Rain Room Sharjah (#RainRoomSharjah)

I can't remember how we heard about Rain Room. But we did and a glance at the Sharjah Art Foundation website was intriguing, to say the least. It was the work of seconds few to pick a day and time and book (you have to book an 'appointment' online, there's no point just rocking up and expecting to get in - more on this later). That was us sorted - a trip to Rain Room for our 15 minute 'experience'.

What is Rain Room? I hear you asking (unless you've been, in which case yes, I know, you've got the t-shirt*). It is an experiential art installation originally conceived by an London-based art collective/company called Random International, back in 2012. Rain Room toured the Barbican in London, MoMA in New York, LA's LACMA and other august artsy locations, to rave reviews. It has found its permanent home in Sharjah, and is open to the great unwashed in return for Dhs25.

It's a giant, black rain shower. You walk into it and sensors clear you a 6-foot dry patch as you wander around. Clearly, if you walk too fast or move suddenly, you get wet.

So here we are in Sharjah and it's late July. It's hot, the mercury at times nudging 50C. It's humid, too. Nasty, muggy, dense humidity that gets so thick and cloying a goldfish swam past my head the other day. The very idea of spending a little time in the rain has a certain appeal, no?

We booked for Saturday at 5pm. Get there 20 minutes early, says the email that followed my booking. Present this registration code when you arrive. And please use the hashtag #RainRoomSharjah. And so this is precisely what we do. Parking isn't a problem, there are reserved spaces alongside Al Majarrah Park with the blood-curdling threat of a Dhs1,000 fine if you park and aren't a guest of Rain Room. How do they know?

The building's totally plain - funky, for sure, but unadorned by any text that proclaims it to be Rain Room or, indeed, to be anything. It's all concrete, glass and steel and the floor is not only laid with the same blocks as those out on the pavement, but they're matched so they form a continuation with the outside paving. There's a Fen Café, just so's you know you've arrived in funky town. For those that don't know Sharjah's 'signature' art café, Fen is on funk. So much so that it actually aches, like eating too many ice cubes. We get our tickets printed and settle down to wait for our turn.

We watch people coming in off the street and expecting to get their 'experience' right here, right now. The chap on the front desk seems to spend 95% of his time explaining things and turning very entitled-feeling people away. Do you know who I am? Yes, and you haven't booked, mate. We're holding tickets and booked in for 5pm, the next available booking is 7pm. We briefly consider setting up in business buying tickets up online and sitting in Fen touting them to walk-ins. They only let six people in at a time and slots fill fast for popular times like weekends and evenings. Putting up a sign to this effect would save a great deal of very repetitive explaining. Our man stays calm and patient and we admire his stoicism almost as much as we admire Fen's jars of funky cookies and display of hipster cakes.

At just before 5, the security guard asks if we're the five o'clock crowd. Yup, that's us. Go to the waiting area, please. It's around the corner, a long concrete wall with bench seats set into it on our left and a great glassed vista looking out over Majarrah. It's a bit odd, looking out onto Sharjah backstreets from this cool concrete monument to contemporary chic. We wait. Nothing happens. 5pm comes and goes. I go to see Security Man. We're aware we're getting 15 scant minutes and that's our lot. So what happens now? We are waiting for people in the toilet, apparently. I ask if we're getting to stay in there until 5.17, then? The security guy giggles nervously. The man on the ticket desk intervenes, no, go on just go ahead. To be fair, they could have been a bit more precise with the old directions, there...

We go back down the corridor and turn a corner into a long passage that descends into the very bowels of the earth. We can hear water. A lot of water. At the bottom of the ramp, a local gent greets us and then we walk into a massive black room containing a single brilliant white light and a enormous cube of rain. It falls from tiny spouts high up in the ceiling, spattering and disappearing into the black grating which covers the entire expanse of floor. We walk into it and are consumed, enveloped in rain. The light picks out the droplets and they shimmer and scintillate as we turn and swoop. We're both laughing. There's a group of three Emirati girls in there with us and they're more nervous than we are, picking their way slowly and wonderingly into the big wall of constantly falling drops.

It doesn't smell of anything. There's no reek of chlorine or even musty damp. There's no sound beyond the hiss and spatter of rain, no hum of machinery. It's just the falling water and the shadows picked out by that single brilliant light. We get our mobiles out and start photographing ourselves not having a great time because we're so busy documenting the great time we're having. To be fair, you can't help yourself. It's deeply photogenic.

We throw shapes. We walk too quickly (and are punished). We're dancers, now, exaggerated slow movements as we carve our wee swathes through the curtain of bright droplets. We play like the big children we are. Our fifteen minutes flash by in subjective seconds and we are politely ejected through a curtain to wander back upstairs, blinking and giggling. It's all a bit intense, really. You feel bereft afterwards. I prescribe a nice cup of coffee and a Fen cookie.

*I said earlier that if you've been, you've got the t-shirt, but that's one trick the Rain Room misses - no merchandise. Sharjah of late has been quite good at merchandising its attractions, but there's not a Rain Room branded goodie in sight. Which is a missed opportunity, IMHO. Yes, yes, I'm sure art transcends base considerations of merchandise and all that...

In short, GO! You can get tickets to Rain Room Sharjah here at the Sharjah Art Foundation website. There's even a pin for those of you that don't know Sharjah or  where to find Al Mujarrah Park (or Al Majarrah park. It's a sort of movable feast, that spelling). The traffic's fine right now, so stop being a lily-livered Dubai type and make the journey North. Swing by the Heart of Sharjah while you're here and take a wander around some real souks. Or visit the Museum of Islamic Civilization (just around the corner from Rain Room) or even Sharjah Fort and its museum or discover the Imperialistic joys of Mahatta Fort, the site of the first airport in the UAE.

Go on, treat yourselves!

BOOKS BOOKS BOOKS BOOKS BOOKS

I can justify that headline. A man called Books reserves his, Books', books of books. There.

Meanwhile, adding to yesterdays frankly amazing news about Birdkill going on promo and being FREE yes FREE for the next four days (it was five days but you wasted a day dawdling), I can now reveal that A Decent Bomber is ALSO FREE for the next five days.

Get Birdkill FREE here.

Get A Decent Bomber FREE here.

And if that weren't already enough, Beirut - An Explosive Thriller is ALREADY permafree. So now you're looking at getting THREE of my novels for nothing.

AND now Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy is on promo for £0.99 with a deal through free/bargain books promo website manybooks.net!

I mean, gosh, it's like a bargain book basement around here!

Let your friends know. Hell, let your enemies know. Here be free books aplenty!

Birdkill And Book Promo MADNESS

Of all the reviews on Amazon for my books, my favourite of the lot is for Birdkill: 

"This is a cynical negative, depressing book. Everyone decent died. I'm sorry I read it."

Well, it's been a very long while indeed since I did anything about promoting books around here. So I might as well make up for it with a mad raft of book promotions all taking place at the same time.

Why?

Well, no particular reason other than I've neglected things over the past couple of years. Beirut - An Explosive Thriller is 'permafree', which is driving a steady wee trickle of sales of the other books and generating the, very occasional, odd review or so on Amazon. These are generally very positive, occasionally sorta negative but, overall, customers have been provided with satisfaction. But it's generally a wee bit quiet and I'd like it to heat up a tad. SO...

For the next five days, psychological thriller Birdkill is a FREE ebook, saving you the trouble of parting with $4.99, the usual asking price.

You can get Birdkill FREE by clicking here!

Birdkill is about a teacher, Robyn Shaw, who suffered a massive trauma while she was at a school in Lebanon, in a town up in the mountains called Zahlé - it's a very lovely town, home to - among many other things, the very lovely wines of the Chateau Ksara.

Robyn's mind has shut down and she remembers nothing of the events at Zahlé, but she nearly died up there and goes through extensive physical and psychological rehabilitation in the UK. Back on the road to recovery, she gets a job teaching at a research institute for exceptionally talented children and it's there things start to go pear-shaped and Robyn's mind appears to start unravelling.

She realises she's losing her sanity and in desperation calls journalist friend Mariam for help. Mariam has to rush to uncover the hidden secrets in Robyn's horrific past before her friend loses her mind.

"McNabb's story of weaponized children and disastrous drug trials astounds and horrifies.."

"Has a visceral effect on you after having read it, the imagery is so vivid and real."

That sort of thing from the reviewers, thank you very much. So why wouldn't you a) download it FREE NOW for your own delight and b) TELL ALL YOUR FRIENDS ABOUT IT!!!

You might have guessed b) is the payoff line. Do it now before you forget, there's a good thing. Tell them all before it's too late...

ithankyou

Manama, Ajman And The 'Dunes' Stamps

Manama Post Office

In an odd quirk of philatelic history, several of the Trucial States (prior to the formation of the UAE) issued stamps in huge and incongruous editions. I say incongruous, because none of them had anything to do with the UAE. I have a full sheet of 'Kings and queens of England' issued by Umm Al Qawain and others include celebrations of the Moscow Olympics and the space race.

Why?

Ask American philatelic entrepreneur (say that quickly after a couple of shandies) Finbar Kenny. As I have related before, Kenny travelled to the Trucial States in the early 1960s and did deals with the rulers of various emirates to issue stamps on their behalf. He then produced massive runs of stamps, which were destined to act as filler in every boy's stamp collection. In fact he overdid it so much that these 'Dunes' stamps are totally worthless even today. Stamps from Sharjah, Ajman, Umm Al Qawain and Fujeirah dating from the '60s can be picked up for pennies still.

Kenny, a somewhat colourful figure, signed up Ajman and so you can find stamp dealers still selling, stamps issued from 'Manama, Dependency of Ajman'. Manama, an inland exclave of Ajman in Sharjah (it's East of Dhaid, just off the Dhaid/Masafi highway) consisted at the time of little more than an adobe fort, a few cinder block houses and a tiny post office. That post office, responsible for issuing what must have been millions of stamps, is why we nipped off the beaten path for a few minutes yesterday, in order I could track down and take a snap of the offending institution.

So here it is in all its sleepy glory. In its time, one of the great stamp issuing centres of the world!

The Trouble With Stuff

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

During the recent hurricane Irma, a number of Tesla owners stuck in the traffic fleeing the path of the storm were delivered a software update by Tesla which upgraded their cars and extended the battery life and therefore range of their cars. Once the storm had blown over, another update removed the additional capacity and reduced their cars back down to the performance level they had paid for.

In fact, their cars were always capable of the extended range but they had chosen not to buy the full 75kw battery option. Few could have been aware that in fact their cars had the full battery installed, but that it had been effectively downgraded in software. Their cars were always capable of the extended range.

It all caused quite a bit of controversy, as you might imagine. But it's just an extension of a whole range of issues which are linked to the concept that you buy hardware but license software and that when you buy into any ecosystem, your rights are effectively limited. You might own that iPhone, bub, but you don't own the software or any of the content it stores and gives you access to. This is also true of your Kindle and your Apple TV or other box with your Netflix subscription.

We don't buy CD racks anymore and many of us don't have upgrade plans for those bookshelves. Content is digital, always-on and an Alexa command away. The ownership of content has changed forever. Of course, you never owned that book or music, you merely owned a physical medium containing the text or recording. The rights to the content subsisted with the author and publisher. But you could leave a book to your kid - you can't leave your Amazon account.

Worse, your iPhone, Kindle, Echo or Tesla is enabled by software which you only enjoy a grant of limited right to access. Amazon et al can simply turn your super-duper gizmo into a brick of e-waste at the blink of an eye.

Tesla extending that model to cars is sort of interesting. Next step is your house. An integrated home automation suite provided by the developer sounds really cool until you find out that if you break the terms of your licence (install the wrong type of shrub in your garden, say, if you've bought a Shiny) your kitchen will stop working.

Volvo has started down that road in a sort of legacy manufacturer trying to be hip with the kids kind of way with the announcement of a sort of extended leasing package called Care by Volvo.  You can bet other manufacturers are going to start exploring the delights of software/hardware industry models for disempowering consumers and disintermediating insurance companies and others who currently profit from the lack of a car 'ecosystem'. In this, Tesla is Apple.

Forget the threat of AIs and the like to our technological futures - here comes the spectre of the elife (and I don't mean Etisalat's crappy FTTH package) - your existence will be dominated by your parents' choice of life ecosystem for you and your world will be under license to The Man.

You mark my words...

Dubai Font - The Typeface, The City, The Legend

Dubai has its own typeface, Dubai Font.

And I have to say, I love it. Cool, contemporary even a tad, dare I say it, futuristic.

Created by Microsoft under a doubtless lucrative deal with Dubai Government, the new typeface is the first time a city has got its very own Microsoft font. Well, apart from the remote and little known city of Comic Sans, Wyoming.

You can download Dubai Font free here!

You're welcome. My pleasure...

Fake Plastic Souks Is Ten

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Oh golly, oh gosh! I nearly missed it. Happy Birthday, Fake Plastic Souks! Ten years ago this month, I was sufficiently intrigued by the idea of expressing my opinion without using a pseudonym (at the time the standard approach for bloggers in Dubai) and was also missing writing magazine articles (I used to do a lot of that) enough to contemplate starting a blog. It's hard to imagine today, but back then it was all, well, terribly experimental. Now, of course, it's quaintly retro.

It all followed on from another experiment in online scribbling, a Wiki called 'Orientations' I had started to put together, which played with the idea of creating a hyperlinked series of articles that led you on an adventure, a little like playing Colossal Caves, around what was something of a stream of consciousness. PB Works, the nice people wot hosts the Wiki, have been threatening to take back that workspace for years and yet the crumbling ruins of that largely incomplete experiment still exist. The first word of the first post on Fake Plastic Souks linked, through the fiendishly clever use of houmus, back to the Wiki in a sort of nod to the past.

Here's the first Fake Plastic Souks post, linked for your clicking pleasure!

That first post was inspired by the sententious rumblings from the Arab Media Forum and amused me greatly. Like many things that amuse me greatly (my first novel, for instance), I find I am in an audience of one. Luckily, that has never detracted from my amusement. The ability to amuse oneself avoids a great deal of unpleasantness in life, I find.

An awful lot of water has flowed under the bridge since those early days, quite a lot of the events which took place around me documented as I jotted things down. It's not quite Samuel Pepys, but I occasionally enjoy stumbling across something old and dusty. In all this time, a tad over 1.2 million pages have been read. Which is nice. I would hate to think how many words I've thrown into this little cloudy corner. I've probably written about 700,000 words in my various novels (not including the two books I made from FPS posts for publishing workshop purposes) and likely more in the blog.

Oh yes, the books. There were two of them, made when I needed a text to create a sample book for a 'hands on' publishing session I did for the LitFest chaps. The first one documented 2007-2009: Fake Plastic Souks - The Glory Years. I joked that I'd do another one if that book sold more than ten copies and to my mild amazement, it did. So I made the second, Fake Plastic Souks - The Fear Returns, which covered 2009-2011. The links take you to the Kindle editions, but there are also paperbacks. I never did get around to a third one. Just as well, probably.

It all seems a little irrelevant these days. Mind you, an early and perhaps over-passionate proponent of 'social media', I now find myself yearning to sit under a tree and play with wooden toys rather than post, share, tweet and snap for the benefit of small and frequently mildly bemused audiences.

I think my favourite things from over the years are were when I 'outed' Harper Collins' Authonomy and the 'Shiny' posts, which did rather tickle me. Documenting the egregious contents of Tim Horton's French Vanilla Coffee not only provided me with amusement, it has informed something like 10,000 people. The 'stuff they put in our food' posts have always caused the most 'Yews'. My abiding interest in food, of course, led to the co-creation of Dubai's first 'food blog' with partner in crime Simon McCrum, The Fat Expat. That was finally shuttered due to lack of time and photographic talent back in 2013. TFE was never really Instagram gold, but I still use it to find recipes even today.

These days, as people may have noticed, I post rather more infrequently and have stopped looking at Sitemeter or analytics. In the early days, the blog would attract a sort of 'background radiation' of readers, about 30 or so per post. That grew to hundreds and even thousands, with anything up to 40,000 page views each month. I was just starting to think that was getting rather reasonable when I met Russian writer Boris Akunin, whose blog gets about 1,000 comments a day. When he invited readers to join him in a walk around Moscow to protest Putin, 10,000 people turned up.

I was duly humbled.

Anyway, there's no real point to this post. I just thought I'd mark the occasion...

Any Old Post

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I've slipped into the warm waters of a happy limbo since the LitFest. I've had little enough to say, too 'meh' about things online even to tweet very much but otherwise perfectly content in my space. Easter saw the Niece From Heaven and Naughty Niece coming out for a week which was lovely. Other than that, no news.

I've been tinkering with Beirut - An Explosive Thriller being a free book on Amazon. Having hit #1 free thriller, the book slowly slid down the slope back into the gloopy, fetid air of obscurity that is the lower reaches of the Amazon charts. Olives never did so well, a combination of less than dramatic title and over-dramatic cover doubtless making it less attractive to an incurious wandering eyeball somewhere in Missouri.

Over 2,500 free downloads of Beirut later, only one new review has been posted of the book on Amazon. I wonder quite how many of those downloads ever got opened? Incidentally, you need over 1,000 downloads a day to top the free Thriller chart and a good 200+ a day to stay up there in the top 3 - about 50 downloads keeps you in the top 10. The downloads peaked high early, dropped back very fast and the book is currently being downloaded about 20 times a day. Whether that is residual recommendations from the original spate of downloads or just chance discoveries being made, I do not know.

As for new projects, I've been flirting with the idea of telling the story of how Gerald Lynch first popped up in Beirut during the early 1980s, chasing an IRA bomb-maker called O'Brien. That early history is hinted at in both Beirut and Shemlan. The idea would be a novella rather than a full-on novel. There are other ideas bouncing around, too. Frankly, I'm in no rush and am just letting things bounce around and bed down in their own time.

I am finding that letting my 'online life' settle down into neglect is not resulting in the end of the world as we know it. Who knew?

Woah. Leave. Back. Ouch.

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

No post for almost a month. Golly, poor blog!

Dubai, London, Liverpool, Haverfordwest, London, Copenhagen, Belfast, Newry, London, Dubai.

What was that? That was your leave, mate. Welcome back 'in station'.

Looking back on the whirlwind that was, the start of it seems like months ago. Copenhagen was our annual attempt to spend some time together away from work and the hustle and bustle of the annual tour of the UK.

Funny place.

The Danes seem to make quite a deal about how free and easy and just, well, downright cool and inclusive and right on they are, but they'll stand on the margins of a totally empty road, yawning blacktop trailing endlessly into the horizon either side of them, waiting for the green light before they'll move. You can freewheel as much as you like, as long as you obey the  rules.

The hotel we finally selected (after weeks of clicking and mulling) was overpriced and packed with American tourists starting out on their Baltic cruises. Actually, all of central Copenhagen was packed with American tourists starting out on their Baltic cruises. Dinner wherever we went was inevitably taken next to Hank and Wilma yelling at each other as if they were still out on the prairie rather than in a cosy and intimate Yerpean restaurant.

We ate well, especially at funky new eatery Almanak at The Standard (a converted old ferry terminus) which we randomly discovered when sheltering from a sudden downpour. It isn't, despite the sound of the name, a Lebanese joint, but a new 'contemporary Danish' place staffed by people who've run away from working in Noma (the best restaurant in the world yadayada) and the food was grin-inducingly stunning. I laughed my way through the meal, my usual reaction to glorious food. And glorious it most certainly was.

We went back for a treat on our last night and watched in dismay as the service fell apart in a Hell's Kitchen sort of way, stacks of plates waiting on the pass, comped drinks all around as the floor staff tried to make sense of it all and failed. It was like the Keystone Cops of food. All it lacked was Gordon Ramsay screaming expletive-laden abuse at them as they tottered around getting everything horribly wrong. The food was still great, it just took three hours for them to get it all out to us. A shame, really.

We visited things. We walked a lot. We learned that cyclists are the new superpower and own both cars and pedestrians. Watching them beasting bewildered Japanese tourists who have wandered unknowingly into the cycle lane was astounding. The Danes don't talk about the Second World War very much, it's sort of missing from the historical narrative which we found generally to be patchy outside of the Christiansborg Palace, which is all very palatial.

We spent quite a lot of time trying to convince people that living in the UAE doesn't mean you have three heads, a close affinity with ISIS and a wife kept in purdah. We've never before been quite so keenly aware of how deeply ignorant people in general are about this place. Maybe it's us.

As for the rest of it, a whirlwind of nieces from both Heaven and Hell, the occasional nephew and many in-laws; friends, family, places and things. We bought a house, as you do. And then we found ourselves sitting in The Oriel at Terminal Three, waiting for the flight and wondering quite where the last three weeks had gone.

It was almost a relief to be back, except it is - as always - very strange to suddenly be plonked with a bump into our real life away from real life. Petrol's gone up, I hear. Other than that, we don't appear to have missed much. In a few days it'll feel as if we've never been away; it always does.

Hey ho...

Stalled. A Writer's Nightmare.

I've stalled on the new book. I've written not one word since before the Summer hols. I made some notes and stuff in Belfast and Newry, I sat down for a long chat with a 'Shinner' MP and former IRA man while I was in 'Noori', that fine town in 'Norn Iron', an engagement organised by my lovely Sister in Law and fascinating in so many ways. But I haven't actually been, you know, writing.

'So you served 15 years of a 27 year sentence in Long Kesh. The Maze.'
'That's right.'
'The H Blocks.'
'No, before them. It was Nissen huts, then, segregated on sectarian lines. We used to pass notes across each others' huts. So even the Unionists would pass our notes, and we would pass theirs.'
'Did you get time off for good behaviour?'
'I doubt it. We burned the prison down.'

It's not 'writer's block', that's something different altogether. It's a bit like work on Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy, which was stalled by my decision to publish Olives and Beirut myself. While all that went on, poor old Shemlan took a back seat, unfinished at around the halfway mark. But I went on going to Beirut and visiting the village, the Mountain and other locations in the book. I just didn't write anything.

When I finally sat down to finish Shemlan, jacked into volume 11 death metal and Estonian plain chant, it flew like a jet-propelled Teflon coated flying thing in a vacuum. Hang on, how do things fly in a vacuum if there's no pressure of air or gravity or other opposing force? Help!

So I'm not really angsting about the lack of progress. Things happen in their time and this one obviously needs to 'bed down' a bit before I go on. I trust my instincts well enough by now not to try and keep pushing if my head won't be pushed. The novel's at a crossroads and I need to go back over it, test it against the stuff in my head and correct it before starting construction work again.

I'll know when I'm ready. Life's busy, there's so much going on, distractions are flying like Teflon coated flying things gravitating towards a large body.

In the meantime, any time I get a few moments to sit down to write, I'm ending up scribbling blog posts instead. The paucity of such posts testifies to the lack of time in general.

Where does it all go?

How To Drool A Frog - More Weird And Wacky Searches

(Photo credit: thms.nl)

I occasionally dip into Sitemeter, the natty little analytics widget I don't use very much, to see what people have been searching to land themselves on this mouldy sub-corner of the Interwebs. I took such a dip today because I couldn't really get into the swing of writing for a while and decided to play a bit until the fancy once more took me to recommence my story of The Simple Irish Farmer, which is my WIP of choice.

I found that not a few people are clearly concerned about whether or not they put plastic in Subway bread - in fact thousands of them have Googled the topic and found themselves reading my take on the whole thing - their searches for truth leading them here. I find it very odd that a silly little blog like this can not only rank so high in search, but draw so many searchers for both this and the Tim Horton's French Vanilla Coffee is junk post. I am similarly pleased to say I have offered succour to thousands of punters who have been tearing their hair out at Chuck Norris the Trackpad on their Samsung S5 Ultrabooks.

Similarly, Sri Lanka Gems is a popular search term - and to my mild shock, my post about the gem and spice sales scams of Sri Lanka is number six result on Google. In the world. I mean, how mad is that? "Gemstones Sri Lanka" gets the same result, which I guess has Klout running around saying I'm influential about gemstones. A subject about which - I hasten to add - I am pretty much utterly bereft of knowledge let alone authority. A similar mind-boggling search anomaly is to be found in the phrase, "where did Nokia go wrong" which features this post on the first page of search results. And that's bonkers. Truly.

Somebody in Pakistan searched the Interwebs for the interesting-sounding "picrs sixi porn salik 17 21" which just led him here, which I am willing to wager a considerable sum was not the result he had in mind. Or even she, come to think of it. Apparently, online onanistic fortune favours the literate. And another rube got here by Googling "marage night fack movie". Were they after a fake movie or a fu... oh, never mind...

Search "online onanistic fortune". It's mine, all mine, precioussss...

Someone else was looking for a cartoon character curry - searching for "tom and jerry masalas", presumably to accompany a nice Daffy Duck Dosa. The searcher, rather worryingly based at Nokia's corporate headquarters over in Finland, got here instead. I say rather worryingly because you'd think they'd have a future to concern themselves about rather than playing about on Google looking for silly curries.

Another person arrived at La Blog by Googling "salmon farming in saudi arabia".

It's Yemen, dunce.

Then there are the surreal. I mean what did you think you'd get when you slammed "www.indianheroinafack blogspat.com" into Google? Blogspat. Love it. Interestingly, the 'perp' works for the Miller Brewing Company in Wisconsin, Milwaukee and was using a crappy old Nokia 5.0 browser. They got this for their troubles...

My favourite of this particular batch was the search term 'How to drool a frog' which really makes the mind boggle just a tad, but led its searcher to this post about HSBC's drooling incompetence. Which wasn't, I'm sure, what they were after. And no thank you, I don't want to know what they were actually looking for...

Any of them, come to think of it.

Dubai Earthquake Tremor Shock Horror

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There I am minding my own business yesterday and then wooah what was that? It's a strange feeling, like the ground just liquefied, your gut sort of goes googly and the Masafi on your desk is doing interference patterns. And you realise you're sitting in a skyscraper.

This is never a good time for the imaginative or fancifully inclined.

5.2 on the Moment Magnitude Scale, 10km below the island of Qeshm (which must have been a much more interesting place yesterday than Dubai), off the Iranian coast, the quake is by no means the first such event: recent major quakes taking place there include two biggies in 2005 and 2008.

By the way, I still call it the Richter Scale (as did most of the reporting media) but that's wrong. The MMS is a new scale developed to supercede the Richter Scale in the 1970s and although it uses a similar number scale to denote bigness, it's different to the one formulated by Mr Richter in the 1930s. Who knew?

Thirteen people died in the 2005 event (although Qeshm is relatively sparsely populated) which was a 5.8 event followed by 400 aftershocks. Another seven died in 2008, with a 5.9 event. Luckily there were no reports of casualties or fatalities from the Iranian News Agency yesterday. Note to self: don't buy a house on Qeshm.

Apparently Iran in general gets an average quake a day, sitting as it does on the convergence of the Arabian and Eurasian tectonic plates. Qeshm is a pretty criss-cross of anticlines and synclines - the region's complex geology is one of the reasons why we have all that lovely oil in the Gulf.

Twitter was fun to watch, Gulf News breathlessly tweeting that it was going to write a story about the event soon which was, if I am not much mistaken, a first. Watch this space because there's going to be some news about the news everyone's talking about already. Cool.

And some people left their buildings to stand next to them because it's clearly safer to be under a building than in it when the quake hits and everything falls over. This the media called 'evacuating'. Emirates 24x7 informed us that Sharjah Police had tweeted there was no damage, which was another new low for me. Like I need an online newspaper to tell me what Twitter's saying. Grief.

Anyway, I found this, which is quite cute. It's like FlightTracker but for earthquakes. So you can know when your earthquake has arrived. Or you can go to the horse's mouth - the National Centre for Meteorology and Seismology (say that after a long night).

Or maybe just go back to work and get over it, which is pretty much what we did.

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.

Jail For Lunch

Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

You think you've seen it all, but 7Days today reports on a British expat teacher in Abu Dhabi who is in police custody after being found having lunch with a man in his house. They weren't even playing pat-a-cake. She's been in nick since last weekend.

The man, a Syrian, had just shown his wife the door we are told, having thrown her out of the house last Thursday. The estranged wife, who in fact has ownership of the house, had arrived accompanied by police with the intention of asserting  her rights when it became clear that the woman, a teacher who had been brought to the house by a colleague, was found with the man consuming alcohol. The friend who had brought her had left.

The Syrian woman pressed charges against the teacher for entering her house without permission, but has since dropped those charges. The teacher is facing criminal charges of consuming alcohol and being alone in the company of a man other than her husband or close relative.

Drinking alcohol alone in the house of an Arab man you have just met is a position many women would think twice about putting themselves in, although few would think of it as a criminal offence. But the couple were arrested on the spot and have been in custody for since last weekend awaiting a court hearing. A week in jail is a long time for a drink and a chat.

There are no substantive details in the story beyond that. If you didn't know that being alone in the company of a man other than your husband or close relative is a criminal offence in the UAE, you do now.

Did you know?

Ten Reasons Why Conformity Is Evil

conformity (Photo credit: the|G|™)

Something of a departure from the usual aimless half-thoughts, this is a list of half-thoughts. It's come about because of a number of conversations I've had recently that have revolved around individuality, independence and creativity vs suits. When I first went to work, I used to wear a suit. It was very much expected of you back then. I can't remember precisely when all that changed for me, but I have a horror of them now. Both the apparel and the phenotype.

1) Conformity suppresses independent thought
The requirement to conform to a given set of behaviours encapsulates those behaviours as essentially sacrosanct. The very nature of conformity is that it is beyond question, because questioning it is in itself non-conformist. How many times have you heard, 'Don't ask questions, just do it.' - shortened by Nike to a cunning call to brand-conformity. Conformity is comforting because you can be lazy and just settle into that nice rut. So much easier to do than break out and ask quite why we all jump off the cliff because it seems, well, sort of counter-intuitive.

2) Conformity is a bully
The first thing those with a vested interest in conformity (often, although not always those higher up a given food chain than you) will do is use it to beat you around the head. It's marvellously self-fulfilling. 'I don't see anyone else around here questioning it. It's the way we do things around here, so you'd better knuckle under before there's trouble.' Stop thinking, stop questioning, just put on your grey drone suit and join the rest of us in the chain gang.

3) Conformity is a liar
There's a wonderful scene in the novel Watership Down, in which the little group of travelling rabbits the book is set around come across a foreign warren. The rabbits talk in the book, which does involve a certain degree of willing suspension of disbelief but there we go. The foreign rabbits are incredibly well fed, fat, sleek and behave in a more 'sophisticated' manner, including doing odd things like dancing. But the word 'snare' must never be uttered in the warren on pain of death. It turns out the local farmer is feeding the rabbits, whose warren is a police state, and snaring them. Conformity, see?

4) Conformity is not community
You'll often hear calls for conformity dressed up as a requirement for 'the good of us all'. The idea is simple: if you conform, we all benefit. But if you should wander, poke around in cupboards and in any other way refuse to adopt a set of accepted behaviours, you're somehow threatening the fabric of society itself. The truth is, any community that requires conformity as a rule for inclusion is inherently flawed and will fail in the face of a community that is both inclusive and diverse. When I talk about communities, by the way, I don't mean neighbourhoods or clubs. I mean any group of people gathered around a task.

5) Conformity hates diversity
My own little foray into experimenting with communities, GeekFest, excited me principally because of its diversity and inclusiveness. But where individuality is subsumed to the need to conform, diversity goes out of the window and insularity comes with its bags packed for a nice, long stay. Insular communities start to rely on their insularity to maintain cohesiveness and so is born racism and other forms of intolerance.

6) Conformity breeds intolerance
If we all need to conform and conformity is our principal attribute, we can quickly see that anyone who does not conform to the ideas or practices we conform to is not acceptable to our community. They are not welcome. We do not want them - or the ideas, challenges or new practices they bring. It's counter-genetic, this idea that we cannot explore or adopt the new because we are bound by conformity. It creates communities doomed to eventual failure.

7) Conformity smothers creativity
It's the process of exploring the new, of tweaking the nose of the everyday and flicking the nipples of the mundane that gives us that marvellous force, creativity. Dreaming up new insights, finding expression that challenges, excites and engages us in new ways is so fundamental to progress and, I would argue, the reason for living at all. If we can't create, if we can't celebrate our very ability to think up new and wonderful things, then we don't have a reason to be. And yet conformity tells us that we mustn't challenge or invent, but instead tread the well-trodden path. It protects itself by punishing challengers and inventors.

8) Conformity abhors change
Communities that have been lashed to conformity are inherently unable to change, because change naturally challenges conformity. So how do we improve? We don't, there's no need to improve. We're conforming because it's better this way, the way we've always done it. You wouldn't understand, it's not conformity so much as tradition and our culture is inherently celebrated by tradition. We have a culture of respect and your non-conformist ideas are, frankly, disrespectful. And so on. The mantras are quite seductive, aren't they? But conformity hides behind mantras like this, smothering change and blocking new and better ways of doing things because we're stuck with the old ways. There's nothing wrong, incidentally, with celebrating tradition. But that's different to using tradition as cladding for conformity.

9) Conformity breeds mediocrity
And so we have a call to be mediocre. Don't question the way we do things, keep your head down and knuckle under like the rest. Don't shine, don't be brilliant. Don't show anyone up or go around knocking down walls or exploring better, more efficient ways of doing things. Don't be outspoken or go to the line because you believe passionately in something. In fact, we'd be grateful if you wouldn't be passionate about anything. Passion can be so, well, challenging.

10) Conformity stifles innovation and breeds weakness
And so we see conformity is the natural enemy of all innovation. Some of the most innovative companies in the world also manage to be highly conformist, though. So where does that fit into McNabb's Theory of Conformity? Because conformity is often selective. You can play in the playground, but you can't play in the classroom. Innovation can happen in the areas where innovation is permitted, but not in the firewalled areas where we demand conformity. It's an insidious thing. But the weakest part of organisations, the blind spots, is frequently where conformity rules. You might invent the world's greatest transistors, but if you're totally closed to a new approach to, say, your communications strategy, you've created a weakness through conformity.

There. Glad I got that off my chest...

Book Post: Music And Books

Cover of Object 47

Finishing Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy has been something of an event for me. The way it went at the end, words tumbling onto the page at a tremendous rate because I knew precisely where I was going, was great fun. And the journey there was accompanied by Rammstein and Arvo Pärt - as strange a combination as you'd ever want. I defy you to listen to Pärt's 'Fur Alina' without feeling a sense of desolation, loss, beauty and peace.

Music has always had a critical relationship to writing books for me. Tunes have influenced the tone of my writing and the type of thing I'm writing has influenced the music I listen to. I think about what I'm writing when I drive to work in the mornings, a half hour of solitary pondering that usually defines the scene I'm about to commit to type. The music on the CD player or iPod can really influence the way that goes.

Similarly, some music has had a totally seminal effect on the book I'm working on. I always had it in mind to add the 'soundtrack' of each book to the end bit but never got around to it. Here, for what it's worth, are those lists.

SPACE
It's so long since I wrote Space now, I forget much of the soundtrack, but I do recall listening to a lot of early Wire - anyone out there remember the amazing Another The Letter? Later on, I found myself editing Space listening to Object 47, which had the perfect feel for the book for me.

OLIVES - A VIOLENT ROMANCE
Olives was actually written as the result of a piece of music - I've told the tale many times, but I went to sleep one night listening to George Winston's February Sea, which had me thinking about a girl dancing in the rain (the central scene in the book) and woke up with a book in my head. I listened to a lot of George Winston while I was writing and subsequently editing Olives. Brian Eno was also a major listen, particularly the stunning 'Music for Airports', but also this amazing little thing, take a listen and see if it doesn't make you want to cry - Bone Bomb. I was also enjoying Lebanese east/west fusion act Blend at the time, although it looks like they're defuncted now. This amazing piece of music by Secret Garden informed the ending of Olives - it's actually a mother's song to a child, but I always think of it as the voice of a lost lover.

BEIRUT - AN EXPLOSIVE THRILLER
Secret Garden, appropriately, ended Olives and started Beirut - I always thought if Beirut got made into a film I'd like the title sequence to be a film of the waves as if approaching Beirut by helicopter, then flying over the city and through its streets as it woke up in the morning. The music would be this piece and the title would reveal at around  2:40. Then we move on to more sensible stuff, particularly Kasabian with the first scene in Beirut very much written listening to this (Lynch and Palmer walk out of the villa and this tune is playing as they drive up the track to the Saida Road). There was a bit of Guy Manoukian going on, as well, some Oumeima and a lot of Beirut Biloma. 

SHEMLAN - A DEADLY TRAGEDY
An awful lot of Foo Fighters, oddly enough. And then the esoterica. A lot of Silence, a huge influence on the book, as was Jorgestrada. I picked up a recording of singing from Estonian Orthodox Churches which I listened to a lot with enjoyment. Jason Hartmoor's first awakening in the book takes place with that playing in the backgrond as he looks out at the beach at Newgale. Oddly enough, that music is a huge influence on composer Arvo Pärt, whose De Profundis was also a biggie during writing. And then there was a load of Ulrich Schnauss and tons of Sigur Ros. To finish, we depended on Professor Kliq, Rammstein, Sasha and the Chemical Brothers. Seriously. And then the last few pages were very much down to Mr Pärt.

So. Now you know...

Sharjah's Big Bus Tour. An Odd Little Thing...

London bus - London eye (Photo credit: @Doug88888)

So a friend has her mum out for a couple of weeks, right? And she decides to take her on the Big Bus Tour of Sharjah (only it's not called that, it's called something else. But you know what I mean). So she nips down to that most classic of Sharjah hotels, The Coral Beach, and she asks 'em if they've got any information on the big bus tour thingy.

She was given a piece of paper with, her words, my face on it.

Disconcerting stuff, eh? In fact she was given a printout of this here post I did on the City Sightseeing Tour of Sharjah. Being one of the few people in the world who don't avidly log in every day to see what half-thought I've jotted down and flung at the wall of this very blog - in fact, being unaware that I even had a blog - she found the whole experience bordering on the alarming.

I think it's quite charming, really. The post wasn't by any means a gushy endorsement of the tour - in fact I went to some length to point out the things it should encompass but in fact misses out. And yet that's what they're using to promote the gig.

I'm thinking of a book now. 101 uses for a marginal blog...

The Definite Article

English: The first Qatar Airways Cargo Boeing 777F (A7-BFA) in Frankfurt (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The is the definite article. It is used in front of definite nouns, for instance, the world. So if you want to be known as the world's five star airline, you need a definite article.

Someone forgot to tell Qatar Airways. Which is a shame as every night I try to catch the news on Sky before going to bed, my only regular TV consuming habit as otherwise I tend to shun TV like a rabid dog. And every night the weather sponsored by Qatar Airways plays out some cheesy image of someone being unfeasibly cosseted together with the tagline, "Qatar Airways. World's Five Star Airline."

I find this annoying. Not in a life-threatening call the anger management guys he's about to chew off Akbar Baker's face sort of way, but in a sort of itchy animal bite sort of way. I do often wonder if the ad agency responsible are client doormats or simply stupid and incapable of stringing together a five word sentence. Alternatively, I suppose, they might think it's clever or in some way 'disruptive' to intentionally mangle the sentence. I can actually see some pony-tailed, yo-yo toting cretin presenting this new way of getting the consumers' attention. It could catch on. Imagine: "A Mars a day helps you work, rest and marmoset". See? Disruptive to the max, baby.

And then in today's Gulf News I spot an advertisement for Qatar Airways to Perth. And lo and behold, the headline's RIGHT! "Fly to the capital of Western Australia with the world's 5-star airline" it says.

I bet someone's gonna cop it for that one.

"You're sacked."
"But it's right!"
"Yes, that's what's wrong. It's not supposed to be right."

The Shipping News

Last year, you may recall two ships landed on the beach outside our front door after their crews had lost control in bad weather. The two grounded around a week apart and became something of a tourist attraction.

A couple of recent spats of windy weather has once again wreaked havoc in shipping circles, with not two but three ships falling foul of the inclement conditions. An Iranian tug has landed on Ajman beach, while the 'Lady Moon', a small tanker, sank just off the breakwater at Sharjah's Hamriyah port last week. Now Hamriyah has a second sinking, the supply vessel Hatem II, according to Gulf News.today.

The Lady Moon was lucky - the 30-metre ship had offloaded its cargo of diesel, which could have resulted in a nasty little spill. Its crew were taken into custody, while the captain of the Hatem II has apparently hightailed it and is nowhere to be found. Presumably he tripped and fell into a lifeboat.

Remember when Ratings Were About Films?

Image via Wikipedia

So a company in America called Standard and Poor's has pronounced on the performance of Europe's economies and governments and downgraded them. This has been taken seriously rather than laughed out of court. I'm sure I'm not alone in being totally bewildered as to how this is the case.

I first came across a rating agency, and the concept of 'ratings' in 2001, when I was working on launching a mobile network. My client's competitor had been rated (It was being primped for a sale) by one of the 'big three' rating agencies with many As and pluses. I was interested to see how the competitor could rate so highly in someone's eyes and obtained a copy of the rating report. The report cited a total lack of competition and an excellent infrastructure. At the time, (if memory serves me correctly) we had just noisily launched a competitive network with the backing of a major international telco brand. The competitor's infrastructure was also, as was obvious to anyone who had spent any time on the ground, woeful. Even their masts looked like rickety water pumps on a hick Ohio farm.

The chap from the rating agency told me they didn't just rate companies - they rated municipalities in the States, too - cities. I remember being awed at the idea that some company would actually have the power to rate a city and effectively change its ability to raise money.

It's an experience that's been very much in my mind over recent weeks as we hear this or that agency threatening to downgrade this or that government. Firstly that these three companies hold that power (and don't tell me for one second these decisions aren't politically or commercially influenced over cosy little lunches in Washington) and secondly that my one experience of them showed that the rating was based on what was presumably some pretty sloppy research and didn't reflect the actual market conditions prevailing.

I wonder why everyone's putting up with it?