The Passing Of The Thorban Pottery

The oil fired kiln at Thorban

There used to be just the one road out to the East Coast of the UAE, a lasso-shaped affair that snaked up into the Hajjar Mountains from Dhaid and bifurcated at Masafi to snake around to Dibba and down the coast past Tayyiba and Khor Fakkan to the sleepy and delightful Emirate of Fujairah. The road back from Fujairah to Masafi takes you alongside a deep wadi, in fact a 3,000 year-old route to the interior from the East Coast, with megalithic grave sites to prove it.

Just after you pass the Manama turnoff from the Dhaid-Masafi road is the village of Thorban, long home to the mildly famous Thorban pottery. You understand we're not talking Clarice Cliff here, the Indian potters who made the cluster of ramshackle cinder-block godowns just off the main road their home produced rough terracotta pots using time-honoured techniques. The kiln they built was wood-fired, each new batch of still-damp pots placed in the kiln and then covered with soil to let the charcoal do its work.

The Thorban pottery became a must-visit destination for any group of visitors we took around the Emirates and was always busy, potters working away on their wheels or mixing new batches of clay, a couple of chaps in lungis front of house to ask for ridiculous prices from the feckless tourists, signalling the start of the long process of bargaining that would end up at half the price and still leave you wondering how much further a skilled negotiator would have got. Latterly, we arrived there to find stacks of cardboard boxes and asked where they were headed. 'Liberty in New York' was the answer!

It was around this time the oil fired kiln appeared. Thorban was thriving and appeared to have found itself a ready export market, as well as popularity with any batch of curious holiday-makers headed East to Masafi's Friday Market and beyond.

We went East for a wander at the weekend, spurred on by the discovery of the huge changes we'd seen in our recent wander around Umm Al Qawain. And yes, the East has changed in almost exactly the same way. Piles of rocks line the Dhaid road, occasional lorries with broken backs buried in the roadside sand dunes tell of the constant flow of heavy trucks down from the mountains. Ras Al Khaimah, Fujeirah and Hatta have become centres of quarrying, mountains slowly being broken down to feed Dubai's voracious appetite for rock, gravel, aggregate and cement and the road down from Masafi is still, downturn notwithstanding, dotted with a procession of groaning lorries capped with green tarpaulins.

Mirroring the story told in Umm Al Qawain, you can see signs of feast and famine: the downturn that halted Dubai's meteoric construction boom almost overnight had its consequent effect in the mountains. Shuttered shops and abandoned date plantations catch the traveller's eye on the road across the wadi plan from Dhaid. Communities that had expanded have contracted again. What used to be the police check point for 'illegals' trying to enter the Emirates from the East Coast is now an office for the Mining Affairs Department. There seems to be another rock crusher every few hundred metres.

When we got to Thorban, what used to be the pottery is no more. Something grey and dusty remains from a spill of liquid, coating the track on the approach to the tin-roofed buildings. There are laths scattered all over the place. And the pottery stands, abandoned, rather in the fashion of the Marie Celeste - there are still pots lying around, moulds on tables and the clay-mixing machine still stands by the door into the main workshop. It's as if they left overnight, taking nothing with them. We wandered around the place for a while, peering into the kilns and, for some reason, whispering.

It was somehow tremendously sad. What had been a thriving little enterprise was gone. The source of all those pots, terracotta camels, foot-scrubbers, mubkhars and candle-holders was no more. And there was no clue as to why it, seemingly so suddenly, came to an end. There's a mobile number on the sign that still stands by the main road, but it doesn't answer.

If anyone knows, I'd be fascinated to find out. 

Umm Al Qawain Redux

(Pic from Google Earth)

We decided to take a hike north over the weekend - it's literally years since we were last in Umm Al Qawain and we were feeling inquisitive. It's amazing how time dulls the curiosity of youth - we used to spend weekends breathlessly roaming around the UAE discovering new stuff, now we rarely bother.

Our connection to the tiny emirate is an odd one. Back in 1993 Sarah agreed to head up the opening of a Choueifat school in Umm Al Qawain - the tiny school was a compound of three hexagonal buildings. Someone had tried to establsh a school there before and it had been closed. Now it was to reopen as a Choueifat with two teachers and twelve kids. We arrived at the school, a gritty track led from the main road to the compound, to find it empty and abandoned. The gatehouse contained a Bangladeshi gentleman called Taimussadin who looked disconcertingly like Catweazle and who patently hadn't seen a human being in years. The echoing classrooms were dusty, their ceramic tiled floors scattered with abandoned toys and posters.

Umm Al Qawain has changed a bit over the years. The school, which used be next to a barracks in its own huge sandy patch, is now nestled in among villas and tarmac roads. The barracks has gone. The Umm Al Qawain Marine Club is still a marine club, although the riding stables have been eaten up by the Palma Beach Resort - a strange compound of double story chalets and an even stranger 'bowling club' in faux-Wafi style, including a massive concrete scorpion.

Back in the '90s, we learned to ride there, chased around the school by the stentorian tones of Susie Wooldridge barking 'Mexican reins!' at us. I used to ride an ancient Lippizaner called Samir who was a workshy, wily old bastard at the best of times. Getting Samir to move beyond a shuffle took enormous effort but every now and then my inexpert foot would tap him in the wrong place and he'd be off executing exhilarating dressage moves as his glorious youth rushed back to him. Then he'd remember his age and go back to his normal moribund state.

They had two camels they'd taught to do dressage, Larry and Alexander. Quite the sight, I can tell you.

Umm Al Qawain's old town area remains fascinating, still crumbling now as it was then, a collection of winding streets with coral-walled houses topped by wind towers. It was to have been developed into a 'mixed use' area. Selfishly, I'm quite glad the plan didn't materialise. Beyond it the gorgeous beach at the tip of the promontory, fading signs proclaim this to be the site of the Radisson SAS Resort - a development that doesn't have appeared to have survived the crunch. The huge villas that line the seaward facing coast are bizarrely now all abandoned, glorious 1970s concrete masterpieces, their owners appear to have moved to the creekward coast, leaving a road of eerily abandoned palaces, each with its own enormous diwan.

It all reminded us of those days when we'd sit in the barasti-covered bar of the tourist club, a strange affair managed by an eccentric German, drinking from cans and hiring jetskis or the glass-bottomed boat to mooch around the mangroves, spying turtles and the occasional marlin. Friday barbecues by the creek, cantering down the unspoiled beach and riding into the sea bareback after a hack. There's nothing in the world like swimming with horses.

It was a fun drive, filled with oohs and aahs and remember thises and remember when thats. The place has expanded, of course, and the gaps between the buildings have filled in a little more. Tatty hoardings promote mega-projects that remain sandy wastelands - the massive, swooping waterways of the Blue Bay Nujoom islands appear deserted. Emaar's 'Umm Al Qawain Marina' is a tiny estate of Dubai-style villas, a very strange drive away from the main road between hoardings (meant, presumably, to protect one's sensitive eyes from the expanse of undeveloped sandy littoral around you) leads to the gated area of finished housing,  a microcosm of the much larger project originally planned all around it. Bearing the mildly egregious realestatesque (it IS a word!) tagline, "A costal paradise where life comes full circle", the Marina was originally intended to be a 2000-acre 'mixed use' project rather than a slightly awkward cluster of beige villas in the middle of a vast sand-blown emptiness.

Whether and when the projects will become reinstated is, of course, a question.

How The BBC Microcomputer Became The Heart Of Your Mobile

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Warning - Ancient Geek Post

Ever heard of Advanced RISC Machines or ARM for short? Few people have, but this British company's designs power over 95% of smartphones and tablets in the world today and they're now starting to be used in next generation low-powered servers by major players like Dell and HP.

Where did that come from? From the BBC Micro, if you please. Any British Ancient Geeks out there will remember the cream boxes with the black and red keyboards that were made by Acorn Computer to accompany the BBC's computer literacy push back in the early 1980s. It was an odd offshoot of an odd little industry - long sidelined by Silicon Valley, the Brits had been consistent pioneers of computer technologies, but their innovation never seemed to gain traction and company after company was doomed to fail while US corporations powered to dominance.

One of the earliest pioneers of computing - in the 1950s - was actually British tea company Lyons, believe it or not. And the early 1980s was a time when it looked as if we might actually make it back to the top table of innovation - Acorn Computer, Dragon and Sinclair were at the forefront of the British microcomputer boom. It was an exciting time as I can testify as I was, albeit painfully young and utterly clueless, involved in a ground-breaking British startup myself.

Acorn got up to some ground breaking innovation in its BBC computers, which at one stage looked like they might conquer the US educational market as they had conquered the UK. One aspect of that innovation was its groundbreaking adoption of RISC technologies. Reduced Instruction Set Computing was an approach to processor design that threw less complex tasks at the processor at any one time, resulting in faster, more nimble systems. In fact, Acorn's follow-up to the BBC Micro, the Archimedes, was technically superior to its competitors, but it lacked one thing. It wasn't a PC. Acorn ceded the British educational market to PC clone maker RIM and its Nimbus machines.

Acorn span off its RISC chip design business into a joint venture with Apple and silicon valley chip maker VLSI Technology. By 1998 Acorn, now struggling to remain afloat, took the company to IPO, raising some $29 million. Though handy, the money wasn't enough to stop Acorn being split, stripped and sold. VLSI was to last no longer and was acquired by Philips. That left only ARM and Apple standing.

ARM carried on in the background, quietly designing its clever RISC processors and licensing the technology rather than trying to make the chips itself. Its smart, fast, low-power core processors and graphics chips were licensed by a growing number of chip makers around the world. And then in 2007, after almost three years of secretive R&D work, Apple launched the iPhone. At its core, the beating heart of its System on a Chip architecture, a high performance, low-power ARM Cortex 8 processor.

When Google's Android came along, based on the Linux open source operating system (which ARM had presciently worked to support), the world changed. The combination of Apple's innovation and Google's wide-ranging alliance with handset manufacturers transformed mobile, sidelining Nokia and creating a massive inflection point in technology. These new systems needed smart, powerful, small chipsets with low power consumption. And that's precisely what ARM was offering. This week saw Microsoft, painfully late to the market, unveil its Surface tablet computer based on Windows RT - its mobile operating system and the first Microsoft operating system ever to be based on a non Intel processor.

It's based on a chip from a small, 2,000 person company in Cambridge called ARM...

Ancient Geek Reprised

Image via WikipediaI had reason today to look back over the series of 'Ancient Geek' posts I put up a couple of years back and I quite enjoyed them. In the unlikely event that you would feel similarly, here they, arranged in chronological order for your viewing pleasure.

Ancient Geek
Encounters with punch cards and HP mainframes.

Ancient Geek V.2.0 (Beta)
How to crash IBM's MAPICS software running on a System 3X minicomputer


Ancient Geek V. 2.11 (Service Pack 2)
Making sweet music using the Apple IIe.

Ancient Geek V.3.0 Professional Edition
How I ended up working for Tandy/Radio Shack and getting sent to Saudi Arabia...

Computers certainly have a lot to answer for...

Twenty

Image via WikipediaToday is our twentieth wedding anniversary. This day in 1991, Father Patrick Cooney married us at the Cathedral in Ennis. We had Irish traditional music instead of organ music at the wedding, then everyone trooped across the road to the Old Ground Hotel for a reception on the lawn followed by a dinner in the Flag Room. There was an awful lot of Irish music about, mainly because Sarah's family were all involved in music and we had some of the country's finest with us that day playing in the church, on the lawn and then, once the band had done their repertoire of wedding songs, an impromptu seisiún.

We also had the first day of sunshine in Ireland that year.

We spent our first night 'legally', as my best man so helpfully pointed out in his speech, in the Old Ground's De Valera Suite, where the great man himself had once slept. Above the kitchen, it smelled of boiled cabbages. No wonder Dev was grumpy.


There was no Internet, no tweets from the church or even mobile phones to go diddledoodoodiddledoodoodiddledoodoodee in the quiet bits (like just after you've been asked if you 'do'). Our photographer, Liam Hogan, used one of those things with a bellows and took so long to set up each shot we were left with acheing cheeks and a set of pictures in which we look not unlike slightly stunned waxworks. Nowadays he's got a website where he uploads his digital creations!

We don't usually make a fuss of our anniversary. One year, we both managed to forget it entirely. But tonight we'll be having a bottle of pop or so.