Britpop

Fly to Bahrain. Foggy morning. Board plane bang on time, much to the expressed surprise of several pleased passengers. I think we’d all expected delays, the fog was pretty bad, so it was impressive indeed to be boarding. Get on board. Captain’s a right joker and announces that we’re looking at sitting on the tarmac for a two-hour delay. Haha. Except, as Jarvis Cocker tells us, I don’t see anyone else laughing around here.

It could be worse. I remember reading about a China Airways flight where the landing gear broke on takeoff, necessitating a three-hour flight in circles to burn fuel before the ‘plane crash landed. You can imagine the conversation being a tad stilted among the passengers. At least we’re waiting two hours to take off safely!

Anyway. We’re off now. An hour’s drive to the airport, two to check in, two on the tarmac and one in the air. It’s taken me almost a whole working day just to get to the start of my working day. I fly back again tonight: an 18 hour day in all.

Blur were right. Modern life is rubbish.

Bar

It’s smoky. There’s an old Khaleeji guy in the bar and he’s pissed, throwing back Heineken like the world’s about to end. He’s calling out to people, throwing lines of Arabic-laced Anglo-gibberish to anyone who comes into his orbit. I tell the barman that there’s no way the guy is flying, but he just laughs at me and tells me the chap comes every week and walks straight when he leaves.

The Asian kid next to me is dressed like he owns Facebook: jeans and Kenzo jacket. He’s drinking Corona, smoking a fag and jerking spastically as he plays with his hand-held games console, the smoke forces him to squint as he plays, moving his head to one side but still jerking his hands in response to the fast-moving LCD.

It’s dark, oddly ‘70s, seedy, all browns and beiges: a Bisto ‘aaahhh’ of grey smoke curling through the air.

The call to prayer sounds over the tannoy, but for Prince it’s still 1999. The Khaleeji guy is grinning like a maniac: “Brinze! Brinze! Kuweiss!” he calls out to his reluctant audience of Keralite and Sudani guys.

The South Africans are talking about piling systems.

I love the bar at Bahrain International Airport.

Vista

I’ve tried not to post this post, God knows but I’ve tried. However, some things I guess are inevitable and this event certainly seems to be.

I’ve upgraded to a new notebook, the Lenovo T61. It seems perfectly competent, but I was inordinately fond of my old T43 and really wanted the same but faster. The T61 is undoubtedly more powerful, but is actually bigger. I didn’t really want bigger. I should have waited for the incredibly sexy X300, I know.

But it’s not the Lenovo ruining my life. It’s Microsoft Bloody Windows Bloody Vista.

It’s hard to imagine anyone purposefully creating a more pointless, dumb and fundamentally irritating piece of software. Windows Vista is like having a constant visual conversation with Barney. Every time you try to achieve or accomplish anything, there’s a cuddly-purple-dinosaur-like dialogue box asking you if you really want to do that or telling you, for some irritating and unfathomable reason, that you can’t do it. Sometimes it offers you help and when you finally wade through a dense jungle of awful dialogue boxes to link to the Microsoft Loves You™ website, it smugly tells you that it can’t help you at all, really. It was just, one presumes, kidding. I’m already sick of waiting anything up to a minute for Windows Explorer to open. And I’m heartily sick of watching a damn blue circle coruscate calmingly as I wait for something, anything, to happen in response to my inputs. I haven’t spent so much time waiting for stuff to happen on a computer for a long time. But then it was complex stuff like drawing a fractal. Now I’m waiting for a basic dialogue box to appear.

I have upgraded to a significantly more powerful computer in order to wait longer for basic system events to take place. Explain that to me. It’s like wading in digital molasses. I’m slowly drowning in a sea of slo-mo, pricked to incandescence by stupid dialogue boxes telling me that the keyboard is the tappy thing in front of me, that I am a bipedal carbon-based lifeform and any number of blindingly obvious infodings that I simply do not want. I feel like a bull being goaded into blind fury before the toreador finally brings me to my knees with a cry of ‘Vistaaaa’.

I’m getting used to some new joys, too. For instance, the joy of finding my DNS settings or my browser homepage arbitrarily reset. The joy of hardware that refuses to work (Vista has convinced itself that the rather excellent Lenovo biometrics system is not connected to the computer).

Every time you try to achieve or accomplish anything, it’s like having a mad mid-Western voice suddenly explode in your head: “Hey! You’re trying to change those settings! That’s under the bonnet stuff, li’l buddy! Are you real sure you wanna go lookin’ under the bonnet?”

“Heyyyy! You’re sending an email! That could be real insecure! Press OK to send the email or just go on ahead an’ press Help to shoot yourself!”

I might sound angry beyond the point of reason. I am. I want XP back. Actually, I want Windows 98 back. Actually, scratch that. I want DOS back. I’ve been forced to the realisation that I’m using 2GB of RAM, 160GB of hard disk and a dual pipelined multiprocessing 64 bit microprocessor clocked at over 2 GHz to type and send letters 90% of the time. I used to use a 64 Kbyte, 1 MHz machine to do that and it was just fine. The only difference is that I used to print and send those letters and now I email them. How can it be possible to do so little with so much computing power and resource? Because there’s a fat, stupid bloated wodge of software between me and productivity and it’s called Windows Bloody Vista.

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

Flight

It’s such a typical Middle East story that I’m not going to bore you with the gory details. Suffice to say that I tried to book tickets for two relatives to come visit us over Easter using my abundant stock of Emirates Skywards airmiles and a few Dirhams more. It quickly turned into a 3-hour nightmare of pointless, long and frustrating conversations and music on hold that sounded like the Clangers playing Sinead O’Connor’s Nothing Compares To U through long reeds inserted into their anuses. Sideways.

The websites didn’t really work very well (Am I the only person who thinks that the new Emirates website sucks at a deep and fundamental level?), particularly the Skywards site, which required customers to reset their cookies, clear the cache and stick marzipan copies of the Venus de Milo into their nostrils (they’re quite insistent on the last point) before it will allow even the simplest transaction to be contemplated.

So then you’re on to the call centres, which give you unparalleled access to morons who believe that your role in the transaction is to be led to the stun gun of their incompetence like cattle to the abattoir.

I ended up with one of two people’s tickets booked on a flight using Skywards Miles and being told to go to Emirates’ call centre to book the other ticket paying cash because Skywards couldn't take cash. Of course then the other ticket wasn’t available for under £1,000 – three times the price of any budget airline and pretty much double the normal Emirates fare for any other flight on that day. And the Emirates call centre couldn’t change the Skywards booking. So I had a useless Skywards ticket and a no-go madly priced Emirates ticket – and a couple flying on different flights on the same day – all with a great deal of ping-ponging between the two call centres and frenzied research on the EK website as the flights during the busy Easter period filled up around me.

Three hours and a great deal of tooth gritting later I got my two flights from the UK to Dubai: one on my Skywards miles and one using good old fashioned cash. Which is what I wanted, simply, to begin with. The angel that managed this was called Nikita and she simply did what could and should have been done in the first place: she helped me and was intelligent.

What amazes me is not that Emirates managed to waste three hours of my life, but that they wasted three hours of their booking staff’s time to complete a straightforward transaction that should have been simplicity itself and enabled by the website.

There was nothing that I wanted that was unusual or complicated. Just two tickets on one flight – using any combination (I didn’t care which combination) of miles and cash.

If there are many more like me out there, Emirates are blowing millions of Dirhams a year on managing long, complex and ultimately pointless transactions with furiously unhappy customers that are simply unable to conduct relatively simple and straightforward transactions on the company’s website or with its call centres.

Or perhaps I’m just unlucky...

Ancient

Gianni was musing the other week about the history of the Macintosh and generally having a ‘my first computer I ever had at work’ moment, which rather got me thinking along the same lines. And good golly, but he’s a relative newbie!!

So here’s the list of computers I've used in order of (remembered) ownership/use for work. Home is another thing entirely!

• CBM 96
• Tandy Model III
• Tandy Model IV
• Tandy IVP (The 22lb ‘luggable’)
• Apple II
• Apple IIE
• Apple IIC
• Tandy M100
• Tandy M1000 w/10mb external HDD (The 'look at me even a little bit wrong and I head crash' model)
• Tandy M2000
• Apricot F1
• Olivetti M10
• DEC PDP11
• THEN an Olivetti M24, Gianni Catalfanewbie!
• Toshiba T1600
• Compaq 386
• Compaq Presario
• Digital Pentium
• Fujitsu Laptop
• IBM T43 (lovely)
• Lenovo T61 (jury’s still out)

I remember laughing at the Lisa and furious arguments at the BASUG Apple user group about the evil 'closed top' Mac, 8” disk drives and the GEM GUI, proofing Ventura pages on a dot matrix and thinking that the Amstrad was a really cool computer. The Sinclair QL and the ICL One Per Desk (doomed from the moment someone said, 'Hey, why don’t we put a phone on a computer?'). The first computer I ever saw, in fact, was a Hewlett Packard mainframe that my school bought at huge cost (suppose it would have been a 3000 series) which was programmed using punched cards.

I think I’d better stop there, actually before the Geek Police come for me…

Lachrymose

One does try not to be an 'it ain't like it used to be' bore, but the sad truth is that Dubai was a great deal more fun in the 1980s than it is now. Sorry, that's just the way it is.

I used to enjoy listening to the tales of older residents when we first got out here; people like Sue and Pete Ellis, Gill Hollis and Shirley Robinson and Dorothy 'Dotters' Miles used to liven things up no end with old stories and photos of the days before the days when the Sheikh Zayed Road was two lanes of unfenced blacktop to Abu Dhabi. The days when Gill drove a Range Rover from Coventry to Dubai overland (well, apart from a roof-warping dhow trip from Iran) , when Sean Connery and company used to drink at the Aladdin Hotel in Sharjah (now a roadside garden) and when Hatta was a real day's journey.

And so this website, posted up to the UAE Community Blog by Localexpat is a truly fantastic thing for me: a hint of the Dubai whose last days I arrived just in time to see, a fleeting glimpse of an altogether more adventurous and really rather quaint life at the genteel edge of the explored world.

Do have fun at Len Chapman's website. It's truly a wonderful place and a little slice of history that really does deserve its own place on t'Internet. I recommend a nice cup of tea or even a 'cold one' and a good hour just to fossick about there...

Disappointed

I do enjoy having the occasional peek at the searches that have ended up referring hapless wanderers of the Internet to this lonely little blog and I like to share the cream of the crop now and then. So here are some more of the searches that ended up getting decent, law abiding people misdirected to this dusty little corner of the internet. You do wonder sometimes what on earth people are up to.

Anyway. I have also appended the best advice I can think of, just in case the disappointed searchers ever try and repeat the search. I feel bad they should have wasted their time here instead of finding the thing they most sought in the world at that moment...

ideas for making fake human kidneys for a project
Let’s, for a second, put aside any natural concern about quite what project we’re talking about (I mean, is this project biology lecture or project scare the hell out of your little sister by filling her wendy house with body parts?), I’d maybe look at using balloons filled with sand. You’ll have a hard time getting a balloon that’s the same colour as a kidney if you don’t live in the Middle East, but my local Lal’s Supermarket sells some really dodgy party balloons and you’re sure to find a couple of kidney coloured ones in each bag. They’ll also be deliciously, realistically, squishy. Now just cover them in lots of tomato ketchup. Don’t let any policemen find you wandering around with a bag full of human kidneys. For some reason it makes them suspicious.

Are there big parks in Ajman
Yes. But there are bigger ones in Sharjah and Dubai.

Are Russian girls grumpy
Generally only if provoked, I find. Otherwise they’re often really quite lovely. However, all girls can be grumpy for no particular reason for a few days every month and so consequently they’re generally always best approached with caution.

Is traffic in Dubai bad?
Are you kidding me? Is there someone in the world that really hasn’t appreciated this, the one abiding truth in the city of a thousand cranes? Yes the traffic in Dubai is bad – gut-wrenchingly, heart-achingly, distressingly, road-rage-inducingly bad. It’s about as bad as you’d want to get: hours of sitting around in pointless, aggressive, lane-swapping lines of epic proportions, the crawling lines of cars laced with belching fumes as they stand on shimmering tarmac. People regularly pitch late for meetings: events are planned around traffic patterns or alternatives found to avoid dragging people through the misery. I do hope that starts to give you some idea of the picture here. And no, the traffic regulator, the RTA, isn’t really helping very much as far as I can see – although we can only hope that its long term vision and plan are better than its short term communications.

Note to RTA: putting up roadside advertisements trumpeting your achievements in areas where the traffic has been rendered immobile by your actions is not the way to people’s hearts.

Dubai lalaland
You pretty much nailed that one on the head.

You need to leave Dubai and look up towards the sky.
If you like. I hear more and more people talking about quitting Dubai as prices go through the roof and the traffic makes each day a grind. The whole rental/property thing isn’t much fun, either. And it’s about as multidimensional as a poster of Victoria Beckham, but personally I’m still highly amused by the place.

Strangled chicken
Strange one, this. I can’t shake the nagging suspicion that this search is somehow linked to some strange perversity that I haven’t yet encountered. But maybe I’m just being a little too salacious.

Is a promotional stone valuable?
Not if it comes from Acer! LOL!

Sad cat
Some little things make all this worth doing, honestly. I am relatively proud of the fact that if you search Google Images for the image ‘Sad cat’, which several people appear to have done, you get to me on the second page of rather sickening results (yeah, it would be better if it were the first, but you takes what you can get). Sadly for those beguiled by the cutesy kitten, you get the following text directly underneath:

“Am I the only person in the world who thinks that the only thing less funny than the much discussed LOL Cats is being boiled to death in your own tears? I freely confess to failing to see the purpose or humour in this most pathetic of memes. Cutesy, dumbed down and with little originality or witticism, they synthesise the worst of ‘Ahhh, look at kitty!’ with a touch of ‘Who loves the naughty kitty then?’ It’s enough to make you puke.”

Take that, cat lovers! :)

Weekend

A while ago I posted up ten things to get you out of the house, which would also do as ideas for when you’ve got visitors. Here’s another ten. So now you’ve got twenty individual things to find out about the Emirates, which really does mean you’ve got no excuse for saying ‘there’s nothing to do today’ or, bless you all, ‘this place hasn’t got any culture’.

Like the last post, this comes with a long post warning. I couldn’t be bothered to split it up and post one a day…

The Gold Souks

This is a bit of a cheat, as I’ve actually got two gold souks in mind. Dubai Gold Souk is inside the bit of Deira by the mouth of the creek, halfway between HSBC in Dubai and the Grand Hyatt in Deira. You can park up anywhere in that area and just walk inside and you’ll get to it: an alternative is to take an abra across to the spice souk abra station from Bastakia, which is always fun. If you do it in the evening, take a turn up the dhow wharfage, too and have a shufti at the amazing mixture of cargoes, boats and crews. Sitting watching life go by and biting into the piping hot, spicy pakoras from the tea shops on the creekside at sunset was an old pleasure from travelling out here in the ‘80s…

Sharjah Gold Souk, the Souk Al Markazi or Blue Souk, is to be found at the edge of the Buheira Lagoon and sits at the end of King Feisal Street as it joins Al Aroubah Street, near to the fish market, the Saudi mosque and Al Ittihad Square. Any cabbie should know at least one of those! A major piece of contemporary Islamic architecture, the Blue Souq is nestled snugly by the insanely optimistic ‘Smile, You’re In Sharjah’ roundabout, so called because it contains that very injunction picked out lovingly, by insane people, in flowers. In fact, we have long referred to this as ‘Smile, you’re insane’ roundabout.

You’ll likely get better shopping out of the Sharjah souk, although the Dubai one is more extensive. The Sharjah one has the added advantage of an ‘antique souk’ on the first floor, although the chances of finding a true antique there are about as remote as those of finding a talking fish. Bargain like your life depended on it: the stallholders are as venial a collection of bashi-bazouks as you’re likely to find in your life.

Sheikh Saeed’s House

Sheikh Saeed Al Maktoum was Sheikh Rashid’s father (Sheikh Rashid, arguably the founder of ‘modern’ Dubai and a truly visionary man) and therefore is Sheikh Mohammad’s grandfather. His house has now been restored from its former crumbling state, years of neglect having reduced it in parts almost to rubble. The house itself is a fantastic place to take a wander in the daytime and is also home to a delightful collection of early photography of Dubai as well as a collection of coins and other bits and bobs. It’s well worth the visit and costs pennies to get into. The area around has also been restored as a cultural centre and you can easily give an afternoon wandering around. If you want to hang around for the early evening, you can sit by the creekside, drink mint tea and smoke shisha at Kan Zaman as you watch the dhows and pleasure boats, abras and seagulls whizzing around the busy waterway.

Another option is to accede to the clamorous abra drivers who park up by Sheikh Saeed’s house and accept a tour up and down the creek. Don’t pay ‘em more than Dhs 60, they’re robbers, but do take the tour: it’s great fun and they’ll drop you off at the Spice Souk abra station so you can wander the dhow wharfage at sunset or go into the Gold Souk. Neat, huh?

Another hint: if you’re going to be in this area with guests, start the afternoon off with lunch at the Grand Hyatt’s Al Dawar revolving restaurant, known to us both (unfairly) for many years as the ‘revolting restaurant’. The food’s really good and you get to do an aerial tour of Dubai as you eat and gently revolve 360 degrees in an hour.

You can get to Sheikh Saeed’s house, which is in Shindaga, by driving towards Shindaga tunnel from Bur Dubai and then slinging a right before you get to the tunnel and just after you pass Carrefour or the Al Bustan Flour mill to your right. Or ask a cab to take you to the fruit souk in Bur Dubai and then go left at the lights beyond the fruit souk towards the main souk area.

Bastakia

Established by Iranian traders under British protection in the C19th, Bastakia’s wind towered adobe houses have been restored and are a delight to wander around: particularly as a few have been given over to cafes and art shops. A short walk along the creekside towards Shindaga will take you past the Amiri diwan to Dubai fort, which is a small, but good, museum.

The wind tower, incidentally, so much a symbol of the UAE is an Iranian innovation brought over to the UAE and can best be seen at Ajman Fort Museum, where a working, original wind tower stands. It’s amazingly efficient.

Geeky fact: one of the reasons these houses and forts are made of coral is that they allow air to pass through: in the summer, water was poured on the roof and the family would then sleep under the stars as the evaporation gently cooled them.

Dubai Museum

What a link! Dubai Museum, located at the old Al Fahidi fort in Bur Dubai, sits next to the Amiri Diwan. You get to it by driving down the creekside past the British Consulate (or Saudi Embassy, depending on how you like your directions) or, alternatively, by passing Bur Juman to your left going down bank street and then turning right at the lights. Or take a cab.

The Museum’s small but pretty much perfectly formed: the entrance leads quickly into a courtyard with rooms off it showing video clips and barasti (palm frond) houses showing how people lived in Dubai right up until the 1970s. Then you’re on the way downstairs, past a strangely stuffed and suspended seabird and a wee model of the old settlement of Dubai and into the highly impressive video show of Dubai’s history. From there, it’s a journey through town and desert and then into a display of artefacts from Dubai’s archaeological past and then, almost before you know it, you’re blinking in the sunlight again. If you’ve lived here more than six months and haven’t been, then shame upon you.

Liwa

Finding Liwa’s a doddle: go towards Abu Dhabi and then drive south – you can use the truck road or the ‘regular’ road – and you’ll need a reasonable road map. If you’re going to do Liwa, there are only two sensible options: the Liwa Hotel or camping. If you’re intending to drive on the dunes you’ll need friends, sand shovels, water, tow-ropes and the million other things that serious off-roading demands. I’d buy a copy of the Explorer offroad book – it’s the best of them.

One attraction on the way down is the Emirates National Auto Musuem, the private collection of cars assembled by Sheikh Hamad bin Hamdan al Nahyan. The watchman usually lets people in, so don’t be deterred if it looks closed!

So why bother with Liwa? Well, the Liwa Crescent is true, deep desert. The dunes roll out as far as the eye can see, stunning piles of golden, reddish sand that can peak at 200 feet. It’s camel country, herds roam across the sands and the people out here are still close to the land, even if they do tend towards the Landcruiser lifestyle a little more than when Wilf ‘watery boys’ Thesiger used to wander around these parts.

The solitude out there is absolute, the tranquillity of the desert is a delight and at night-time, the deep desert clear skies and glistening stars stretched out above you, totally free of light pollution. There’s nothing like it!

Wadi Warraya

Wadi Warraya is easy to get to these days, signposted off the Dibba-Khor Fakkan road (or, if you’re going the other way, the Khor Fakkan-Dibba road) and reachable by blacktop road. It used to be an 18km wadi drive from the main road and was by far better off for it, too.

It’s the only guaranteed year-round waterfall in the Emirates and is, sadly, covered in graffiti and often filled with rubbish: the inevitable consequence of the road being built up to it. On one occasion we visited to find a gentleman had pitched his tent and installed a generator to drive the lightbulb on a stick he’d placed in front of it. The noise was awful.

Be careful about letting kids splash in the rock pools at Warrayah: there’s often a hidden payload of smashed glass in there. Climb up, though, and bathe in the bowl at the top of the waterfall, where a natural ‘Jacuzzi’ has formed: it’s really nice up there and the whole area’s great for a wander along the wadis and even a picnic!

Fujeirah Fort & Museum

The East Coast makes for a great day out: strike out early and aim for Masafi (the Dhaid, or airport, road out of Sharjah or the 611 out of Dubai should do, slinging a right at the Sajja turnoff – you could also drive towards Hatta and turn left at the Madham roundabout to get to Dhaid but that’s a long haul. Turn left at Masafi to get to Dibba, then right to pass by the JAL Hotel, the Al Aqha Meridien and then the Sandy Beach – an overnight at any one of these hotels would make the day out a neat weekend break. Drive down the coast towards Khor Fakkan, stop at the Bidya Mosque (the wee meringue-shaped white thing on the right under the lookout tower on the hill) for a peek on the way to Sharjah’s Indian Ocean resort town. Bidya is thought to date back to the C15th, which would take it back to the fall of Byzantium – although there is more ancient history on this coast with Dibba the scene of the battle that finally established Islam as the religion of the entire Gulf (and the burial place of 10,000 warriors today) and Bitnah home to a megalithic (that’s 3,000 years old to you, mate) grave site on the ancient trade route that used to snake up the wadi linking Fujeirah to Masafi.

Wadi Warayah is a right hand just before you get to Khor Fakkan (so is Wadi Shis, but that’s another story for another day)

The Oceanic Hotel at Khor Fakkan used to be nice, but we haven’t stayed there in 17 years, so don't take this as an up-to-date recommendation! When you leave Khor Fakkan, you’ll head inland for a bit before rejoining the coast and then you’ll find yourself entering Fujeirah itself.

Carry on along the coastal road until you see the Hilton on your left. There’s a large coffee pot on the roundabout (most roundabouts in Fujeirah are monumental, in fact many are monumentally dysfunctional): sling a right here and you can’t miss the Fujeirah Museum as well as the slightly drab ‘cultural and heritage centre’. The Museum’s nice and worth dropping by for, but not worth the trip to see specifically. If that makes any sense. It’s a short walk or a hop in the car from here to the restored Fujeirah Fort, which is well worth a wander round – particularly if you remember the awful ruin on a hillock that stood there washing away into the ground with every winter rains.

Now you can drive down the coast some more to reach Khor Kalba or drive inland to Masafi and perhaps visit Bitnah or Daftah on the way up. The drive’s amazing, particularly at sunset, when the craggy peaks to your left are silhouetted rather wonderfully.

Khor Kalba

If you decided to drive down to Kalba rather than go up to Masafi, you’re in for a treat: Kalba’s got a nice restored fort (it used to be an Emirate in its own right and an important one, as the backup airstrip for Imperial Airways’ airport at Sharjah was in Kalba), which used to be nothing more, literally, than a depression in the ground. It’s also got a neat seaside which extends out into an extensive mangrove swamp. Conservationists will get irritated here: Kalba’s something of a mess and really could do with more environmental protection measures and perhaps something nice like a visitor centre, but for now it’s open to all and the rubbish tells its own tale. The mangroves are fantastic, buzzing with life includling blue-shelled crabs. On the beach, local fishermen bring up dragnets using ancient, battered Toyota Landcruisers, a massive frothing load of fish the eventual result and then, tragically, a beach scattered with the corpses of sand sharks: edible but not liked by the locals and so of no value to them. They can’t be put back, apparently, as they inevitably die once they’ve been pulled up in the nets and have breathed air.

Go back on the mountain road to Sharjah and get a real treat of a drive scenically – including the mad tunnel through the mountain – and you’ll eventually end up at the infamous National Paints Roundabout on the Emirates Road!

Al Maha

Scrimp and save if you have to. Use your Skywards Miles. Sell a child. A kidney. But just do it.

A club class upgrade to Heathrow = 50,000 miles. A 24-hour summer blissout with food on demand and a luxurious desert chalet with a private pool = 50,000 miles. It’s a no-brainer, surely!

Emirates’ Al Maha Desert Resort is getting arguably a teensy weensy bit old and drab and could do with a minor spruce up. (Oi! I didn’t say change it!) But it’s still Dubai’s most interesting hotel and without doubt stands as the premium resort hotel in the Northern Emirates, no competition. You call ahead when you’re on the Al Ain road (route 66) and there’s a guide waiting to pick you up as you arrive at the holding area (you can’t take your own car in). It’s a quick ride through the dunes on black top to the hotel, passing through the enormous game reserve (something like a third of Dubai’s land area). Once you’re there, ladies in kandouras ply you with towels and fruit cocktails as you’re checked in then it’s a golf cart to your chalet which will feature a massive bath for two, a nice fresh coffee maker, a decanter of sherry (very civilised at sunset on the decking), two chaise longues and a decked area out back graced with its own swimming pool for two. Oh, I should mention it’s definitely not a child friendly place. Yaaayyyy!!!

Room service is included as is any meal you take in the restaurant, so it’s much lounging around followed perhaps by a glass of pop on the dunes after a camel ride or a quick safari with your guide, then freshen up before a drink overlooking the waterhole and dinner in the restaurant: it’s a set menu, but the chef will accommodate pretty much any request, including a Sri-Lankan curry for two if you’re really, really nice to him and give him some notice. It’s a curry to die for, too.

If you’re up to it, there’s falconry in the morning. We’ve never managed the 5.30am wakeup. You’re more likely to find us lolling around in the extensive, excellent (and a tad expensive, but in for a penny...) spa. Incidentally, once you’re checked out, there’s no hurry to get rid of you – the staff always make it a point to ask if you’d like to stay for lunch. Which is a nice touch.

And so, 24 hours after you called from the Al Ain road, you’ll be blissed out, relaxed and filled with strong feelings of love towards your fellow men. I’m not saying that’ll last, I’m saying this is how to get there…

Cruel

It was none other than Guardian technology section editor and blogger Charles Arthur who, via his report on his blog, turned me onto a most amusing little corner of the Internet which I, in turn, feel compelled to share with you.

As if to show that the mighty Guardian can, indeed, take it on the chin, Charles reports on the fascinating affair of The Guardian's very own home grown scandal - that of the 'gap blogger'. The gap blogger, a young chap called Max, has been given a slice of the Guardian's blog in which to report on his travels in his 'gap year'. A gap year is the year between school and university that many, often well-to-do, British kids spend backpacking around the world and discovering themselves. Incidentally, I do think that people who set out to discover themselves are often just trying to travel away from the fact that what there is there to be discovered is very little indeed.

So Max, apparently no different from any other 19 year old, gets to write on a British national newspaper's blog. A break which few aspiring young travel writers could expect to get. The fact that Max's travel writer dad is a Guardian contributor introduces a beguiling whiff of nepotistic sulphur to an otherwise drab contribution: Max's first piece is really no more or less than you'd expect - a little silly, naive, slightly clumsy and perhaps gawky. What's perhaps surprising is that The Guardian Blog is supporting such a poor contribution.

And this is where we get to the real fun of the affair: the tide of abuse that nestles in the comments. It's even possible that the phrase gap blogger might enter our dictionaries or even transform into a real life honest-to-goodness meme.

I do recommend a flick through Max's first (and last?) post and the consequent howls of rage from readers. The criticism is nothing less than coruscating - and the volume of comment is quite remarkable. It's a rollicking good read and a fantastic example of social networking at its most... social or anti-social? You decide!

Blocked

They're at it again. According to Emirates Business 24x7, Internet access is to be liberalised.

Before you get all excited, it's important to understand what the word liberalised means. You probably thought, like many people, it meant something like 'to make or to become more favorable to progress or reform, as in political or religious affairs'.

Progress, in this case, means extending the site blocking policy that Etisalat currently supports to its competitor Du and formalising the criteria to be applied to what content is to be blocked. That includes 'dating websites': Emirates Business, in its incisive report on the move, quotes a spokesman for the UAE's Telecom Regulatory Authority, the TRA, as saying that sections of social networking websites such as Facebook that encouraged dating would be banned but that residents would have access to the website excluding those parts.

Let us be very clear here, perhaps clearer than we have been over our use of the word liberalisation. Social networking results in opening up channels between people of every origin, creed and colour to enjoy dialogue, to share their thoughts, creations and experiences. It's really quite important.

We're not talking about blocking commercial pornography, sexual or blasphemous content here. We're talking about stopping people, individuals, exchanging information over an open platform.

It does strike me that if you can't deal with what other people have to say, or can't stand the thought that the people close to you cannot deal with the moral challenges of unfettered thought, I'm not really sure that the answer is sticking your fingers in your ear and shouting 'Lalalalalalalala' until they go away.

But I am sure that these blocking policies have the potential to continue retarding the adoption, innovation and use of these emerging technologies in the region. Liberalisation is an inexcusable misuse of language to describe this move, both on the part of the regulator that used it and the newspaper that allowed it to pass unchallenged.