Beirut Off Limits?

(Photo credit: Côte d’Azur)

I wonder if Gulf News gave Beirut's Phoenicia Hotel the option of dropping its quarter page colour ad in today's edition, given the paper carries the news of  the UAE Foreign Ministry's clear warning to Emiratis not to travel to Lebanon?

The warning comes as Lebanon struggles to cope with the effects of the Syrian conflict on its border (which makes a change from a Syrian conflict within its borders, which has also been known to happen), with a large and fast-growing refugee problem and myriad economic woes hanging on the conflict's coattails.

It's a pretty bleak warning as the Ministry is making travellers sign a pledge to take responsibility when they travel to Lebanon. A few days ago the Lebanese government asked Gulf governments to drop their travel warnings - intra-regional tourism is an important revenue earner for Lebanon, particularly as we go into the summer and the Gulf's favourite playground comes into its own.

This year, it's going to be a desolate little playground, methinks, filled with the sound of people playing with that brittle, manic gaiety born of desperation.

Even the UK's FCO has joined in with its own travel warnings. Given, as I pointed out (admittedly using the voice of anti-hero Paul Stokes) in Olives - A Violent Romance, the FCO is usually sensible...

"Scanning email got me a travel warning from the Yanks for Jordan: present danger despite the peace deal, terrorist threats against US and other allied nationals, extreme caution, yadayada. Great. Looking up the Foreign Office resulted in, as usual, the suggestion that Brits might like to wear a hat if walking through Gaza at midday as the sun can be tiresome."

...its warnings against travel in the Bekaa, Saida, South of the Litani and anywhere close to the Syrian border are slightly more nuanced than the Gulf's blanket warnings, but are all the more concerning for all that.

Given the Lebanese embassy to the UK (nice website for fans of the 1990s school of web design, BTW) advises travellers to "Leave a copy of your trip itinerary with a friend or relative at home and maintain regular contact with family and friends while in Lebanon." You'd perhaps begin to sense a pattern. Increasing lawlessness, sectarian violence and the re-emergence of kidnapping as a pastime have all contributed to a general feeling that perhaps the place is a tad less secure than it was, say, this time last year.

The Israelis have, of course, been lending a helping hand by conducting low-level bombing runs over Beirut, an old but much beloved pastime of theirs, breaking the sound barrier above the city and smashing much glass in the process.

Of course, 'the West' or 'the allies' - or whatever epithet the people tacitly supporting the American bid to engineer regime change in Syria wish to use to describe themselves - aren't really terribly concerned about the growing instability in the pretty little country next door.

Having just finished writing a book set in part in Beirut back in 1978, I feel terribly conscious of the echoes coming to us from a terrible age ago. And yet I can't bear to lose all hope...

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.

Nutter

There's little doubt that Gerald Donovan (@gerald_d to many) is special - whether that's not quite right in the  head special or another kind of special is something the jury's out on. If you want proof in the pudding, the above video was taken on an abortive trip to the top of the Burj Khalifa to get the shots he needed for the Burj Dubai Pinnacle Panorama wot I have previously posted about.

Finding himself at the top of the world's tallest tower, some 860 metres up at the end of an 60-metre tube that's 1.5 metres in diameter when a sandstorm blows in, he of course straps on a helmet camera and proceeds to hoon about poking his head around the place as the wind buffets the whole structure.

Anybody normal wouldn't have been up there at all, but I would submit if a reasonable man had succumbed to a head-fit and gone up to find those conditions, he would have nipped down for a coffee and almond croissant at the Armani or something.

Anyway, you can read more about the whole thing over at The Daily Mail, which leapt at the chance to play with the pano again. By the way, in case you're wondering what a piece of coverage on the Mail Online website is worth, you can start at 100,000 views in 24 hours.

I'm thinking of doing a stunt competition for a client whereby people have to devise ways to scare our Gerald. I mean, I'd hate to have to cure his hiccups...

The Dubai Police Supercar Collection

Dubai Police BMW (Photo credit: Danny McL)

The papers have been all agog this week with Dubai Police's natty collection of supercars, being shown off at the ATM (Arab Tourism Market) show in Dubai. They've got more coverage than Beiber. Mind you, if it were up to me, I'd give the inside of a ping pong ball more coverage than Beiber, the egregious little brat.

The boys in green have been showing off their Bentley Continental, Lamborghini Aventador, Ferrari FF and an Aston Martin One-77 and many's the gasp their collection has earned 'em - you can see the pics here from The National.

Now while you might cavil and say this is just another example of over-the-top supercar culture in a country where car culture kills too many young people every year, I have to confess I have come around to the view that it's actually a brilliant stunt at a number of levels. Firstly, it's part of the Dubai Ltd message - better, bigger, faster more. We have such luxurious luxury neighbourhoods we have to patrol them in supercars. You might find the brashness sits uneasily with you, but these cars are every schoolboy's dream and they're as much a part of the Brand Dubai proposition as seven star hotels. And I bet you a pound to a penny they get a nice slot on Top Gear to boot - let alone loads of other media coverage and squillions of social media shares as tourists post Twitpicks of that unbelievable cop car they saw in Dubai.

It's also brilliant because it has the potential to recruit those dazzle-eyed schoolkids. If people who drive cars like this are cool then, syllogistically, Dubai Police are cool. And we'd all rather have a cool policeman to look up to rather than some out of touch fuddy-duddy jobsworth with a book of tickets, right? I mean, if some guy tooled up with an Aventador says 'Drive Carefully', you might just listen to the guy. It's like Chuck Norris telling you to eat your greens.

Initially skeptical, I have now taken my hat off...

Nightmare Resurgent

(Photo credit: monkeyatlarge)

The plain stretches out around me, boundless and bare. There's a strange mewling sound coming from the box lying a few feet away from me. I'm not sure how I got here, or where I'm going. Every direction leads into endless emptiness, there's nothing beyond that box.

It's like a shoe box. Small and incongruous in that vast emptiness. It's green. I know the only thing for me to do is go to it and open it. My only other option is to turn away from it and walk into the infinity around me. For all I know it might be flat, it might stretch upwards like a crucible around me.

Panic rises in my throat, a quickening that threatens to be emetic until I force my mouth open to breathe the clean air. There is no breeze.

The mewling starts to nag at me. It's like an injured leveret, that animal sound so close to the call of a baby's cry. I walk to the box reluctantly, the squealing is louder. Sickened by inevitability, I bend to open the lid of the box. I recoil in horror from the thing inside, flinging the lid aside reflexively

It's sightless, green-skinned, those awful sounds coming from a small open mouth glistening with streamers of the slime it is threshing about in, semi-formed linbs paddling at the ooze. As the air rushes into the box, it stiffens. The noises become stronger, deeper. In front of my eyes it starts to thrash an urgent rhythm. It unpeels its eyelids painfully, casts around and focuses on me with its shining black orbs. It's growing in front of my horrified eyes, faster than I thought imaginable. It breaks out of the box, pushing itself to stand. it staggers, streamers of gleet anchoring it to the floor. It struggles against them, breaking the slimy bonds as its cries become roars, hair sprouting all over it. The mouth widens, great teeth snarl as me as I try to step back but I can't move. I'm trapped, immobile and helpless. Even if I could move, where would I run?

It's towering over me now, flexing scimitar claws at the end of its rippling arms, its savage animal face bisected by the roaring toothy maw. It lumbers towards me and the roaring forms into speech, indistinct to begin with but as it repeats its refrain it becomes horribly understandable.

"Millenium Estates - A Thoroughbred Lifestyle"*

I will myself awake, but it's no good. I realise this is no nightmare. This is reality.

* Gulf News saw a double page tabloid real estate ad running today with this very tagline. Dare to Dream! Live to Love! We're BACK, babies!

The Passing Of Ocky White

The chances are very high indeed you've never heard of Ocky White and likely never will again. It's a relatively small independent department store located in the sleepy Pembrokeshire town of Haverfordwest, a town famous and notable for nothing whatsoever. Well, perhaps for being the nearest town to where my mum lives.

If self awareness is the key to success, by the way, being a department store that can't spell department store on its own website might hold at least part of the clue to the puzzle of Ocky's passing...

Ocky White originally opened its doors in 1910, a sort of Welsh version of Mr Selfridge without, perhaps, quite as much glamour. Its founder Octavius had his name shortened by the locals, presumably because it made it easier to compose limericks about him.

It's got all you'd want in a provincial department store. It's got a perfume section and a slightly brash gifts section, a glass and chinaware section and a kitchen section. Upstairs, there's lots of nice Windsmoor clothing and a men's department. It's got a cafe that smells of frying food and slightly seedy pasties.

It is a store steeped in tradition and therefore bound to fail. And fail it has.

The passing of Ocky White takes place this coming week with a sale starting Wednesday for invited guests and Friday for the 'hoi polloi'. As people flock to pick over the leavings of its failure, almost 50 staff will lose their jobs and Ocky White's will become another shuttered shopfront in a high street that is slowly collapsing into something you could use as the set for an Ulltravox video. Sorry, showing my age there.

The final nail in old Ocky's coffin was the out of town Withybush shopping development that brought Marks and Spencer to Haverfordwest (and, oh! the excitement!), lulled Boots out of the town centre and is now to see the opening of a branch of Dubai's favourite little corner of England, Debenhams.

It's hard to see what Ocky White's management could do in the face of this onslaught from major brands clustered around plenty of car parking in a low-rent out of town site. How can an independent retailer possibly compete with those massive supply chains and colossal buying power?

It could, of course, have modernised - thrown out all that old fashioned Windsmoor stuff and put together collections of stunning clothing and precious things, but you're really just pushing back at the tide. Because at the same time cars are taking shoppers out of town, our shopping habits are changing and we're giving more of our time to online - we've got less time in our lives for strolling around town centres or retail parks and browsing around as we spend more of that time glued to eBay, Amazon and BuzzFeed. And that's assuming its not pelting down with rain, a not uncommon occurrence in Haverford.

During our time in the UK at Easter we visited two big out of town 'designer outlet' centres, Bridgend in Wales and Banbridge in the North of Ireland and were struck by how desolate they seemed compared to when we saw them last. There were many units to let - and precious few shoppers flocking to all those bargains. Both seemed as desperate as Haverfordwest Town Centre. You sort of felt yourself waiting for the tumbleweed.

British high street retail has never looked so shabby and unkempt. Not only has the recession created havoc in the high streets - the money's moving out of town or online. Now even the out of town sites appear to be losing out because just as they decimated the high street, online is decimating them. Cheaper prices and free delivery mean that retail footfall no longer guarantees you a transaction, it just guarantees someone a transaction as buyers do their research and then go online to do their business - now something people do while they're actually standing in the store, thanks to mobile.

This, in fact, is what ecommerce means to physical retail. So what does ecommerce - the great nascent market of the Middle East - mean for Dubai's mall culture? I have to confess, I'll be sorrier to see the passing of Ocky White... 

Shiny New Access Control System at International City

(Photo credit: Donna Cymek)

"I can't get to my Shiny. The door's locked."
"Really? Try using a key."
"What are you doing with that magnifying glass?"
"Inspecting you. Right, thanks for dropping by for this little chat. Always lovely to see you."
"No, hang on. I'm not talking about the key to my own door. The door to the whole building is locked."
"Yes, that's right. It's to stop overcrowding and illegal subletting. Only one person per 200 square feet will be allowed to occupy any apartment or villa."
"But this is my freehold property. If I want to share it, that's entirely up to me."
"Not according to the accepted practice of nmkl pjkl ftmch. That's what we're applying here."
"Hang on. When you sold me this Shiny it was freehold and then you said it was usufruct and now it's nmkl pjkl ftmch. What does that mean?"
"It means we have the right to inspect you, to use CCTV cameras to monitor you and an access control system to stop people coming to your apartment. And to fine you if you or your tenants don't comply with our regulations what we make up every now and then."
"Why don't I go and live in a concentration camp?"
"We just branded it differently. We hope you're daring to dream and loving life itself."
"So where's my access card then?"
"You can't have one until you've been properly inspected."
"Well you just said you were inspecting me."
"And so I have. Here's your satisfactory inspection form. Now remember, inspections are daily and you'll be fined Dhs108 per square metre if you decide to let the property and your tenants overcrowd it."
"You mean I'm responsible for policing my tenants' adherence to your arbitrary regulations if I rent my 'freehold' flat out?"
"Of course. That's only fair, isn't it?"
"So where's my access card?"
"You have to apply for it. Right. Super to see you again, do give my regards to everyone."
"Where? Where do I apply for it? What do I need to apply? How long's the queue going to be? What's it going to cost? Where do I collect it? How long does it last for? What about visitors who want to come for tea and cakes? How do I apply for an access card if I want to let my apartment to a tenant?"
"Lalalalalalalalalalalala. Gone yet? Lalalalalalalalalala."

* International City is installing an access control system.

What? No Smile You're In Sharjah?

Sharjah's famous 'Smile You're In Sharjah' roundabout is soon to be no more - a Dhs1 billion upgrade to the 'Al Jubail Intersection' is going to replace the current roundabout and it's clear from drawings released by Sharjah's public works department that the new roundabout, a combination of cloverleaf and swingabout (it is SO a proper word) will obliterate the flowery imprecation that has gladdened so many hearts over the decades. The drawing above was sourced by Gulf News from consultant WSP Middle East, which has proposed the scheme to ease the traffic issues that have dogged the roundabout in busy times.

The news also carries with it the prospect of some gnarly short term traffic issues - the roundabout serves Sharjah's central bus station and also intersects one of the two arterial roads that feed the city - Al Arouba Street. Although the long term effects of the upgrade are undoubtedly going to be positive, the short term holds nothing but snarling traffic jams and diversions. With the Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Road currently in a state of some considerable upheaval due to the roadworks around National Paints (not completed on April 15th as previously, insanely, predicted), that only really leaves the already packed Al Wahda Street. Things are going to get pretty dicey around here, trust me.

Whether we'll keep some floral version of the cheery 'Smile You're Insane' oops sorry, I meant 'Smile You're In Sharjah' when all that newness is completed is unclear. The journalists, as usual, didn't ask anyone the one question that mattered in the whole thing...

News Management At Twitterspeed

(Photo credit: mkhmarketing)

"Every minute that passes the poison is spreading into the system to all sorts of roots and you need to find a way to cauterize that very, very quickly."

That rather glorious quote comes from a chap at number 10 Downing Street, talking about news management and Twitter. It's carried in this piece in the Guardian. The piece looks at how the relationship between compliant journalists and dissembling politicians has moved to the Twitter age, in particular No. 10's intention to hand out 'Twitter exclusives' to journalists.

The quote is one of the scariest things I've seen in some time. While it recognises the viral nature of information movement in this connected age, it's the characterisation of information as 'poison' by political communications people I find unsettling. We're all enjoying new levels of transparency and demanding, in fact, better transparency from the people and organisations we support. Information as poison is counter-intuitive to that.

Of course the great challenge facing journalism is the direct nature of networked communications. I am in contact with my audience and don't need a journalist to filter or agree to carry what I have to say. Likewise, my audience has pretty much, by following me, decided it wants to hear what I have to say from the horse's mouth. This direct communication avoids the pitfalls of editorialism, whereby a third party decides whether what I have to say is important or relevant to the majority of an averaged audience. The development of that process to a high degree of refinement gives us mainstream banality such as CNN or Fox. But now people with special interests or a particularly strong interest in a given area or topic can go straight to the source, create their own feeds of information and even their own magazines.

We have many ways of presenting and consuming news - one of which is journalists who are now fighting to match information that's flowing at breakneck speeds. Along with that comes a loss in quality of information, with mainstream media dropping their standards to meet the exigencies of time and therefore adding immeasurably to the spread of that terrible poison.

Easy, then - give journalists you can trust to toe the line privileged access to information that allows them to do a better job of analysing and presenting it. That way, you get your side of the story out to some important multipliers and the journalist gets the head start they need to compete with Twitter-speed. You also have a neat control mechanism, because the second a journalist gets into that sort of cosy relationship, they've signed a Faustian pact. Go off message and you're out in the cold.

David Cameron was once negative about Twitter, but his new media strategies have been evolving since 2011 and now conservative MPs are encouraged to "tweet as a muscular force". That's another interesting set of multipliers, because No. 10 can depend on several hundred loyal MPs to RT what the PM had for breakfast. As long as that breakfast is 'on message'.

So what's changed? A compliant Westminster press carrying the government's message, the government media machine leveraging the voices of hundreds of MPs to get a critical mass of 'on message' communications out there at a local level and planned bursts of communication that pre-brief media under embargo to ensure that the 'right message' gets out there.

It's the poison. Like the magic in Terry Pratchett's books, the problem with that poison is it has a nasty habit of escaping. A wonderful example cited in the Guardian piece is chancellor George Osborne's 'Great Train Snobbery', the recent incident where an accompanying journalist live tweeted the chancellor's crass attempt to travel first class on an economy ticket because of who he was. The whole row blew up with blinding force and speed - such speed that there was a press pack awaiting the unprepared and clearly embarrassed chancellor as the train pulled up in London.

The poison had clearly spread...

Masafi 'Thank You' Campaign. What that?

If you're based in Dubai, you might have seen the billboards around town exclaiming 'Thank you!' on behalf of Masafi. In fact, Masafi is thanking us for all the children we're helping. The Dubai Cares logo is featured prominently in the company's promotional materials. Dubai Cares is a charity set up to help improve childrens' education in developing countries and is a good thing.

It's nice timing, as the price of Masafi has just risen. I can remember the days when a nice vinyl 1.5L bottle of Masafi would cost you Dhs1 - now the 500ml diddy ones cost Dhs 1.25, 1.5 or 2, depending on where you buy 'em (Lals, ADNOC and Emarat respectively). The company also had a relatively recent product recall, which it would quite like to forget all about. So a nice, high profile campaign is quite understandable.

You'd be forgiven for thinking this was smart marketing by Masafi - take a short term haircut and donate the price rise to charity for the first couple of months of the new price - for instance - and you might find consumer resistance to the increase is lessened. What's more, at the end of the drive you could present a nice, hefty cheque to Dubai Cares.

And that's pretty much what's happening, according to the press release. Each of the 'Thank you' branded bottles sold sees "proceeds" go to Dubai Cares. Quite what "proceeds" means (the total retail amount, profit, a percentage) we are not told.

Alongside this, a charity auction is taking place. For a bottle of Masafi.

To show that we're 'down with the kids', the auction is being held using a thing called an Internet. You can go online using this Internet and bid for a bottle of Masafi. Yes, that's right. All those tens of thousands of dollars of marketing spend on advertising and rebranding the company's packaging for the promotion are being poured into an online auction for a bottle of water.

At the end of the auction, the winner gets a bottle of Masafi and Dubai Cares gets what the winner has bid for the bottle.

So far sixteen people have registered to show their support for the campaign and thirteen have lodged bids. Twenty people have shared the promotion through Facebook. The top bid for the bottle currently stands at Dhs 1,700. No donations have been made.

I have nothing to add. If you do, by all means feel free to leave a comment.