and kids and they are dying to know what us expats think of Dubai. K is cool with gooi-ing me a fast-track visa every once in a while. And that translates into me being cool with having the occasional cuppa and a bulldust with the man.