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.