Car

Let's just assume for a moment that someone you dislike intensely is humming 'Scarborough Fair' in a really, really annoying and insistent way. And that you react by shoving a broken child's plastic descant recorder up their nose with some considerable force so that it is stuck there. And that you then plug their mouth with a dead stoat.

Now let us postulate that you have recorded the subsequent attempt to continue humming that tune using a microphone without a pop-shield that is in turn fed through a fuzz-box. And that you crank up the amplified result of the whole wonderful set-up through a hundred-watt Marshall guitar amp.

You are starting to get an idea of just how unbelievably annoying Al Habtoor Motors' Sharjah Service Centre's music on hold is.

Once you get through the frantic parpings of Simon and Garfunkle's VL-Tone Greats, you get automatically routed to an extension that is permanently engaged. Dialling zero means being routed to a resentful-sounding individual who will then consign you, with no sign of having a guilty conscience, to whole minutes of Scarborough Hell. And then you get the service centre man. Which is where the fun really starts.

"Hello."
"Hello."
"Hello."
"Hello."
"Look, let's just take the hello as read, shall we?"
"Sorry?"
"Never mind. I want to book my car for a service."
"AC not working?"
"No. Service."
"Yes, this service centre."
"I know that. I want to book for service."
"You want for service?"
"YES!"
"OK. You must call to make booking."
"I AM CALLING TO MAKE A BOOKING!"
"Hello?"

You get the gist. But let me assure you that this conversation goes on for a long, long time. I do love it when service time comes around. Not.

Father Angelo's Last First Communion

One of the strangest buildings on earth is St Mary's Church in Sharjah. It's a marvellous, miraculous little place, even for those of us that don't really buy into the whole miracle thing. Built by donations from its (mostly unmoneyed) congregation, St Mary's has long been dominated by the figure of its priest, Father Angelo: a huge figure of a man who makes Giovanni Guareschi's Don Camillo look like a rank amateur.

We went today for friends' daughter Lily's First Communion, an event that would, coincidentally and ironically, be Father Angelo's Last Communion. And, to be honest, that's why I went. I've seen him in action before and it's wonderful. Now he's in his 80s, although you'd be hard put to guess that, he's about to slip away to a home for retired gentlepriests somewhere in Italy.

St Mary's is unique. A Catholic church with a touch of the Eastern tarbrush, it plays host to a strange, globalised religious eclecticism. It feels somehow a little Orthodox, its got a tiny touch of Eastern, Greek lasciviousness. And yet the choir's gospel-tinged American bible-belt singing praise-the-lord Philippino and many of the regulars are pre-Vatican Indian Christians who dress the statues, kiss the hems of their robes and stand touching the picture of Padre Pio or the robed Child of Prague, festooned in Hawaiian style flower garlands, in silent supplication. The Lebanese St. Charbel rubs shoulders with St. George, the dragon-slaying Syrian adopted by the Levant-unfriendly Brits. It's like the United Nations of Christianity in there and, just like they did when they were wearing blue helmets in Lebanon, the Irish stand around looking at the way the other fools are carrying on in wide-eyed wonderment.

And then there's Angelo himself. He's huge, bigger than his physical presence. His accent is impenetrably Italian. The last time we were in this church together was the wedding of our friends Terry and Orla. Fr. Angelo managed to marry 'Elvis' and 'Olga' in an accent so thick that I've been dining off the impersonation ever since. "Jaysuus," Father Angelo would tell us, "Jaysuus he lovva you. Jaysuus he lovva you all. He lovva me anna he lovva you. He looka downatus from heffin and he sayaa I lovva everone!"

This is the stuff.

And yet, at the same time, there's something marvellous about the man; something that makes even the most agnostic of us admire the sheer weight of belief that has shaped this church of two millenia. He believes it; the miracles, the wonder, the eucharist and the sacrament. He lives it, breathes it and is it. His passing will, somehow, make this little church in the heart of Arabia a smaller place: another last note in a sad, small threnody.

How to embarrass your telco

The Road and Transport Authority of Dubai, which is responsible for much of the development of the city's multi-modal transport system, has today announced a new SMS-based taxi ordering system.

Hurrah!

The new service will consist of numbered location boards around the city, under which the taxi-needy can stand, texting 4777 and the location board number. The taxi will then be dispatched to the given location.

This strange and Heath-Robinsonesque workaround would, of course, be rendered totally unnecessary by the availability of any location-based service from the telcos that are meant to be providing mobile services in the UAE. Location based services allow information to be provided contextually using the GSM cell location as a cue and are implemented in other world markets, where they enable systems such as automatic location checking for taxis or other delivery based services, location-specific information services and all sorts of wonderful things.

It's a step forward from calling up and telling them where you are. But only just. The RTA's got the right idea here and obviously isn't going to wait 25 years for the telcos to bridge the growing advanced services gap.

RTA 1 Telcos 0.