More Tea, Vicar? The Mackwoods Factory And Labookellie Tea Centre

The Mackwoods factory at Labookellie is a charming trip

Mackwoods' tea factory at Labookellie is on the A5 up to Nuwara Eliya from Kandy, past Tawalantenne and the Ramboda Tunnel. You can't really miss it, sitting on a bend on the road, all green and white. It's surrounded by swirling rows of plantation, the lush green hillsides all around striated by tea bushes with colourful dots here and there - the tea pickers of fame - moving slowly between the lines.

Actually, they're more like nickers than pickers - they nick off the delicate, light green bud and topmost pair of leaves from each plant once a week or thereabouts, the thicker, darker leaves below are left to drop as natural compost. Each tree lasts up to 65 years and they're pruned every five years to keep them in check and generally show them who's boss.

Mackwoods makes fine tea - sending some to auction, some to Harrods and some retailed under its own brand name. The company also makes much of its 160-year heritage.

But like so many things you'll find in Sri Lanka, Mackwoods isn't actually quite what it seems.

The true history of Mackwoods is quite hard to define - there are some very 'fuzzy' periods in Sri Lankan tea history and although the company is keen to infer that its Labookellie plantation is part of an unbroken tradition spanning back to 1841 with the foundation of the company by retired sea captain William Mackwood, that's not actually quite the way it all worked out.

For a start, there was no commercial tea plantation in Sri Lanka in 1841. James Taylor didn't introduce commercial planting until 1867, with the establishment of the 19-acre Loolecondera plantation near Kandy. It wasn't until 1875 that the first plantations were established in Nuwara Eliya - a replacement for the island's devastated coffee industry, progressively wiped out by blight from the 1860s onwards.

Oddly, the company claims in its website that the first tea plantation in Sri Lanka was actually in 1867 - contemporaneous with Taylor's in Kandy - at Labookellie, by Solomon and Gabriel de Worms but this is not borne out by history. The de Worms brothers actually established the nearby Rothschild Estate and divested the estate in 1865. And their attempt at planting Chinese tea failed, while Taylor succeeded.

Besides, Labookellie belonged to The Ceylon Company at the time - later transferred to the Eastern Produce and Estates Company. And, in fact, Mackwoods (originally established in 1839, actually) wasn't a plantation company at all but a trading and shipping agency based in Colombo.

Whatever. Pressured, as so many others were, by the growing clouds of impending nationalisation and 'SriLankisation' when Ceylon gained its independence from Britain in 1948, the Mackwoods family sold out in 1956 to a Mr. N.S.O. Mendis, the deal claimed to be the first SriLankisation of a British sterling company. It was by no means to be the last, as a draconian wave of egregious nationalisations in 1971-72 saw every tea plantation in the country over 50 acres forcefully sequestered by the government.

Funnily enough, the impact of the nationalisation isn't mentioned at all in Mackwoods' carefully worded official history, neither is how it managed to acquire the rights to manage some 27,000 acres of plantation today. Oddly, before the shake-up of the nationalisation, Mackwoods appears to have owned the Carolina and Balmoral plantations. It manages neither currently. Whether it owned Labookellie prior to nationalisation is unclear - as is whether Mackwoods ever did own a plantation before Mendis acquired it.

In fact, all tea plantations in Sri Lanka currently remain in government hands with management contracts awarded to 'managing agents' on a long lease basis. Sri Lanka's 'privatised' RPCs or regional plantation companies manage the plantations and take a profit share as their 'management fee'. One of these 23 'super plantation' companies is Agalawatte Plantations Plc - a subsidiary of Mackwoods. It apparently acquired its management contract without having to go through any of that inconvenient competitive bidding stuff, which is always nice. And one of the many plantations included in its 'package' of plantations awarded by the government is Labookellie.

Not so prosaic as the whole sea captain thing, is it?

Back to the tea plantation visit

The Labookellie tea factory is open to visitors and so we duly visited. It's a very slick PR exercise indeed and they don't charge for tours of the factory, which are guided by smart young ladies in green Mackwoods uniforms. Like the tea pickers themselves, the girls are Tamil (The British coffee and then tea planters originally established the practice of importing Indian, Tamil, labour to work on the plantation and the tea industry's labour force remains dominated by 'Estate Tamils' today).

Drying the tea - 10,000 kg of green leaves are dried to 2,000 kg a day at Labookellie by the factory's four blowers

We are taken up to the drying room where the picked tea is dried, two huge batches a day go through the process of 'withering' which takes about 12 hours. Then the leaves go downstairs to be rolled, fermented, dried and then sifted into grades. It's all great fun to witness and our guide is smart and has the answers to all our questions about the process.

And then onto the tea room where the tea, despite a notice saying it's Rs35 a cup, is free. The wee square of chocolate cake is excellent and is charged for at a wicked Rs50 - about Dhs1.5...

Needless to say, the tea is excellent. We're happy buyers in the shop and go crazy buying every grade of tea we can find, although we balk at the silver-tip tea, which is the finest tea you can get, sold in fancy containers and savagely priced.

It's been fun. Mackwoods sees upwards of 2,000 people a week pass through its factory and the operation is slick, smart, well managed and totally on-brand. It's not often you'll meet that combination in Sri Lanka and it's all the more impressive when you do.

Even if the experience masks a somewhat murky past...

Invigorated by our experience and the cup that refreshes but does not intoxicate, we wend our way up the vertiginous road to the highlands of Nuwara Eliya and our appointment with destiny. Our hotel here is the boutique 5-room Jetwings Warwick House. And it's Jetwings who managed the Lighthouse Hotel in Galle - the site of The Worst Meal Of My Life.

What was this place - that promises so much and yet threatens so much - going to be like? The answer lies here!

The Earl's Regency Hotel, Kandy

One of the two wings of the Earl's Regency Hotel in Kandy. 

It's actually prettier than this in real life, but not a lot prettier...

Grubby, sweaty (despite the frighteningly efficient AC in the Lexus), smelling faintly of Frangipani and with the ugly sight of chained elephants still in our minds' eyes, we checked into the Earl's Regency Hotel in Kandy.

The hotel choice had been the source of much angst - a glance through TripAdvisor shows Sri Lankan hotel reviews are all Alpine in their nature - a collection of vertiginous ups and downs. It's like Marmite, there's so much love and hate you don't know who to believe. I went for the least dangerous-looking of the lot and it wasn't a bad choice at all, really.

The Earl's Regency is actually quite a small hotel with something in the region of 130-odd rooms (according to staff - the website says 104) - although it looks larger. The reception area screams 1970s, browns and brass with a lot of woodwork on display - but that's just Sri Lankan decor for you - it was actually opened by the Minister of Tourism in 1999.

The hotel looks from maps and so on as if it's just out of the centre of Kandy but the combination of snaking roads and the driving can mean a 15-20 minute schlep away from Kandy proper. It's by no means walking distance from town.

Check-in's fine, one of those 'take a seat and we'll bring the form to you (containing fields to fill in which you've already filled online but who am I to cavil) and welcome drinks of watermelon juice' jobs.

A balcony overlooking the Mahawelli River in Kandy. Truly lovely.

The room was rather beautiful, large and wooden-floored, overlooking the Mahawelli river doing its placid meandering thing. All mod cons are to be found here, bathrobes (tiny) and slippers, tea and coffee making, a nice enough bathroom with toiletries. There's a TV offering crackly reception and a minibar that was poorly stocked and didn't work properly. The accompanying cabinet has room for more choice - spirits, crisps and that sort of thing but they weren't in evidence. A bottle of wine in the fridge was half-drunk when we opened it, a swift complaint resolved after much Manuel-like 'me no drink this' play-acting.

The plumbing and AC worked, by no means a 'given' in a Sri Lankan hotel, by the way - although the bath took an age to drain and the toilet flush had to be shuggled around to stop it constantly draining from the cistern into the toilet. We asked housekeeping to take a look at this but they didn't. The room had a balcony which was a magical place to enjoy early evening drinks overlooking the lazy waters. Room service was excellent.

The 'Mountbatten Lounge' should offer a fine venue for a pre-dinner drink, but didn't. For a start, it has no bar - drinks are served from the well-stocked bar in the hotel's Indian restaurant which, if the truth were told, would have made a nicer bar than restaurant. The waiter didn't understand vodka dry Martini or any other combination of these words to produce possibly the world's most famous cocktail but did get 'Gin and tonic' so we resorted to the fallback. The only wine by the glass was a Chardonnay, but if you prefer Pinot Grigio or other varieties, you have the option of buying your own bottle. Getting enough ice into the G&T proved a mission, but we got there in the end by pulling together as a team.

The hotel has two outlets - Royal Spice reflecting Sri Lanka's strange obsession with Indian food (seen as 'more sophisticated' than Sri Lankan - and rubbing cheek-by-jowl with an equally mystifying love of 'Chinese' food) and Far Pavillions, the buffet operation which cranks out breakfast, lunch and dinner.

It's worth noting Kandy has limited eating out facilities. It's not really part of Sri Lankan culture to eat out, so you're likely to end up eating in your own or other hotels.

We ate at Royal Spice on our first night. The food is billed as 'Northern Indian' and wasn't at all bad at doing that, but it wasn't exactly ground-breaking - chicken makhani is hardly the pinnacle of Kashmiri eating. We sent back the undercooked murgh malai kebab, but generally enjoyed the meal which was pleasant if not outstanding. Given we live five minutes away from arguably the best Indian restaurant in the Emirates (The Ajman Kempinski's stunning, if expensive for where it is, Kashmiri joint Bukhara), it would be hard for us to be impressed by anyone's take on 'Northern Indian' food.

On our second night we dined at Far Pavilions. This was barely adequate buffet food, a mix of Indian, Sri Lankan and 'international' dishes that managed to do none of the three terribly well, although a tom yum soup on offer was very good. The desserts were awful international hotel buffet dessert selection fare and best not talked about.

Breakfast at Far Pavilions is a similarly strange affair - but it's hard to see what else you could do with a rainbow nation of visitors - there were Europeans, Sri Lankans, Malaysians, Indonesians, Koreans and Egyptians we managed to identify in an idle game of 'spot the strangest plate of food being consumed'. Watermelon, salt, croissant and scrambled egg nestled together on the plate with green salad won the day.

The egg station is in an enclosed room where the frying action takes place - this station is responsible for frying pork bacon, beef and chicken sausages, puri and other varieties of fried breads and eggs. The result is frequently little less than chaos, with milling crowds of guests proffering their cold plates Oliver-like for their chosen savoury to be placed thereon. I'm sure our Muslim fellow-guests would have been a great deal more disquieted to see the non-pork sausages handled with the same tongs as the bacon than we were.

Sri Lanka only does cold plates. Seriously.

The bacon is done on request, so you can wait a long time while your eggs cool unless you know how to work the system. Likewise, the toast machine is one of those conveyor belt numbers and takes three passes to actually toast the tiny slices of sweetish milk bread on offer. By the time you've fought to protect your slices of toast you're exhausted. I couldn't face the fray on day two and asked the staff if they could possibly provide some toast. Of course they could, sir. Of course they didn't.

It's important to note that "Yes" means a number of things in Sri Lanka. It can mean 'I do not have the authority to give you what you have asked for' and also 'I have severe attention deficit disorder and my assurance will be forgotten, along with the nature of your request, in about two seconds' and it can be certainly interpreted as 'I do not want to disappoint you or appear rude but I have no idea of what you are asking me'. It certainly never, ever actually means yes. The sooner we work this out and accept it, the happier we will all be, trust me.

We didn't use the pool, but it looked very nice. The hotel's in two blocks, one above reception and the restaurants, one slightly removed - we thought booking the reception block was a good idea. Overall, this was an enjoyable experience. We used the hotel as a base for some long trips out, so really didn't see it other than breakfast and drinks/dinner. But the service was generally fine (always friendly if frequently ineffectual) and returning to Kandy, we'd certainly come back here again. And yes, you read that right. By the time we'd checked out of the Earl's Regency, we'd recanted our 'never again' vow and become fascinated by Sri Lanka.

The reason why is partly a result of how we spent our first day. But for that you'll have to wait until tomorrow...

Sri Lanka Week

Some flowers. A symbol of Sri Lankan hospitality or some such...

Rather in the same mould as a hotel special night - and having had one too many themed buffet meals than we needed over the past week, thank you - this week's going to be Sri Lanka Week, so if you're not interested in Travels In Serendib, I'd give it all a miss if I were you.

We did a hare-brained, breakneck tour of Sri Lanka over Eid, as usual ill-informed and wilfully determined not to be told what to do. We had help at hand - an 'inside job' had been arranged by Sri Lankan pal Deepika, who had a driver at hand. The scheme was simple - clock into Colombo at the dreadful hour of 2.50 am thanks to Air 'we like the cheap slots' Arabia and stay briefly at the Ramada Katunayake at the airport before whizzing up to Kandy for two nights staying at the Earl's Regency, Nuwara Eliya for a night at uber-funky boutique plantation house The Jetwing Warwick Gardens and then back down to Colombo for an evening at the Mount Lavinia before flying out again in the early hours.

There was method behind the four-night madness. We had travelled to Sri Lanka before, a week's stay at the lovely-looking Sun House in Galle. That week was to turn out to be nothing short of disastrous, featuring a gurgling twit English hotelier, a randy old monk, sham tea plantations, rats piss blankets and The Worst Meal Of My Life. We eventually escaped to Colombo and got drunk before fleeing Sri Lanka vowing never to return.

I reviewed the Sun House Hotel for now defunct food blog The Fat Expat back in the day. The review's linked here and worth a read for a laugh. As a taster, it starts...

"What more could you want to make your boutique hotel experience unforgettable than the facilities offered by the Sun House in Galle, a former colonial bungalow converted into a small, exclusive and luxurious hotel?

The Sun House offers a gurgling twit British owner who appears to have escaped from a comedy show, limited and inflexible dining, a set of threadbare towels and sheets, broken plumbing and a nice, steady stream of rat's piss onto your pillows as you sleep. It really is the perfect way to come to a state of fear and loathing in Galle."

As for The Worst Meal Of My Life, that was at the gloriously beautiful Lighthouse Hotel in Galle, in probably the most handsome restaurant I have ever dined in. That one's linked here for your listening pleasure. As a piece of review writing, it's one of my personal favourites, by the way and still makes me, despite everything, laugh. Here's a snippet:

"In fact, the entire meal had come out and then simply gone back. And the waiter didn’t bat an eyelid. He had obviously seen this happening before: seen the breathless anticipation of romantic couples turned into wide-eyed horror and revulsion and then plunge into despair."

Sarah 'The Hedonista' Walton went to Sri Lanka and loved it, writing it up as an ethereal and magical experience. I could never reconcile that with our own snarling, resentful journey of furious disappointment.

So this time around Deepika talked us into it - but we decided to move so fast that if we encountered disaster, at least it would be fleeting. And I'm glad we did it now, because we had a fantastic time - a roller-coaster ride of ups and downs that was never less than fascinating, frequently endearing, sometimes frustrating but never in danger of going anywhere near the painful lessons of Galle.

So welcome, armchair traveller, to Sri Lanka Week...

Book Post: Writing Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy

I found a sub-folder in my laptop's big mess of writing folders that contained a tiny snippet of text - an idea I'd jotted down at some stage. It was dated early 2004 and the Word doc in contained no more than:

Today I have been alive a little over an hour. The sea is very blue outside the window of my bedroom, which makes up most of one side of the room. The bed sheets are white and crisp, and they feel good.

It was an odd thing to find in 2013 - particularly as Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy starts:

Jason Hartmoor has been alive a little over an hour. He has recovered from his recurring nightmare and turned the damp side of his pillow to face the mattress. He lies, luxuriating in the bright light streaming through the window overlooking the sea. It takes up most of the length of the room. The bed sheets are white and crisp. Every opening of the eyes is a bonus, a thrill of pleasure. Sometimes he tries to stave off sleep, lying and fighting exhaustion until the early hours. It is becoming increasingly hard to push back the darkness. These days he’s lucky to hold out beyond midnight.

The idea seems to have stuck around, no?

The concept of MECAS - the Middle East Centre for Arab Studies - has long fascinated me. Somewhere up there in the Chouf mountains above Beirut was a building that had for thirty years housed the Foreign and Commonwealth Office Arabic language school - known to the Lebanese as the British Spy School. Founded by Bertram Thomas, disgraced by George Blake, (taken from Shemlan and arrested as a Soviet double agent) and closed by the Lebanese Civil War, MECAS is an enigma and a minor marvel to me.

The idea of setting a spy thriller around someone who had studied at the school - around the school itself - had long nagged at me. I bought books about the school and sought out memoirs written by people who had studied there, life-long diplomats like Ivor Lucas, whose self-published memoir of his career was to inform Jason Hartmoor's mostly unremarkable diplomatic existence. Eventually, on a misty, rainy spring morning, I travelled up into the mountains with pal Maha and we tottered around the dripping village of Shemlan looking for the school. Or rather Maha tottered, wearing her usual mad heels and complaining that I was responsible for ruining her McQueens as we squelched around.

She found my comment about how she should have worn trainers unhelpful for some reason.

The locals didn't think much of being asked about the spy school by some Egyptian chick with a camera-toting Brit old enough to be her dad in tow. But we eventually tracked it down. I've been back to Shemlan a few times now - the village is lovely and the Cliff House restaurant an absolute delight that is alone worth the journey up from Beirut. It's odd how all roads lead to Shemlan - pal Dania 'Summer Blast' Al Kadi hails from the next village, as did a lady present at the recent How To Write A Book workshop I did for the Hunna writer's club (the How To Publish A Book one is at Dubai's Dar Al Adab on the 2nd November). Choueifat is just down the road, the home of the school that brought Sarah out to the UAE first in 1988. And Shemlan was home to Philip Hitti, the author of 'History of the Arabs' - a book I have long revered.

I had actually started writing Shemlan just before I published Olives - A Violent Romance. The book was shelved, paused about halfway through, while I got publishing Olives and Beirut out of my system. Originally called Hartmoor, the title was quickly changed when I discovered Sarah Ferguson's 'planned' historical novel of the same name was scheduled to publish in 2015. Having sent Beirut bobbing into the wide open sea last year, I took up the reins on Shemlan again earlier this year and finished the novel in a mad burst of frenetic activity, pumped on death metal and alternately smacked down by Arvo Pärt like a twisted druggie shredded by a mouthful of French Blues chased down with slugs of chilled vodka and warm dark rum.

And just in case you're interested, yes - I do know precisely what that feels like...

The story of Shemlan was, from an early stage, fated to travel to Estonia. We went to Tallinn for a magical week a couple of years back and I dragged Sarah across town to the British Embassy so I could photograph it for use in the book later - as it turns out, Lynch never does go to the Embassy to fall out with the ambassador in the final version of the book and so I didn't need the Embassy at all, but you can never be too careful.

Sadly, the other major location for Shemlan was Aleppo and the marvellous C14th Ottoman souk has been destroyed. In the overall devastation the last two years have brought, the loss is a small one, I know.

An odd footnote of interest to absolutely nobody but me is that the Urfalees church of St George's in Aleppo was somewhere you could still hear very early plainchant - the root of all European music lived on in the preserved practice of the Urfalees community. I use the past tense only because I don't know if it - and they - are still there. The little green orthodox church (Estonia is the most secular country in Europe - you don't get a lot of working churches there!) down by the port in Tallinn is also somewhere you can hear Estonian Orthodox singing, a rare and beautiful sound that is not only similar to the haunting echoes of Aleppo, but also the inspiration for Pärt's sparse, spine-tingling music. And it was to the aching soundscape of his 'Fur Alina' I finished writing Shemlan.

Book Post - Something For The Weekend

(Photo credit: dsearls)

This is just a note, really, not a post as such. So please don't feel cheated or anything.

It's for those of you what has read Olives - A Violent Romance or Beirut - An Explosive Thriller and not got around to reviewing them on amazon.com or amazon.co.uk.

I wonder if I could prevail upon you to do so this weekend? A sort of thing to add to your things to do list. It needn't be a very big thing, but I would truly appreciate your candid assessment - there's no need to sugar coat it or anything, a review is a review. I won't hate you if you didn't like one of my books. Honestly. I've linked the .co.uk versions in the titles above.

But reviews - particularly for Beirut, which didn't get the promotional whirlwind Olives did (basically because I was exhausted by then) - are really an important part of how people buy books these days. And I could do with a few more.

If you've already read and reviewed them, please take no action but accept my thanks. This post will self-explode in a short time.

Ithankyou.

Dubai Real Estate Boom Bubble Flashback

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

"Ah, there you are! Come in! Come in! Have a seat. Fancy a Fanta? Teem? Mirinda? Sprite?"
"I'll have a water please."
"Sure. Masafi do you? Sorry about the bottle, it's one of those annoying flimsy new ones that's worse than a paper bag. There, see? You've got water all over yourself now. Those skinny lids don't fit too well, I know."
"That's fine, thanks. Look, it's about this new Shiny you're selling."
"Oh, yes. Shiny 2.0! It's brilliant. You can dare to dream of a fulfilment of your desert lifestyle as you tantalise your ultimate desires with an abundance of urban satisfaction."
"Yes, that's the one. How is it different to the old Shiny?"
"Different? Oh, my dear boy, it's a leap - a quantum leap, I should say. We're back and it's official - there are crowds of people scuffling to get their hands on the new Shiny 2.0. Simply flocks of them. We've had to put pit bull terriers on our stand at Cityscape just to keep the masses in check. Shiny 2.0 has got what the market wants, no doubt about it. We've made a few changes along the way as we've refined the product for today's discerning buyer, of course."
"Like what?"
"Well, we've dropped the Falkirk Wheel and the life sized model of Mount Everest and the working volcano with real lava. It's a simpler, more effective product. And it's regulated, look."
"You've just put on a cap that says 'regulator' on it."
"That's the one. Your quality guarantee."
"So what about the bubble?"
"What bubble?"
"The one that burst in 2008 taking away the aspirations, hopes and dreams of thousands of unwary investors who rushed to buy something they didn't understand from people that weren't interested in helping them understand anything beyond how to write a blank cheque?"
"Hahaha! Oh, you're such a cynic and I do like that in you. There was a global financial crisis dear chap, not a bubble. There was no bubble. It never happened. Lalalalala. Anyway, moving on, how many Shiny 2.0s do you want?"
"Well I swore I'd never buy another one after the first one went dull and my kids got sick and you stopped me from watching my TV or planting red flowers in my garden..."
"Ah, those were the times, eh? All water under the bridge now. Shiny 2.0 is going up 50% in value year on year, you know. It's got a fingerprint sensor, too. You'll need to get in quick before you lose out to the rest of the market. Have you seen the skyline? Isn't it marvellous? The cranes are back!"
"But what about how it was before? The mad traffic, the groaning infrastructure?"
"It's all coming back! Isn't it just glorious? We're going to make fortunes! We're back at the brunch tables and they're simply groaning! Nomnomnom as they say. Here - have some Bolly! I'll get the hog saddled up."
"You learnt nothing didn't you? It's as if the past five years never happened."
"What five years? Here you go, just sign here. It's a perfect plot, right next to the lakes and near to the shopping centre we're building on top of that old monument thingy that had to go. We'll move the plot on you by the time it's built and it'll be a three bed instead of a five bed, but you know that this time around. You'll have so much less to complain about, in fact."
"Okay, I signed. What about my old Shiny?"
"Rent it! You'll be living off the rental income and then some the way things are going. Through the roof, rents are! Do you want us to tell you who you can rent it to, how much you can charge and what your tenants are allowed to do in their home?"
"No, not really."
"Shame, that. Because that's precisely what we're going to do. Have a nice Shiny!!!"

(Old Shiny posts linked here for your listening pleasure)

Sharjah Traffic Survey Masterplan Scheme Thingy Shock Horror

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We're about halfway through Sharjah's traffic survey, a project started in September and slated for completion in November. Traffic counters have been spotted on roundabouts, while we are told that thousands of residents will be surveyed with a number of different methodologies, including being asked questions while we sit in traffic.

Irony alert.

The survey aims to find out what we really want from transport. The answer has already been identified for us as more public transport, but we've got to be asked first.

Now comes the news that controversial consultancy AECOM has bagged a $4 million contract to draw up a 'master plan' for Sharjah's transportation network, to be ready by 2015. Amongst other things, AECOM will work on 'developing a scheme appraisal framework', whatever that is. Apparently the study will also lead to 'fostering modal shift towards public transport and collective modes.'

Which means more public transport, no? It's always nice to see a study of a problem that sets out already having identified the solution. It's so much more comforting that way.

Mind you, it's funny they're going to all this effort when a few hours looking at Nokia's brilliant Here Maps mobile app could tell them what we all know - the traffic overlay shows traffic density at near real-time, with free roads painted green, cloggy roads orange and jams outlined in a neat red. You can watch the morning developing quite nicely on your mobile in the comfort of your stationary car.

All roads east and south are routinely screwed, turning nicely red as the morning develops. The Road Formerly Known As The Emirates Road is a car park from about 6am onwards, stretching from the infamous National Paints (remember that 'it'll be done in April'? Yeah, right) all the way back to the airport road and beyond towards Ajman. The airport road bungs up, too - a combination of traffic leaving for the backed-up TRFKATER and the blinding sunrise on that wee bend before the university conspiring to cause it all to gum up back to Culture Roundabout.

Beirut's totally banjaxed, despite Dubai's sneaky Dhs4 collecting mechanism, while Al Wahda/Ittihad goes the same way (traffic backs up by the Faisal Street and Al Khan turnoffs first) from about 5.30am. Everyone hoys off from about 7am to take their kids to school so all roads East clog up very nicely thank you, with Anjads peeping and flailing at people as they try to smooth the way through key roundabouts of which Sharjah has many (and they're all called squares. Figure.).

The schools area - because zoning all schools together in an area with limited access is a clever idea - becomes a snarling mass of jostling entitlement. The Middle Road gums up from the schools area towards the city and again where it joins the Mileiha Road, because some genius at some time in recent history decided not to put in an intersection at the junction of two relatively new and planned major arterial roads, but instead plonk a chaos-inducing traffic light there instead.

This is all repeated, in reverse, in the evening, with TRFKATER south blocking up while the Northern lane jam stretches back to Mirdiff City Centre. The Middle Road access to TRFKATER then backs up.  Ittihad blocks up back to Garhoud and Nahda through Al Arouba Street just gets chicken oriental from about 4pm onwards. Basically, a lot of very unhappy and frustrated people gather and try to make themselves feel better by upsetting other people.

And it's all getting worse as we move back into mega-project announcing mode.

There we go, job done. No, no thanks necessary. This here matchbox contains your scheme appraisal framework. You just have to remember never to open it or it'll stop working. You can just pop that $4 million in my HSBC account and they'll somehow conspire to lose it or turn it into cat litter or something.

HSBC Dubai Drooling Incompetence Special

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It's been a while, hasn't it? Things have been pretty quiet on the HSBC bank Dubai front. Nothing screwed up, nothing frustrating. We've actually been managing the hideous complexities of money in/money out without putting out the welcome mat to Mr Cockup. This long period of tranquility has, however, merely been a ruse to lull us into a false sense of security, presumably to ensure that when the diabolical blow came, its impact would be more sorely felt.

So you log into internet banking with a user ID and then enter a memorable piece of information and the six digit code generated by your HSBC secure key gadget. The memorable piece of information consists of a number of pre-set daft questions like who's your favourite dog or name the fifteenth star out from Betelgeuse if you're travelling clockwise around Orion's Belt. Logging on yesterday, Sarah found the system had simply stopped letting her in at this stage of the process. No error message or any other indication that something was up, the screen just refreshed and took her back to its initial state. We checked and double checked, she was typing everything properly but it simply wasn't working.

The fear that gripped me was immediate and overwhelming. I started to gabble at her. Try standing on your head. Drink a glass of water. Anything but force me to call their call centre. But it was clear there was nothing else for it. My hand shaking, I made the call.

The usual appalling IP line, the usual strongly accented CallBot on the other end of it. Perhaps we had been mis-typing the memorable information. Had we forgotten it? It was perhaps a network problem. How the hell can typing an ID into a webpage be a network problem? You might as well blame the state of our custard. Go on, try that. It's a custard problem. Makes as much sense, doesn't it?

A number of calls follow, an hour of frustration and walking through the same script with a number of different people. Reset your memorable information, that'll do it. Okay, off we go to do that. We decide to re-enter the same memorable information as that's what Sarah's been using these last few years and she remembers it.

No. You can't do that. You can't have new memorable information that's the same as the old memorable information. So we're inputting the memorable information correctly then. Do we accept this? Yes, sir, I understand. You clearly have a custard problem and the solution is to reset your memorable information and password. Wearily, we reset the memorable information and password. Still doesn't work.

Someone at HSBC has been watching The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. You know, the scene where they give Judy Dench a job humanising the call centre people who spam the UK with constant double glazing cold calls. The CallBots are now programmed to say human-like things such as 'How are you today Mr Alexander?'

Given I have just spent twenty minutes being poked with sharp sticks by your witless colleagues and am in a state of fundamental frustration being denied access to my bank account for no apparent reason, how do you think I am today, you artless, bloated drone?

Some things never change, though. There's that same insistence on assuming you are the issue, not HSBC. 'So you appear to have forgotten your memorable information, Mr Alexander.' is part of the affirmation phase of the script. Because of the appalling quality of the line, it becomes 'Snarble afquack I am pooble pickled aardvark goosp fellate.' and has to be repeated a number of times as does, cathartically, my response that I have forgotten nothing the problem is entirely of their making and if the Americans needed any help in making their government even more broken than it currently is all they'd have to do is call into HSBC and ask for assistance with the simplest of issues.

At one state someone suggests using another browser. It's insane. A form is refusing to populate and verify correctly input information and the solution is to use another browser? After protesting, we do. Same issue. And then, three hours of forehead-slapping frustration later, someone else suggests using another PC. Which, against all possible sense works. Why? Because Sarah's downloaded a browser plug-in from some educational company a couple of days ago and HSBC's security has detected it, doesn't like it and so won't let you past its log-in screen.

No error message, no hint why it's not working. Nobody telling the call centre that a failed log-in at this stage could be triggered by another level of unseen security that blocks certain classes of browser add-in. No note anywhere on the system that log-in issues could be caused by untrusted add-ins. So the CallBots just lead you through the reset password script until you explode like a frog with a compressed air line up its backside.

Every time I fly through Heathrow, I see the HSBC ads all over the airport - you know the ones that talk about the future of the world being understood by HSBC? It's got to the point where Sarah has to restrain me, marching me ranting past the offending drivel before security pick me up.

Why not change? Because I am constantly assured the others are just as woeful. If anyone wants to earnestly recommend their UAE based bank to me in the comments, I certainly will. Up until now, nobody has ever been able to make such an unqualified recommendation. Which is, let's face it, pretty tragic...

Of Goats...

(Photo credit: heliotropia)

Our neighbour is in the habit of slaughtering goats outside his villa. He's got a killing tree they hang from as he slits their throats then beheads and skins them. I make no complaint, but it can be a tad disconcerting to be popping down to Spinneys and find your gaze caught by the sight of glistening viscera and a pavement swimming with blood as a man in a shalwar kameez hacks away at furry folds.

They were preparing for a feast the other day, a pile of three beheaded carcases awaiting skinning as another was hoisted up. Must be a big family do or something.

It all rather got me thinking about the whole process. My mum remembers killing the pig from when she was a child, Wales in the 1930s, a big family and community occasion. Sarah remembers animals being slaughtered at home - Ireland in the 1970s was a very rural place indeed. Today, of course, we're too squeamish for that kind of thing in the West. The very sight of slaughter is something we cannot bear. We're far too sophisticated to stop and contemplate the fact our food contains, you know, dead stuff.

Sarah came back from school a couple of years ago with the marvellous news she'd told her class of five year-olds McDonalds were made out of cows. The class wouldn't believe her, a torrent of yews and general sick fascination following. These kids have only ever seen chicken on foam trays. They make no connection between a hen and the supermarket shelves.

Imagine - they mince up dead cows to make McDonalds. Lucky she didn't tell 'em what they put in the chicken nuggets, isn't it?

And strangely, in our rush to be 'humane' and escape the appalling sights of death, pumping blood and warm, fatty flesh I think we've become less human. We talk of humane killing and buy our food wrapped in plastic so we never have to become involved in the messy death of our next meal. By being 'humane' I think we seek to exonerate ourselves from the fact we kill to eat - and survive. And yet my neighbour understands his food, has taken the blood, the responsibility, on his own hands. He's a lot closer to life, through the cycle of death that feeds it, than I am picking my nicely prepared and sanitised meat product in a packet from the chiller in Spinneys.

Mind you, the spectacle of a bloody-handed bloke in a shalwar kameez hefting a big pointy knife in the street plays a lot better in Sharjah than it would in Surbiton...

The Dubai Canal - Is The Archive Doomed?

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

"Work on canal to start within weeks", Gulf News gushes this morning. Signed off last year as a slightly less fancy version, but now with an added crescent, the Dubai Canal project links the Business Bay waterway system out to the Gulf at what is now Jumeirah Beach Park. The canal will cut into the park and also into the margins of nearby Safa Park, one of the oldest and most established areas of calm and relaxation in a city famed for having little time for such things as it embarks on the much more important pursuit of making money.

The mega-project, for that is what these sorts of things are called, is up from last year's announced Dhs1.5 billion price tag and currently stands at Dhs2 billion. That buys a 'sprawling' (according to GN) 80,000 square metres waterfront walkway and leisure area around the canal, four hotels and 450 restaurants. With six kilometres of beachfront and a three kilometre canal, the development is also, and this is the part that chilled me to the bone on the instant, going to 'transform' Safa Park into an 'integrated leisure destination'.

An integrated leisure destination. And just what is it right now? A muddy field? It's lovely right now, is what it is. It's peaceful, charming and relaxing. It doesn't need to be transformed, believe me.

Now many will know that Safa Park is home to a little building, a transformed toilet block in fact, called The Archive. It is a place of which I am immensely fond. It's a lovely idea, a community artspace, café and a growing collection of books on Islamic and Arab architecture, design and art. It sits in the tranquility of Safa Park's green sward, the path to it often takes you past playing schoolchildren or groups of leotard-clad women doing tai-chi. It's a very nice place indeed.

With the passing of The Pavilion (it's being turned into a sales showcase for one of Emaar's new mega-projects, apparently), The Archive is the only free wi-fi welcome to come here and work and meet or do coffee or whatever floats your boat space left in this part of town. And I have the horrible feeling that transforming Safa into an 'integrated leisure destination' isn't going to include leaving some scrubby little 1970s toilet block sitting there to clutter up the views of the 50,000 metre shopping mall.

The designs for the new canal show a much-changed Safa park, with the current lakes giving way to a single lake close to entrance five, extensive replanting and new walkways throughout. Few of the current buildings seem to form part of the new scheme. They might just leave The Archive as it is - irritatingly, Gulf News has slapped a label over its location in its 'infographic', so it's hard to tell. The Archive might be replaced by a new, more modern building with all sorts of facilities. Might. But I can't say it looks good from where I'm standing.

Whatever the outcome, the whole area is going to be a building site for the coming three years. Now the weather's cooling, The Archive comes into its tranquil own. I'll be spending as much time down there while I still can...