Electronic Tenancy Contracts. Whoopeedoo.

Contracts (Photo credit: NobMouse)

So Sharjah is talking about online electronic tenancy contracts. This is a good thing, albeit the cynically minded might point out it's coming a bit late in the day. We can only hope it won't be the usual laughing implementation of 'fill out the e-form, print it out and then bring it to us with all the necessary documents' so beloved of the Gulf e-government sites.

The way it works here in the UAE is that you have an annual tenancy contract (unless you've 'bought' a house here) and this needs to be ratified by the municipality otherwise it's not considered a legal contract. If you've heard of the shenanigans between landlords and tenants I have over the past brace of decades, you'd want that contract in place.

In order to do this, you have to take the Arabic language contract, duly signed and stamped by all concerned, your passport copy, a copy of the landlord's ownership certificate, your marriage certificate (just so's they know you're not a bachelor living in a family area) and your up to date electricity and water bill and any other paperwork they decide on the day is required (so you take every possible form of paperwork in the world) to the Municipality, where you join the shuffling hordes in jostling to get a ticket from the paperwork checker before sitting down and waiting for your number to come up. When this eventually happens, you wait for the nice Emirati lady to tip tip tap for a while, hand over 2% of the rental (this is a fee, you understand, not a tax) and Robert's yer father's brother.

Moving this online makes so much sense it's not true. Upload some scans, pay by Visa and what is currently at least a two-hour face to face shuffling unpleasantness becomes a ten minute online administrative task.

It's actually so simple, the question isn't so much when they're going to do it as it is why it wasn't done years ago. Ironically, I am now off to the Municipality to get my tenancy attested - hopefully for the last time!

Salik Cap Doffed

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The RTA's been and gone and removed the daily cap on its popular Salik road toll, so now if you pass through more than six of the cheery little RFID-enabled gates, you're going to have to pay, baby. This has led to much wailing and gnashing of teeth in the local papers.

There are now three sets of Salik gates in Dubai - two placed on the arterial Sheikh Zayed Road at Safa and Barsha respectively, two on the Maktoum and Garhoud bridges and now two on the main roads to Sharjah at Al Mamzar (Ittihad Road, AKA 'Murder Mile') and the Airport Tunnel (Beirut Street).

There are actually two gates on the Ittihad Road, but they charge as one - as do the two gates on the Sheikh Zayed road IF you pass between them both within one hour (the one hour limitation doesn't apply on the Ittihad Road, so you can pass under one gate, camp overnight and then carry on without incurring an additional charge.).

Nevertheless, if you want to drive from Sharjah to, say, the Jumeirah Beach Residence and back, you're going to get hit for six tolls, currently by a huge coincidence the maximum Dhs24. Now the cap has been removed, any further Salik teasing will result in Dhs4 a time being deducted with a satanic giggle from your Salik account. The alternatives are, practically, the E311 and E611 bypass roads although with some fancy footwork you can get through Qusais and onto the Al Khail Road.

This route is massively congested during rush hours mainly because everybody and his uncle is trying to save Dhs8 each way (they gets you in the road in and they gets you again on the bridge). Caught up in that snarling traffic, cars cutting in, jostling and changing lanes as they cut you up, slumped listlessly over your steering wheel as you wait for the next creep forward and admire the shimmer of the heat on the metal tightly packed all around you, you could be forgiven for wondering what part of 'clear' does the Arabic word salik mean to the RTA.

The RTA has been quick to point out that the change to the cap will only affect some 5% of drivers, but couriers and logistics providers have been most unamused at the scheme. Probably because that 5% of drivers include them - and they will very easily knock up tens of journeys through those gates a day.

You waitses, preciousss, just you waitses for the outcry when they sneaks in a raise to Dhs5 per gate. Oh noes, you might say, they'd never be mad enough to do that!!! I leave you, then, with this parting thought from super-duper tabloid-tastic newspaper 7Days' report on the whole shemoozle:

"The RTA declined to comment when asked by 7DAYS for more information on why the move is being implemented - and whether there are plans to introduce any more Salik charges in the near future."

Dubai Social Clubs Require Licenses. Book Club Fear And Loathing To Result?

(Photo credit: jm3)

A piece in today's Gulf News clarifies that any social club or community organisation in Dubai requires to be registered and licensed. As it's presented in GN, the requirement would extend to book clubs. I agree that's taking the idea to something of an absolute, but the isn't that what regulation is all about?

"Whatever your organisation is — be it a dance club or a running organisation — as long as you are a social club that serves communities and you operate in Dubai, you need to be registered and obtain a licence from the Community Development Authority (CDA)."

Gulf News tell us. The very fact we have an authority for the development of communities should speak volumes. The CDA, apparently, 'conducts continuous inspections in various community events to check for unlicensed organisations'. The fines range up to Dhs 10,000 while a license costs Dhs 2,000.

Of course, the danger is this might drive book clubs underground. Clandestine meetings of like-minded readers in candle-lit caves could ensue - secret societies with their own codes, developing unusual argots as they vie to continue their communal sharing and critiquing of the latest novels of the day. I can see the special handshakes, the knowing nods and winks.

Pretty soon there'd be pressure from rival bookclubs, turf wars and gangland-style attacks between supporters of Dan Brown and his legion denigrators. Polarised in their love of RomCom or loathing of ChickLit, the unlicensed underground book clubs would start to enforce their beliefs with terrible punishments for their enemies. It could be the Valley of the Assassins all over again.

When you look at the potential consequences, it's a relief the CDA's looking out for us all. That whole book club thing could get ugly and twisted with shocking speed...

I Am No Longer With Agent

(Photo credit: jafsegal)

I suppose it's a bit like a phantom pregnancy. Not that I've ever had one of those, you understand. But it was Beirut - An Explosive Thriller that finally tipped a noted London literary agent over the edge into signing me up after 250 rejections for my various works up to that point - Robin took pen to contractual paper early in 2011 and started shopping the book around to publishers at the London Book Fair. His endeavours were, sadly, to bear all too little fruit beyond 14 variations on the word 'no'. It took seven months to collect those 14 negatives. Publishing worketh not at Twitter speed...

I subsequently sent Olives - A Violent Romance over to Robin but he pointed out, much as he had enjoyed reading it,  if he couldn't make a sale with something as commercial as international spy thriller Beirut, he was never going to do it with a novel like Olives. This point is fair enough, but what killed me at the time was how long it took to hear back from him with this opinion. It's actually what pushed me into self publishing - not the 14 rejections, but the fact the agent who had signed me took longer to read my book than any of the slushpile submissions I had made in the past.

And now it's happened again. Over ten weeks after I completed Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy and sent it to him, he's 'had a chance to read it'. This wasn't a blind submission - this was an agent I was contracted to. I say was contracted, because Robin didn't feel Shemlan was one for him. And I can see no point whatsoever in being signed up to an agent who doesn't feel he can even try to sell my work to publishers.

I don't blame him, by the way. I can see agenting can be a thankless old task. I used to get angry at agents and rail at them from the other side of the gatekeeper's cottage. But now I've got to actually meet more of 'em and learn about what they are really driven by. They're doing a job and I can only imagine what it's like constantly having authors battering at you like a malevolent winter hailstorm. Lovely use of simile Alexander. Why thank you. Hardly noticed you'd slipped that in, tell the truth. One tries to be subtle.

So Robin's got a TBR as long as your arm (To Be Read list. Now publishing has discovered the Internet, it's playing with acronyms. How cool are acronyms, eh?) and I understand that. But I just wasted over two months of my life waiting for his verdict and once again realised - as so often in the past, particularly unlocking the little blue door in Sharjah post office to receive another batch of rejections - I was feeling like a Christmas Dog.

Abandoned unloved in the cold, the Christmas Dog chases any passing car in the hope it's the car he got thrown out of on boxing day, the one that led back to the fireplace and the laughing kids feeding him chocolate treats from the tree. I was actually waiting for his response for weeks, opening my Gmail with wide eyes and tongue lolling, panting with dumb canine anticipation. I never actually meant to, you know, eat the sofa...

I thought I was through with that. I thought I'd gone beyond it. I mean, cripes, I decided to self publish! I promoted the bejabers out of my first self-published novel and loads of people have really enjoyed it. I've got oodles of great reviews, done book clubs and school talks and all sorts as a result of self-publishing Olives - A Violent Romance. You can see some of the reviews here or on the book's Amazon or Goodreads pages. It stirred up proper old controversy, it was quite the whirlwind. And opening that little blue door at Sharjah post office to lift out royalty cheques rather than rejections is still a major treat for me.

But for all the positive newspaper reviews, website interviews, blog posts, debates around controversies and cascades of delighted feedback from readers, Olives has sold a total of about two thousand copies. That's it. Two years down the line, I've sold a miniscule number of books. By the same token, I don't regret self publishing at all. I have had so much fun, shared so much pleasure and learned so much, I can't look back with any shred of regret whatsoever. But I also have to confess, the promotion is wearying. Unbelievably so.

Beirut has been promotionally neglected for that very reason - and it shows. It hasn't sold as well as Olives, despite being a much more commercial book. Many readers have enjoyed it more than Olives, finding it a more racy and unputdownable read. Others disagree, which is cool. But the point is, Beirut is the one an agent thought he could sell - the one where I shelved my own feelings and motivations (and, yes, agenda) and wrote a good old fashioned testosterone-soaked international spy thriller. But it's also the one that I just couldn't be arsed to drive promotionally with the same frenetic energy I ploughed into driving Olives.

Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy is a book I am personally very pleased with. I think - and beta readers whose frank and blunt feedback I have come to trust agree - it is my best work. It has some of the strengths of Olives, IMHO, and some of the strengths of Beirut. It's darker, in ways faster and yet more nuanced. It's got a hook so hooky you could stick a pirate hat on it and it'd go 'oo aar'. It's not sitting in a desk drawer. No way. If I've learned one thing from this whole self publishing gig, it's that your work is better off out there than in there.

And yet I still want to give it a chance with the backing of a traditional publisher. From Dubai, I can't get out there enough - I don't seem to be able to drive the scale. I'm not a marketing klutz, I know what I'm doing - I mean, it's the day job and everything. Unlike more purist writer friends, I not only don't mind the limelight, I thrive on it. But the conundrum of how you achieve that scale by yourself, especially from a foreign base (and trying to escape the clamorousness of thousands of other authors), has me mildly puzzled and, yes, majorly exhausted. Tens of thousands of followers, countless hundreds of thousands of page views, reviews touching hundreds of thousands of eyeballs and I've sold just a few thousand books.

So no, I don't want an agent who doesn't think he/she has any passion for what I'm up to. But yes, I do want a publisher who thinks they can make something of original fiction set somewhere different and who will put some of the investment into achieving that scale and reach into the UK and US markets. And yet I don't want to spend the rest of the year being Rex The Christmas Dog. It's quite the conundrum, isn't it?

Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy will publish this year, one way or another. I promise you that. And given the timescales 'traditional' publishing works to, I suspect it will be the other. In the meantime, I'm now looking for another agent.

Footnote: Two other agents have passed and so I must conclude it's not for traditional publishing, so Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy has gone for editing and will be published, by me as usual, this Autumn.

That Was The ArabNet That Was

(Photo credit: carrierdetect)

It's been a hectic week, hence the lack of posts. The ArabNet Dubai Digital Summit sucked down more time than I'd ever have thought it was going to - but what a time it's been. The week's flown by in a whirlwind of panels, chatting, eager startups and blethering about all things online.

Not even HSBC's decision to mount an insane war against their SME customers, reported upon excellently by the Al Arabiya English website, tempted me to post. Truth be told, there just wasn't the time and anyway, what could be possibly said that would make any sort of sense of a bank unilaterally shutting down business accounts in the United Arab Emirates with just 60 days' notice - just before the summer and Ramadan coincide to ensure 60 days' notice is insufficient?

Even HSBC's assertion that it 'remains committed to the SME market' wasn't enough to break the ArabNet spell. Although now looking back on the story that comment still provokes wide-eyed astonishment. We've wiped out the Marsh Arabs but remain committed to all indigenous peoples. Right.

I got to have a little gentle fun with banks myself at the ArabNet banking solutions panel, when Graham from Radical outlined some of the cool stuff his company had been doing with banks internationally and the very brave Pedtro from Emirates NBD took to the stage to speak for the Middle East's own banks. Perhaps starting the panel with the assertion that all Middle East banks are rubbish wasn't terribly PC of me (I realised my introduction to the topic had turned into a spittle-flecked rant only when the audience started to turn into a mob hefting burning brands and demanding to march on the monster), but I thought if we could all agree that basic principle, we could then move on and not spend an hour throwing custard tarts at Pedro.

And that's the way it worked out, generally - but I came away from the session with the feeling that people like Pedro are fighting against legacy systems and legacy-minded management, while banks in other parts of the world - leaner, meaner and generally more competitive - are providing some really smart digital services. You wonder what's holding us back and then something like HSBC vs SME happens and you realise that yes, it is pretty nigh hopeless.

I enjoyed many of the talks and panels I attended at ArabNet, there were few 'duffers' in the mix which was a blessing - and with three tracks on the go, rare was the moment when something interesting wasn't happening somewhere. Skills marketplace Nabbesh was raising money on startup crowd investing platform Eureeca, Wally got Dhs 1.5 million funding for its blisteringly smart expenses tracking app (it scans receipts and lets you track locations, venues, expenditures and the like), Restronaut took everyone out for dinner (the latest brain-child of Make Business Hub founder Leith Matthews) and private car booking service Careem offered everyone a free ride. There was a lot of stuff going on, I can tell you.

I had the dubious honour of being the last speaker at ArabNet Dubai and so was surprised to find a packed room in front of me - that's a testament to the engagement and commitment of the audience at the event. There were a few grumbles of 'three days is too long' but I'm not so sure, myself. It wasn't a stretched out agenda by any means. Anyway, I spent fifteen minutes gibbering and railing at the audience in tongues, the usual shamanistic display of erratic behaviour. And then I got to lead a panel on women's content and branded content. 

With one client and three publishers on the panel, it was always going to be hard to get a good challenging debate moving - and the publishers were determined not to have the fight I was so keen to goad them into, so the panel was a tad tamer than I'm used to. Tragically, we didn't have the Twitterfall displayed on the stage monitors, so couldn't see the howls of outrage taking place on the projected screen behind us. As the panelists talked about why marketing managers didn't understand women in the region and why women's content was Chanel and handbags, a furious cry rose from the significant female element in the audience who felt women were, well, worth more than that. I couldn't see it and so the opportunity to square the circle between audience and panel was lost.

And then, in a trice, it was over. The developers' awards saw Lebanon taking the trophy and a couple of hours later, the Atlantis conference centre was back to being a vast expanse of strange nautical primary colours and Dubai was filled with little pockets of partying geeks and, no doubt, a very relieved and exhausted ArabNet team.

See you there next year!

Confession: Spot On was an ArabNet partner

ArabNet - The Dubai Digital Summit

It starts tomorrow - ArabNet's Dubai Digital Summit - three days of conference, workshop, developer competition, roundtable and other information sharing stuff. It's a pretty packed agenda - there are over 120 speakers (including li'l ole me) and there are expected to be upwards of 800 attendees gathering at the aesthetically interesting Atlantis Hotel on the Palm.

The three-day conference is at the core of a number of other activities, including ArabNet's 'Digital Showcase'. This excellent initiative gathers over thirty young digital companies from around the region and provides them with a platform to show their wares at ArabNet - and includes brokered meetings with media buyers, banks, telcos and other business enablers. There's also the final of ArabNet's developer competition which will bring together winners from the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Jordan in a final face-off to crown the best developer in the Middle East. My money's on the Jordanians...

The actual conference consists of three tracks - a Forum Track and a Workshop Track - then on day one a Startup Track and day two an Industry Track, which splits into verticals and is more 'solutions' oriented and day three a Roundtable Track. Someone with a highly advanced sense of humour has put me moderating the banking panel on the industry day, which should provide a few laughs if nothing else...

There are four industry round tables taking place in the Roundtable Track, which will tackle key issues in the development and expansion of the Middle East's digital industry. I'm chairing the one on advertising, "Growing digital adspend", which should be interesting as the invited attendees for what is intended to be a productive brainstorming session represent all sorts of interests - mainly vested! - in the way this important sector is developing in the region.

As anyone who's been to ArabNet in Beirut will attest, there's a 'vibe' to the event that is truly infectious, a coming together of smart people who share a passion for something that is at the heart of exhilarating and often breakneck change and transformation. There's a grin-inducing cocktail of dynamism and innovation in the air.

So all in all it promises to be a busy, intense and fascinating week - and if you are interested in mobile, online, digital, social or anything touching the online and digital industry in the Middle East, you would be mad not to be there*.

Oh, and you can catch my presentation on addressing the 'content crisis' at 5pm on Wednesday and see quite how neatly I manage to wave in the inevitable plug for Beirut - An Explosive Thriller.

* Disclosure - Spot On is the PR partner for ArabNet but as you'll all know by now, this blog has never represented my day job. I'm bigging up ArabNet because I'm a fan, not because I'm shilling for them.

One Small Day On Twitter

Image via CrunchBase

I gets a text from the bank that likes to say 'flibble' telling me YouSendIt has billed my card for $49.95. I am not best pleased at this as it's the first I hear of the matter.

I'd signed up to their premium service last year when I had some big files to share, but the company has since  standardised on another platform and so I have no need for the long-forgotten YouSendIt.

I nipped off to their site to undo this transaction only to find that I can only cancel my subscription at the end of the current cycle (ie 2014) or immediately. But cancelling walks you through screens of 'please don't go' and says nothing about refunding my card. In fact, clicking on the 'cancelling and refunds' link takes you to a video that shows you how to cancel. And that's it. Nothing about refunds at all.

Comments are enabled on the page, which has a number of wailing voices threatening dire threats about their refunds. And no sign of an answer. I am man in front of a very big wall indeed and there's no sign of a human anywhere.

Contact Us gives you a sales number and a location map. No email addy. I wander around the site for a while and eventually lodge a support ticket, but I've got the message by now. My money's a-goner.

Disconsolately, I fire a tweet into the ether:

I get the feeling getting a refund from YouSendIt of the sum billed without notifying me is going to be a long and wearisome task...

Imagine my surprise to get a response from YouSendIt's social media community manager, Kathleen: "Not at all - I'll help you out, can you DM me your email?"

Within minutes my support ticket was answered with reference to Kathleen's conversation with me and an assurance my refund was being processed.

It was smooth, neat and assured customer service and once again a reminder you can't outsource customer service on Twitter as effectively as managing it with in-house smarts and direct access to the CRM. What I found interesting was that it was only necessitated by the fact the renewal system and the website had both failed me. Tell me before you bill me and give me the option of not renewing or give me a 7-day opt-out window on the site. The answer to my problem could - and should - have easily been automated and the need for an intervention in the first place averted.

IMHO.

100 Reasons Why The Internet Is Cool. Reason 82. Crowd Investing.

So you've started a digital business and you want to take it through to the next level without giving away all your equity to an greedy angel investor or venture fund. You've got some options - you would win a reality TV show, for instance, or perhaps even look at crowd investing. Or even both!

I first met LouLou Khazen Baz last year, we worked together on a project to position the company she and co-founder Rima had dreamed up, Nabbesh. LouLou was in the interesting position of having won the Dubai One TV show, 'The Entrepreneur' - in which startups competed to be the winners of a Du-backed prize of a cool million UAE Dirhams in cash and half as much again in 'kind'.

She won the show, which gave Nabbesh much-needed funds to see it through to its next stage of development. In interviews, LouLou was always noting - having herself worked for a VC - that the longer you can keep going without asking the market for money, the more value you could build in your business and consequently keep when the sharks lovely investors come knocking.

Nabbesh is a skills marketplace - an online exchange where people can post their skills and talents and then others can hire them for those skills. So if you want a bunch of developers or copy writers, designers or a tennis coach, Nabbesh is the place to go. It means you can hire talent from the Levant or further afield - or from home - although there is some debate as to the legality of freelancing in the UAE, Nabbesh is also somewhere where people with trade licenses can offer their wares too.

Nabbesh has just signed up with PayPal - that's the business model: the business partnership between talent and hirer takes place over the site and it skims a slice off each transaction. The model works elsewhere in the world, Nabbesh wants to localise the service for the MENA area.

So now LouLou has taken something of a brave step - in that she's put her need out in public - and sought funds through crowd investment platform Eureeca.com - take a look here for the Nabbesh proposition. Note you have to sign in to Eureeca before you get all the info. 

The really cool thing is she's already 25% 30% of the way there, one day into the campaign...

Sharjah - Radar Down

(Photo credit: brizzle born and bred)

As eagle eyed observers will recall from earlier posts, Sharjah has been suffering from a mysterious and expensive spate of radar shootings.

Someone has been regularly taking out the traffic radars on the Mileiha Road - the arterial route that leads from the notorious National Paints parkabout all the way out to the delightful East Coast littoral of Khor Kalba across on the other side of the Hajjar Mountains. It's a delightful drive, BTW - and you can pop across the border to Fujeirah for a bite to eat for lunch before coming back, say, over the Masafi/Dhaid road.

This morning's drive to work took me along the road from Sharjah Airport to junction 2 on the aforementioned Road To Mileiha. That connecting road contains, among many other things (including a co-op and loads of huge palatial villas) two radars.

Standing by the second one was a copper and a couple of puzzled looking blokes. The radar on the northern carriageway (one of the expensive new models) had been pretty comprehensively smashed. If that was a bullet, it presumably means the perp's still at it. Now all we've got to wait for is Gulf News rehashing that quote they use every time they report on a new radar 'kill':

“We are collecting evidence from the spot and will soon nab the person who committed the crime. We will find out what motivated him to commit such a crime.” He goes on to add, “The person responsible for shooting the radar will be arrested soon. “He will be punished according to the UAE law.”

It's no laughing matter for Sharjah's finest, by the way - that's now a total of 15 radars ruined and, at Dhs250,000 apiece, we're talking about almost four million Dirhams. To give it a sense of perspective, that's almost four days' revenue from the RTA's Sharjah-bound Salik gates!!!

When they catch him, the radar shootist is undoubtedly in for the high jump in no small way!

Hooch, Booze, Sid And Eth

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This genteel post over at super-smashing expat blog The Displaced Nation started a chat on Twitter today about the demon drink, particularly as relates to its consumption in the country Americans, for some reason, like to call 'Sordi'.

My first exposure to expat drinking habits in the Krazy Kingdom came in 1986, just after Her Majesty had intervened in the case of a number of 'nuns and strippers' who had been lifted by the gendarmes after a party in Jeddah had been busted in an action that ran contrary to accepted norms. Usually, the police knock on the compound gates, the watchman tells them to hold on a minute and rings around to tell everyone to jettison their stash. Result: squeaky-clean compound and a lot of very happy fish.

This time around, they dispensed with the niceties and (if memory serves me right) about fifty expats were facing eighty lashes each for consuming alcohol. I don't remember if there was any additional punishment for dressing as a nun or a stripper, but I have always had a fond image of the chase across the desert sands in my mind's eye. After Brenda got involved, they were merely deported - and deportation, rather than the traditional punishment meted out to Muslims, became the norm in such cases.

So it was, just after this had all blown over, I found myself in-Kingdom. A chap called Graham was my first introduction to expat weekends in Saudi. Based in Khobar, he was having a party that weekend, would I like to come along? It was a raucous affair and Graham's villa had a bar upstairs, complete with dartboard and a variety of 'lifted' bar accessories such as ashtrays and beer mats.

There were four drinks on offer: 'white' or 'brown', Dr John's blackberry wine or 'beer'.

Now 'white' was 'siddiqi', Arabic for 'friend'. 'Sid' or 'Sin' to some was basically ethanol, whether produced in a bathtub or by a laboratory for medicinal use (a friend was a physics teacher in Kuwait and used to have to keep the ethanol under lock and key. 'Eth' is a popular libation in that place). Ethyl alcohol, cut 5:1 with water, is a potent drink but doesn't induce a hangover as there are none of the impurities you'll find in less direct forms of inebriative condiment. You can lam some juniper berries into it if you fancy 'sin and tonic'. On the other hand, 'brown' was sid with oak chips added. This made it look like whisky, even though it tasted like methylated spirits that had been dripped through rabbit bedding.

An important life tip. You always test a new bottle of sid or eth (or even their close relative, the wonderful Irish libation poitin). Always. Burn some on a spoon, if it burns with a clear, smokeless flame, you're good. If it has any colour to the flame or gives off black smoke, one sip will have potentially lethal consequences. Please don't try this at home.

Dr John's wine was actually delicious, although very strong and sweet. Unlike the sid, its consumption carried  appalling consequences the next morning. And the beer, as all home made beer in desert kingdoms is, was just appalling stuff. You skip down to the supermarket and buy trays of 'malt beverage' (for a short, halcyon, time, authorities were unaware of what tins of brewer's wort looked like, but they copped on pretty fast. Thousands of expats suddenly presenting themselves at the airports carrying huge tins with 'beenz' scrawled on them in magic marker might have had something to do with it), sugar and baker's yeast. Now you put it all in a dustbin and then place on the roof of the villa for a couple of weeks. Bottle the resulting noxious brew and consume at leisure, ideally chilled to the point where you can't taste it.

The following morning saw me awake and staggering out into the blazing sunshine where my kind hosts were barbecuing T-bone steaks for breakfast and downing kiloton-spiced bloody marys. The strongly emetic consequences of Dr John's wine combined with a hammering in my head and a powerful dehydration that made me feel as if I had been steeped in lime overnight. I couldn't take it. More to the point, my liver couldn't take it. Lightweight that I am, I fled for my hotel.

In the intervening two and a half decades or so, I have frequently found myself in the company of chaps enjoying the illicit pleasures of the grape in a number of places and situations, sometimes in highly imaginative ways. But that first encounter with the expatriated liver remains a clear and formative memory.