Hotel Chocolat And Brand Positioning Online

Hotel Chocolat, Kensington, W8 (Photo credit: Ewan-M)

We were talking positioning brands online the other day on the Business Breakfast – it's linked here if you fancy a listen in - about the changes in the rules that taking an ‘offline’ brand to the Web entail. As part of that chat, we looked at some brands that had moved the other way – digital brands that have made their way onto the high street. One of the more high profile successes at this has been Hotel Chocolat.

I am, and always have been, a huge fan of this company. Started by founder Angus Thirlwell and co-founder Peter Harris as a business selling mints in 1988, by 2003 the company had become known as ChocExpress, a catalogue-based mail order business (with a website) that included a chocolate tasting club – a concept that was to be core to Hotel Chocolat and a club that today has over 100,000 members.

The trouble was that ChocExpress didn’t reflect the luxurious image that Thirlwell was after for his premium chocolates. And it was that dissatisfaction that led to the product I first encountered in my mum’s living room many years back. It was a luxuriantly packed box of chocolates, more like a hat box than a chocolate box, with a ‘Hotel Chocolat’ room card-key and a ‘do no disturb’ sign to hang on the door while you had your one-one experience with that box of very fine chocolates indeed. The chocolates had individual recipes, lavish descriptions and a little card for you to take tasting notes and send them back to Hotel Chocolat.

Here was an online business with a two-way customer communication mechanism built into its very DNA long before everyone had started talking social media.

The brand, and its promise, was incredibly strong. It was unique, clearly differentiated and communicated throughout the product offering – and the website which took over from the catalogue as the premier conduit for reaching customers. Although Hotel Chocolat was quick to open high street stores, it has been the Internet business that has driven the incredible success of the company which now employs over 800 people and has a real Hotel Chocolat in the Caribbean and its own cocoa plantation to boot. The company has launched a range of sub-brands, including boutique cocoa outlet Roast+Conch and Cocoa Juvenate, a range of cocoa-themed beauty products. There are over 70 stores in the UK’s high streets, five in the US and three in the Middle East. You can nip down to Mall of the Emirates if you fancy a chocolate rush par excellence - the only shame is that Hotel Chocolat's boozy chocolates don't get a look in. Because they, my dears, are very good indeed.

And that website’s still there, reflecting that brand positioning as strongly today as it did almost ten years back when I opened a posh-looking box of chocolates in my mum’s living room and was transfixed by the painfully smart marketing that met my eyes just before I lifted the paper covering to reveal the rows of little shinies underneath.

You know, I might be lying about the positioning. It might just be all about the chocolate after all…

Hatta - The Track That Is No More. And Summer Rain.

We spent the weekend at the sublime Hatta Fort Hotel because we've been married 22 years and both of us needed to get away to overcome the feeling of utter shock.

The Ramoul Bar at the hotel is one of my favourite places on earth. Seriously. It has many fond memories dating back two decades and more - and it's one of the most wilfully retro experiences to be had in the UAE. Built in 1981, the bar is sheer '70s wonderfulness, all dark brown velour walls, a walnut ceiling dotted with the original spotlights, square glass lights and brown silkscreen prints on the wall. It's glorious. The original furnishings and leather bar edging were cream, they're red now and the Millbank speakers on the wall have been replaced by Bose units, but much of the original bar is as it was the day the hotel opened up in those faraway hills. It suits a Martini as well as anywhere suits a Martini. Lemon twist, no olive, thanks.

The Hatta Fort still does silver service. It's wonderful - food is revealed from beneath silver covers, caesar salads and crepes are made at your table. It doesn't get much better. The hotel runs like clockwork, it knows who it is. Its staff actually want to help. It has beautiful grounds, makes a brilliant breakfast and is more chilled out than a quantum hyper-chiller.

We took a turn up the Hatta track - as was. It was raining when we got up for breakfast, a fine, soft drizzle and a yellow cast to the sky, the mountains slowly enveloped in the encroaching mist. Breakfast looking out over Hatta watching the mountains fold into the meringue, then we set off.

There are few things finer than cool summer rain in the mountains.

Oh, my dears. Who remembers the Great Hatta Track? We first travelled it together, Sarah and I, the week we met during GITEX 1988 - 25 years ago. We hired a Corolla with a colleague of mine and Sarah's housemate and we took it out to find the Hatta Pools. We overshot. Four wheel drives passed us, staring. The girls got out and pushed at one point as the Corolla's little engine heaved to negotiate the rutted, vertiginous passes. We stopped at the village of Rayy (now spelled Rai for some reason) and asked directions at the mosque. It was a Friday. A wasp got into the car, cue the exit of two girls wearing shorts. Legs up to their bums. It's the only time I've ever felt intimidated in the Middle East, in the middle of nowhere, more callow than Callum the Callow Marshmallow and the locals furious at two prancing half-naked beauties decorating their Friday devotions. We beat a hasty retreat and ended up in the wadi at Shuwayah, playing with frogs in the glittering wadi waters that wove through the hot rocks.

In a Corolla. We did it in a Corolla. The hire company was furious at the state of what was eventually returned to it. But what to do?

It's just a memory, now, that track. It's blacktop nearly all the way, the only exception one short section where the road has to cross a particularly fearsome stretch of wadi that spates with road-destroying force. They've blown up the mountains to make the passes (three of them) more passable, so they don't climb as steep or high. The biggest was a first-gear climb, especially when the track got rutted up and you were traversing as well as climbing. The swoops down into wadi beds with their stomach-churning bottoming outs have all gone. It's just, well, a road through the mountains.

But they are still glorious, arid, scalloped mountains that surge from the land with all of the enormous splendour of their volcanic uplifting from what was then the ocean bed. They fold and thrust, patinated by purple outcrops, ochre faces and grey-white striations. Shuwaya is a memory of a wadi pool now, drained by snaking black plastic piping - and the Oleander Waterfall is clearly no longer visited - the old track as it originally was, washed away and accessible only to the brave who knew it was home to a little waterfall and a welcoming campsite on the high ground above the temperamental wadi bed.

The rain petered out, the heat intensifying as we drove down onto the plain, still blacktop all the way where it had once been gatch track, a road through the Madam plain and then up into the mountains past the Omani check-point and then back up to Madam through Vilayat Madha.

I felt intensely sad at the passing of those tracks. But that, I am sure the architect of the new roads would tell us, is progress.

Game Of Thrones. I Am Clearly Unbalanced.

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Kindle has turned me - a lapsed bookworm - once again into a voracious reader and it's touch and go whether I've made more money from Amazon than I've spent on there. I'm constantly on the lookout for new reads, but it's hard - there is so much dross out there, it's not true and I'm not just talking self-published dross, either.

It's hard to get to the good stuff sometimes. I need a literary Hillary Briss...

I've just finished re-reading Frank Herbert's Dune, a book I read back when I first starting working in the Middle East. It's just as amazing now as it was then, although the 'writer' in me did unearth no fewer than three lazy instances when a sandstorm was described as being the colour of 'curry'. Jalfrezi or bhuna?

In hindsight I probably shouldn't have approached an unknown from such a high, but that's the breaks.

One of the things that makes Kindles so brilliant is whim. At a whim, I can have pretty much any book I want. So I downloaded George RR Martin's Game Of Thrones. Not because I've seen even one minute of the HBO series, but because I'd seen such intense praise for Martin's original books. The Kindle has made me considerably more catholic in my reading, I'm more up for an experiment than I would have been at £9.99 and 2 Kg of paper. I had Game Of Thrones in my hands within the minute.

Three days later I've finished reading it. I haven't finished the book, just finished reading. I got bored. Terribly, dreadfully, terminally, mind-numbingly bored. It's like The Bold and the Beautiful on horseback wearing leathers, a sort of two-dimensional fantasy version of a slightly dumbed-down version of English history with obvious situation played out over obvious situation in a sort of millefeuille of obviousness. The baddies are clearly bad, the goodies are clearly going to get into trouble. It's Punch and Judy on a lavish budget with some legendary dragons.

I can't finish it. The world's raving about it, glued to its TV sets with purple drooling faces, slack-jawed and wide-eyed as each trite event plays out on that flat backdrop painted by a four year old with wax crayons, a sort of medieval history lite with one-cal fantasy trimmings.

I am obviously alone in this, the only person still alive in a planet of shuffling, brain-eating zombies. Either that, or I'm simply unbalanced.

Game of Thrones is a Dorothy Parker book - not to be tossed aside lightly, it should be thrown with great force...

Book Post - Stuck

(Photo credit: NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center)

It's an odd place to be in. Having finished Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy, I'm having the odd potter with the manuscript, tidying a sentence here, clearing up a point there and adding little dashes of colour where that seems the right thing to do.

But if I tell the truth, I'm sort of marking time. It needs to go off for editing now, but I'm still waiting for one agent's feedback before I give up - again - on 'traditional' publishing. I'm reconciled to the fact that Middle Eastern spy thrillers are not going to sell to a UK publisher.

Which begs the question, what to write next? It's probably not going to be a Middle East spy thriller, given events so far. It's been great that loads of people have enjoyed Olives and Beirut, but 'loads' is relative and it hasn't added up to more than break-even with the project so far - and certainly isn't going to pay to have Shemlan printed. I'm still down a few thousand dollars on the deal. In fact, the only people who've made money so far have been the editors, printers and distributors.

Which makes one of us pretty dumb. And there are no prizes for guessing who's wearing donkey ears around here.

So what to write next? I know I will write a new book - it's already killing me that I haven't started. I've got a number of projects jostling for attention. A retired IRA bomber who's blackmailed out of his rest by modern day terrorists. A psychological thriller based around a damaged woman with amnesia, a whistleblower and a battlefield drug trial that's gone horribly wrong. And, oddly, an allegorical comedy based around a logical man's battle with authority are among the candidates that are banging around in my head like dodgems in a power surge.

The result of which is I'm stuck. I literally don't know what to do next. I've never had writers' block, but now I've got something worse - book block.

The answer might be to start on a romantic comedy or a vampire fantasy or something more 'commercial'. Trouble is, of course, neither I nor the publishing industry really knows what's 'commercial'...

In the meantime, I guess I'll just carry on tinkering.

The Emirati Indian Road Rage Assault Video

So Twitter was all a-twitter on Monday night with chat about a video posted to YouTube. The clip, taken from a car adjacent to the incident, clearly shows an Emirati man beating a cowering Indian man with his aghal (the black ropey headdress thing worn as part of the traditional Arabian costume) and punching him. The Emirati appears to be driving a Lexus Land Cruiser with a three-figure plate (a status symbol here), the Indian a stationery distribution company van.

By Tuesday, the YouTube video had been taken down but these things, once done, are hard to undo and it was soon back up thanks to LiveLeaks. Why would the video be taken down? Well, because it's illegal to photograph or film someone in the UAE without their permission - and this was certainly a case of a video taken without permission. The taker obviously gave in to wiser counsel, although his act in sharing the video was a brave one, presumably motivated by sheer indignation.

Dubai Police acted quickly after a large number of people brought the incident - and video - to their attention, particularly over Twitter. The Emirati - a government official as it turns out - is currently 'in custody' and faces a charge, according to 7Days, of minor assault. This carries a maximum jail term of one year and a maximum fine of Dhs10,000.

The Indian gentleman who took the video and posted it to YouTube was arrested after the official's son lodged a defamation case against him with police and is apparently 'being questioned' after his computer was seized by police on Tuesday and now potentially faces a charge of recording without permission and defaming a person, which carries a TWO year sentence and Dhs20,000 fine. Abusing someone's privacy and putting private material on the Internet can result in a six month jail term, the newspaper tells us.

Can we be quite clear. Defamation applies here in the UAE as a criminal case and includes publicly sharing evidence of a thing that would lead to punishment for the person so defamed - regardless of whether the alleged act took place or not. The UAE cyber-crime law makes this clear. You can, in fact, defame someone in the UAE with the truth.

Dubai Police have told press the man should have shared the video with them rather than post it up publicly, where hundreds of thousands have now seen the incident. The son told media the video had damaged the reputation of his father and family. You'd be forgiven for thinking that beating cowering men who know full well that if they raise a hand in defence they'll be for the high jump and likely end up being deported for it was what damaged anyone's reputation, but who am I to judge?

At one rather poignant moment in the video, the poor man appears to hand the dropped aghal back to the official who continues to beat him with it.

I thought there was a telling paragraph in Gulf News' story about the arrest today. Here, have a go at seeing where YOU would put the bold text emphasis in this paragraph quoted from that story:

"Major General Al Mazeina said the case will be transferred to the public prosecutor. He said the Emirati official has been arrested over beating up an Indian man in the middle of the road in clear view of other road users."

My mum said I should always tell the truth, but she never told me you should go to prison for telling it. 'spose it just goes to show what my mum knows...

1,000 Things You Can Do With A Masafi Bottle. Number 82...

E(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This piece in today's Gulf News had me chuckling - not because it is inherently funny, but because it reminded me of an event almost twenty years ago.

I should add that the piece relates to Dubai Municipality's latest - and highly laudable - scheme, an eco-friendly insect trap. We've seen a spate of recent stories in the UAE after illegal pest control companies' activities have led to a number of poisonings and Dubai  Municipality's got a point - a Masafi bottle with the top cut off and inverted then filled with some sugary water would, indeed, create an effective, simple and inexpensive insect trap.

But my chucklesome thought was back to the days of yore, when colleague Matt and I first arrived with our respective partners to set up a publishing business in the wilds of Ajman. We spent the first six months living in temporary accommodation, then found ourselves nice spanking new apartments just on the Ajman, Sharjah border in the Al Hamrani Building - at the time, the tallest building in Ajman (at five storeys!).

If there was one fly in the ointment of our contentment, it was that there was no plumbing for a washing machine in our apartments. I elected to pay the plumber who had worked on the building to install such plumbing in our apartment. Matt refused to pay the man's usurious price.

Quite apart from unerringly drilling a hole into one of his own pipes (a truly comic jet of water in eye moment) and running a plastic pipe across the wall at 45 degrees then across the kitchen floor to the overflow, the result of the plumbers labour was at least functional. We hadn't yet learned to shrug and move on when it came to aesthetics, being freshly out of the UK.

Matt's solution was infinitely more ingenious. He merely ran the outflow pipe from the washing machine to the overflow. Perfect. Except that pipe actually has to go above the level of the drum in order for the pump to work. Never daunted, inspired by Heath Robinson, Matt tied the outflow pipe to his iron, perched on top of the machine. Now the pipe was raised above the drum and the pump worked. Except now the pipe was too short to reach the drainage hole in the floor.

Channeling Mr Robinson, his teeth grinding and a wild look in his eye, Matt cut the base off a Masafi bottle, then cut little splines around it, pushing the bottle into the drainage hold in the floor. This allowed the outflow pipe to be jammed in the neck of the Masafi bottle (they were vinyl in those days, none of yer posh PET).

The perfect solution. We went out for a drink to celebrate Matt's undoubted genius. On returning, he discovered that hot water melts vinyl bottles and his apartment was consequently full of warm, soapy water, the only drainage hole being blocked by a melted vinyl bottle.

Which is why that insect trap had me chuckling...

Oh Noes! Ramadan Traffic!

lumia (Photo credit: twicepix)

My life, certainly my sanity, has arguably been saved by Nokia Here Maps over the past few days. A mild curiosity - one of many packed into the excellent Lumia 920 I am using (wot Nokia's PR agency gave me to 'trial' and then 'forgot' to ask for back) - Here Maps has been a thing of great beauty as Ramadan has rendered the normally relatively predictable traffic patterns of the UAE truly Brownian.

The mornings have now changed from the 7-8am school run congestion to a post 9am get to work rush, while the afternoons appear to start with the lunchtime rush and never really die down up until 5 o'clock ish. Different roads are seeing different traffic densities as people try out alternatives, timings change as they try and avoid the worst of the congestion. You'd hardly think a great number of people had already left for the summer, but apparently they have.

It's all made things a bit unpredictable and for those, like me, fond of the open road, you have to get pretty witty. Which is where my mobile has been so very handy: Nokia's Here Maps, apart from being nicely accurate, contains a number of overlays - one of which shows the density of traffic. So you can skim along your intended route and check if its clear (green) a bit sticky (orange) or utterly banjaxed (red).

I have been doing that rather a lot recently - in fact every time I venture out. It has saved me countless hours of grief and frustration already...

The Last Telegraph. Stop.

Major telegraph lines in 1891 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Today there is actually less chatter in the world. The last telegraph has been sent and now the old machines are officially museum pieces. The last message over a telegraph network was sent by Indian state operator BNSL - Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd - from Pune's telegraph office, in fact Saturday saw something of a rush for the outmoded service, with something like 150 telegrams commemorating the end of a service that has been connecting the world for 160 years.

Although Samuel Morse gets all the credit (his telegraph was patented in 1847), there were a number of pioneers developing wireline communications systems - it was Morse, fuelled by having missed his wife's death as the message she was ill came too late, who defined the telegraph and whose famous code allowed the first telegram to be send in 1938.

The story was carried last month by Business Insider, where I stumbled upon it and took it along with me to Dubai Eye radio. The National's done quite a nice piece on it today.

As I've mentioned before, the UAE has its own little piece of telegraph history, with Musandam's Telegraph Island, a tiny islet in an inlet out by the Straits of Hormuz in what is apparently called the Elphinstone Inlet. The telegraph station there was built in the 1860s, but was only actually occupied and in use for two years or so around 1865-1868, before the cable was re-routed.

Apparently in that time, two men were lost to the appalling heat - the legend is the island is the origin of the phrase 'going round the bend' because the hapless, over-heated Brits would go potty waiting for the next supply ship. A gunboat had to be maintained for the safety of the crew on the island, apparently, because of the 'piratical nature' of the locals. As the excellent 'The Myth of Arab Piracy in the Gulf' by HH Dr Sheikh Sultan Al Qassimi points out, they were a feisty lot back in the day.

The cable, part of the London-Karachi link, meant that a message could travel from London to India in just five days. Advances in technology meant that just seventy years later, a man could fly from London to Sharjah in just four days.

How we move on, eh?

For Whom The Trolls Troll

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Australian marketing website Mumbrella has a habit of unmasking Twitter #fails and so its eagle eye was fixed on the hashtag #SocialCV after Melbourne based PR agency Porter Novelli announced it was going to canvass for account executives based on the top three tweets on that hashtag.

Mumbrella was right to keep an eye out – it wasn’t long before Twitter decided to have some fun with the hashtag and sure enough, little storm clouds formed over the teacup - if you can't be bothered to look for the hashtag, some choice examples are linked here.

There are those who think the stunt was ill-advised, that perhaps the search for talented communications consultants could perhaps be filtered in ways beyond 140 character statements. There are those who can’t see what all the fuss is about. But in between there have been a large number of very witty tweets indeed, the vast majority at the unfortunate agency's expense. The hashtag trended in Australia, natch.

Although Porter Novelli was initially slow to respond (in Twitter terms), the agency came out with a response on Twitter and also took to Mumbrella, claiming its ‘plan for the trolls has worked’. The response calls on brands to better understand social media, which doesn’t really help matters when you've just been roundly spanked by Twitter.

To sum up what happened, an agency made an ill-advised attempt to show it was ‘down with the kids’ by using a hashtag to recruit, was lampooned and then tried to justify the campaign with a ‘we meant to do that’ response. Significantly, its claim to have planned to manage the trolls showed just how out of its depth it was – there were no trolls, just people having a laugh at what they thought was a dumb idea.

Knowing the difference between those two is actually quite a critical skill – people who disagree with your point of view or actions aren’t trolls, they’re people who disagree with you. Trolls are people who are intent on harming you – and there’s a world of difference. You can reason with people who disagree with you – or you can see their point of view and ‘fess up for getting it wrong. But you can’t reason with people intent on harming you. You can only put your point of view for the benefit of any watching and move on.

Trolling is a recognised Internet based behaviour, although firmly founded in the school of offline human nature that ties cats to lamp posts and stones them. It’s vindictive and nasty and frequently hurtful in the extreme. It’s couched in the concept of anonymity and so trolls rarely carry much reputational weight. It's usually personal - highly so. It's sort of hard to troll a corporate...

Going back to good old fashioned communications planning, what Porter Novelli actually faced was a negatively elective audience, not trolling.

And it was, IMHO, a negatively elective audience entirely of their own making. So no, Tubbs, the plan didn't work...

No Book Plugs Today, Then...

Beirut (Photo credit: Miss Lady Lee)

One of my many odd little habits is having a window on my TweetDeck dedicated to the hashtag #Beirut, on account of my having written and published a book of that name. Once again today it caught my eye as the usually lazy pace of tweets with that hashtag changed and tweets started falling at a rate of knots. Sure enough, it wasn't on account of good news.

A large car bomb had gone off in Dahieh, straight away dubbed a 'Hezbollah stronghold'. Dahieh (or however you want to spell it) is the southern suburb of Beirut, a sprawl that spreads either side of the airport road. Its population is, sure enough, in the majority Shia. And so the slumbering giant of Lebanese sectarianism is prodded once again awake and we can only stand aside and hope that tempers hold, that people don't lash out in revenge and that Lebanon's increasingly febrile peace is maintained. Already Saad Hariri has blamed Israel. Others are looking for anyone to blame. A shocking start to Ramadan.

It's a blessing and a curse that hashtag. I was just finishing a long peroration on how sexy the city was for the Beirut - An Explosive Thriller website last year when I saw the immortal tweet, "What the f*ck was that?" which triggered the wave of news breaking on #Beirut about the huge Ashrafiyeh bomb. Now it's happening all over again. Eighteen hurt, forty dead, 38 wounded, 40 lightly injured. The news sites scrambling to get the headlines out first and just adding jumble to the tweets from eye witnesses.

I'm a great deal happier when there's nothing more exciting on that screen than a tweet from me about buying my book or sharing a review or some other inanity. A slow news day in Beirut is always a good news day...

A Matter Of Form

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So I was talking the other day about Sharjah announcing online tenancy contract renewal, the dream yet to be realised. There's a slew of announcements doing the rounds these days following Sheikh Mohammad's clarion call for e-government to take to mobile and everyone's busily trying to show they're working on m-government. Today, for instance, the Emirates ID Authority is to be seen in Gulf News demonstrating near field technology and pre-announcing ID card renewal via mobile apps by the end of the year.

Let's revisit that one just before Christmas for some reality checking, hey?

It's a major cultural change for the Emirates, all this online documentation stuff. It's counter-cultural to a huge degree. We're used to the good old ways and they are very analogue ways indeed. The generally accepted procedure is to require huge amounts of documentation to be produced in order to complete the simplest transaction and to insist on that transaction being carried out in person. It is mandatory to neglect to tell the applicant (or, more properly, supplicant) which documentation is required. When the applicant arrives hefting a huge wodge of paperwork, the concerned employee of the given department will unpick any staples attaching these documents together and re-staple the documents in a different order. He will then sigh and point out that the applicant has not remembered to bring the copy of an attested marriage certificate, birth certificate of his spouse and a copy of the frontispiece to the Faber 1932 edition of The Complete Works of Shakespeare.

If, frustratingly, the applicant has all required papers and clearly has a copy of a wombat owner's license from the Saskatchewan state licensing authority, the employee of the concerned department will press the clear window worn in an otherwise grubby touchscreen and a small printed slip with an impossibly high number will be handed to the supplicant applicant. The applicant will be referred to at all times as a customer, including on the slip with the number.

The supplicant applicant customer can now wait in comfort as the impossibly low numbers on the screen count up towards the lofty heights of the number clutched in his hand. I've taken to bringing my Kindle with me, which does rather help.

In the good old days you had to take everything to a typing centre for them to type an application form for you, but in these days of e-government, we have the option of filling in the form online before printing it out and bringing it with us to make our application supplication customer service experience. The concept that scans of the required documents could be included in the online process, perhaps also payment of the releavant tax fee made is not really up for consideration - much less that the documentation could be digital from the get-go and available by cross-linking databases. Oh no, couldn't have that, could we?

And so I went to have our renewed tenancy contract attested today, carrying with me every possible document under the sun. I kid you not. I have long experience with this process - I've been doing it for something like twenty years now and can never once remember managing to have everything they've asked for first time around. I had tenancy contracts, passport copies, attested marriage certificates, copy of the landlord's ownership document, copy of the landlord's passport. I was equipped for an all-out war of attrition and I was going to win this one, baby.

Do you have this letter? Sighed the employee of the concerned department. What letter? This one. You have to have your landlord sign it and then you sign it. It says you won't build extra rooms in your villa and house more families. No, of course I don't, I've never heard of that letter until now. Regretful shrug (which I swear is a government employee's grin of triumph). You have to have it before I'll give you a number.

Sure, I can't wait for the process to go online. But I rather suspect it'll be a case of filling in the form online and printing it to make my application supplication customer service experience in person. They won't forego the pleasure of thinking up some new insane requirement to trip me up with. I can only wonder what they'll think up for next year. Meanwhile, I'm on eBay looking up old editions of The Complete Works of Shakespeare...

The End Of The Road For Sharjah's Airport Runway?

Al Ittihad Square (Photo credit: kathrin_gaisser)

News continues to come out regarding what appears to be a massive reworking of the centre of Sharjah around the Souq Al Markazi (Blue souk to you), 'Smile You're In Sharjah' roundabout and Ittihad Square areas. Today's Gulf News carries the announcement of a new Sharjah central transport station, which appears to move the existing bus station over Arouba Street to sit adjacent to the King Faisal mosque, making room for the big new junction that's planned. That junction appears as if it will see an end to the cheery 'Smile You're In Sharjah' floral messages that have greeted visitors to the Cultural Emirate for so long - I posted about that here.

But the model illustrating Gulf News' piece on the new transport hub would appear to show another passing - that of the remnants of the old Sharjah airport runway. It's a little known fact, but when you drive past the King Faisal Mosque from Mahatta Fort towards 'Smile You're In Sharjah', the slightly odd, bumpy road surface is in fact not a road surface at all, but the end of the old airport runway. Formerly the site of RAF Sharjah and then Sharjah International Airport until the opening of the new airport on the Dhaid road in 1977, the old Mahatta Fort (retaining the airport's original conning tower) is now an aviation museum - and the the oddly straight street S116 runs down the former runway, which becomes the road surface once you're past the lights by the King Faisal Mosque.

The new road network will replace that piece of street, according to the model in the photo. But thankfully Mahattah itself has been preserved, a fascinating aviation museum that's well worth a weekend visit. If you're quick, you can drive along the old runway, too!

Book Post - A Week Of UBER-AWESOME Freebies

Okay, so here's the deal. this week (starting today, ending Friday 12th July) I'm giving away ebook copies of Olives - A Violent Romance AND Beirut - An Explosive Thriller. Have I gone mad? 'course not.

Firstly, you get an epub (iPad, Nook, Kobo, Sony Reader, any Android tablet) ebook of Olives - A Violent Romance when you sign up to my mailing list (using the wee red form to the right of this very text). That commitment means you get an email from me every few weeks when I remember to get around to it with interviews, book freebies and other stuff as and when they come up. It's far too informal to be an email marketing programme (I do that in the day job so really don't want to do it in my spare time) but is a way of collecting people interested in my books and books, writing and authors in general. I have, I realise, quite a few interesting writer friends! You'll get to meet them on the emailer. Think of it as a Tufty Club for intelligent adults who enjoy good, original fiction.

You can take a few seconds to sign up now, in fact. It's okay, it just takes a name and an email address. I'll wait, no problem. Yup, just over there on the right, the red sidebar thingy.

Secondly, I'm giving away a FREE ebook copy of Beirut - An Explosive Thriller (100,000 words of mad, testosterone-soaked international spy thriller the Huffington Post called "a gripping, fast-paced exciting book...a must read" and Khaleej Times called, "an unputdownable read for its sheer force of action, violence, and elaborate, lavishly colourful characters...") for this week only.

All I ask in return is that you share the good news with ten friends - just email them with the coupon code I give in response to your signup to the emailer and they, too, can get free copies - as long as they get moving and use that code before Friday 12th July.

If you can't be arsed with emailers but still want to to play the free ebook game and are willing to share the good news with ten friends (by email, Facebook, whatever), then the coupon code is VG69L and you can go to this here link to use it to get your free ebook. So, I cheated. Sue me.

I'm clearly hoping the Aristotelian principle works here - if a few of you do this and a few of your friends do this, I should start gathering new readers from around the world at an exponential pace - a chain letter that's got a week to grow and meet my target of seeding a thousand ebooks out there. And then we'll see what you all think - whether I get hard sales on the back of it by generating word of mouth, reviews on Amazon, letters from little old ladies whose lives have been saved by reading Beirut and so on.

Sadly, if you have a Kindle, I can't give you Beirut for free -the only way I can do that is by forsaking other e-reader formats and joining Kindle Select (as, indeed, I did with Space which is a Kindle only book). I'm not comfortable with doing that, so I've reduced the price of Beirut on Kindle to $0.99 or £0.77 this week from its usual $4.99. You can just go to Amazon.com here or Amazon.co.uk here and buy it for a snip. I'd still appreciate if you could share that amazing ohmigod once in a lifetime discount brilliant book news with ten friends and invite them in turn to share it with ten friends and so on.

That's all folks! Enjoy!

The Joy Of Binary Language

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I've come to call it binary language - the American-inspired habit of simplifying language to the point where the world is either ordinary or awesome. We have now added another layer to this minimalist interpretation of life, the universe and everything, because, well, sometimes things are more awesome than just awesome. Sometimes they're super-awesome.

So, like, a Kit Kat is awesome but a Kit Kat stuck in a Mr Whippy ice-cream like a double 99 is super-awesome. If you want to add emphasis you can call it so super-awesome. The longer the so, the more emphasis is given. When you get to the stage when the so is so long you haven't got enough breath to keep the o (which is actually a w disguised as an o) going, you can take it to the next level - if you replace the Kit Kat with, like, a flake, well dude, that is like hyper-awesome. Logically, therefore, if you sprinkle cocaine on it, it would be uber-awesome.

It's like a form of crowd-sourced Esperanto - a reduction of language to simplicities that render it universally accessible, created by the community for the community. We can now communicate rich landscapes of human emotional reaction just by the addition of these simple qualifiers. So I'm pissed you burned down my house, but if you burned it down and my insurance had lapsed, I'd be super-pissed. There's no doubting you'd mistake quite how pissed I am, man.

We can also add some neat monosyllabic emotional indicators to this rich soup of neo-English. Yew, for instance to denote disgust, wow to denote amazement or delight and aww to denote disappointment. There's no doubting that 'Yew, that was so super-gross' is a clear statement of absolute disgust and it does neatly circumvent any need for using a wider vocabulary to communicate the sentiment or its strength. In fact, with an almost complete lack of vocabulary, most states of the human condition are now not only neatly within the reach of expression of anyone with the intelligence of a mildly retarded mongoose, they are also within the range of comprehension of such a mongoose.

The mongeeses will undoubtedly inherit the earth. Super-soon.

And yes, thank you, I do feel better now.

The UAE Sedition Trial - 94 Accused, 25 Acquitted

(Photo credit: saraab™)

It's in all the papers today, Gulf News in particular devoting an extraordinary amount of extent to its coverage of the verdict against the 94 Emiratis accused of plotting the overthrow of the UAE's government through the activities of an Islamic front organisation accused of having links to the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Islah.

I had a finger waved at me the other day, accusing me of being 'craven' in not joining in the chorus of voices questioning the trial, the treatment of the prisoners and so on. I thought it was quite an extraordinary thing for someone to do - demand that I take a stance on an issue because they had a viewpoint. I didn't see them taking to a blog in their own name to denounce it all. But it's okay for them to expect me to.

Truth be told, I know absolutely nothing about the trial beyond what our papers have told us - and much of that coverage has been through the national newswire of the UAE, WAM. I assume it's all been filtered, because there's no 'alternative voice' out there. Not from the UAE's media and certainly not from international media. Investigative journalism has either failed, been utterly indifferent or decided there's little enough here to investigate. I know very little indeed about the detail of the case as, I suspect, do we all.

Knowing so little, I find it hard to have a polarised opinion. The trial was conducted by a court constituted by the rulers of this country, under the law of the country. You might not like the country or its law, but that's the facts. It's as valid as a verdict handed down in the UK, Ecuador, China, Singapore or France. Different countries have different forms of rule, judicial systems and standards of what I suppose we should call probity. Some are aggressively open (hello, Scandinavia!) and some are aggressively secretive and intrusive (hello, America!). All limit opposition to the incumbent system of governance to the constituted organs of governance. Really. Ask Ed Snowden. That's our world.

The verdict of the court has been reached. And that, as far as I'm concerned, is that. Please do remember to use your real name and email when you use the comments to call me craven...

Electronic Tenancy Contracts. Whoopeedoo.

Contracts (Photo credit: NobMouse)

So Sharjah is talking about online electronic tenancy contracts. This is a good thing, albeit the cynically minded might point out it's coming a bit late in the day. We can only hope it won't be the usual laughing implementation of 'fill out the e-form, print it out and then bring it to us with all the necessary documents' so beloved of the Gulf e-government sites.

The way it works here in the UAE is that you have an annual tenancy contract (unless you've 'bought' a house here) and this needs to be ratified by the municipality otherwise it's not considered a legal contract. If you've heard of the shenanigans between landlords and tenants I have over the past brace of decades, you'd want that contract in place.

In order to do this, you have to take the Arabic language contract, duly signed and stamped by all concerned, your passport copy, a copy of the landlord's ownership certificate, your marriage certificate (just so's they know you're not a bachelor living in a family area) and your up to date electricity and water bill and any other paperwork they decide on the day is required (so you take every possible form of paperwork in the world) to the Municipality, where you join the shuffling hordes in jostling to get a ticket from the paperwork checker before sitting down and waiting for your number to come up. When this eventually happens, you wait for the nice Emirati lady to tip tip tap for a while, hand over 2% of the rental (this is a fee, you understand, not a tax) and Robert's yer father's brother.

Moving this online makes so much sense it's not true. Upload some scans, pay by Visa and what is currently at least a two-hour face to face shuffling unpleasantness becomes a ten minute online administrative task.

It's actually so simple, the question isn't so much when they're going to do it as it is why it wasn't done years ago. Ironically, I am now off to the Municipality to get my tenancy attested - hopefully for the last time!

Salik Cap Doffed

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The RTA's been and gone and removed the daily cap on its popular Salik road toll, so now if you pass through more than six of the cheery little RFID-enabled gates, you're going to have to pay, baby. This has led to much wailing and gnashing of teeth in the local papers.

There are now three sets of Salik gates in Dubai - two placed on the arterial Sheikh Zayed Road at Safa and Barsha respectively, two on the Maktoum and Garhoud bridges and now two on the main roads to Sharjah at Al Mamzar (Ittihad Road, AKA 'Murder Mile') and the Airport Tunnel (Beirut Street).

There are actually two gates on the Ittihad Road, but they charge as one - as do the two gates on the Sheikh Zayed road IF you pass between them both within one hour (the one hour limitation doesn't apply on the Ittihad Road, so you can pass under one gate, camp overnight and then carry on without incurring an additional charge.).

Nevertheless, if you want to drive from Sharjah to, say, the Jumeirah Beach Residence and back, you're going to get hit for six tolls, currently by a huge coincidence the maximum Dhs24. Now the cap has been removed, any further Salik teasing will result in Dhs4 a time being deducted with a satanic giggle from your Salik account. The alternatives are, practically, the E311 and E611 bypass roads although with some fancy footwork you can get through Qusais and onto the Al Khail Road.

This route is massively congested during rush hours mainly because everybody and his uncle is trying to save Dhs8 each way (they gets you in the road in and they gets you again on the bridge). Caught up in that snarling traffic, cars cutting in, jostling and changing lanes as they cut you up, slumped listlessly over your steering wheel as you wait for the next creep forward and admire the shimmer of the heat on the metal tightly packed all around you, you could be forgiven for wondering what part of 'clear' does the Arabic word salik mean to the RTA.

The RTA has been quick to point out that the change to the cap will only affect some 5% of drivers, but couriers and logistics providers have been most unamused at the scheme. Probably because that 5% of drivers include them - and they will very easily knock up tens of journeys through those gates a day.

You waitses, preciousss, just you waitses for the outcry when they sneaks in a raise to Dhs5 per gate. Oh noes, you might say, they'd never be mad enough to do that!!! I leave you, then, with this parting thought from super-duper tabloid-tastic newspaper 7Days' report on the whole shemoozle:

"The RTA declined to comment when asked by 7DAYS for more information on why the move is being implemented - and whether there are plans to introduce any more Salik charges in the near future."