Dubai Traffic On The Increase. Whoopee.

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The car dealers are rubbing their hands, gleefully cackling and singing 'happy days are here again' in their broken, wheezing voices. As miserable a bunch of avaricious hunchbacks as you'll find, the saggy-skinned troglodytes in suits are hearing the sound of tills ringing and they have pronounced the sound To Be Good.

It is within the pages of the mighty Gulf News today we are told that Dubai has increased new vehicle registrations by 10% year on year. That's presumably a sign that we're seeing a 10% increase in vehicles on the road - a total of 1,240,931 vehicles were registered with the RTA this year. Car dealers in Dubai and Sharjah have apparently told the newspaper of increases in new car sales of up to 40% and anticipate a continued strong growth trend.

Even Gulf News made the connection. That means more cars on the road which means more traffic which means more congestion which means more jostling with aggressive dolts in lines of glittering metal blowing out billowing clouds of choking fumes and general bloody misery.

One place there are less cars to be found than last year, incidentally, is the Sharjah/Dubai highway. Although it still gets gummy here and there, the traffic volumes are undoubtedly down as traffic concentrates instead on choking Al Wahda street because everyone's trying to leave at Al Khan and hoy off over to the 311 (The road formerly known as the Emirates Road but now renamed the Mohammed Bin Zayed Road) to avoid shelling out Dhs4. I am constantly amazed at what lengths people will go to in order to save Dhs4 - including spending Dhs5 in extra petrol.

So Salik (the name of Dubai's traffic toll system and Arabic for 'clear') has lived up to its name. Who knew?

The question is whether the expansion of the UAE's road infrastructure will keep pace with the expansion in traffic. There's a new arterial motorway planned to link the 311 down to Abu Dhabi, while a new road system around the Trade Centre Roundabout - started before the bust and now completed by Italian company Salini, which has somehow managed to ride out the recession and its significant exposure to Dubai - is opening this week. The conversion of the National Paints Car Park into a functional road appears to be nearing completion, too - it'll be interesting to see if any number of new lanes can bring clarity to what was the UAE's most notorious traffic bottleneck.

Meanwhile, property prices in Dubai rose by more than anywhere else in the world, according to a piece in The National, which identifies a 28.5% rise in the first nine months of the year.

Oh, joy. Groundhog day.

Book Review: The Summer Book (Tove Jansson)

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

You'll probably know Tove Jansson - if you've heard of her at all - as the Moomin woman - and that's certainly how Finland's tourist trade likes to promote her. You can hardly move in Helsinki without being met by one of the strange bulbous-nosed things. A celebrated illustrator and artist, Jansson was born to artist parents and was about as Bohemian as a Scandinavian gets - including a life-long relationship with her female partner (which everyone appears scrupulously to avoid calling a 'relationship' but which Jansson's own writing makes clear is a thing of shared beds).

Through a moment of Kindle caprice, I met Tove Jansson the novelist and was instantly entranced. My first buy was The Summer Book and, in Helsinki for the summer, the book made perfect, delicious sense. I went on not only to voraciously read everything of hers I could get my hands on in the weeks that followed, but went on to reread them too. Funnily enough, her Moomin legacy to this day overshadows her serious writing (look at her Wikipedia page and you'd think she'd never written a book) and yet her novels are gloriously written observations of humanity that veer dangerously close to philosophical. Her The True Deceiver is a book as dark as the Finnish winter nights. But, fie!, we're not here to celebrate darkness, but the summer.

The Summer Book is about a little girl, Sophia, and her grandmother - whose name we never learn. Together, the girl and the grandmother explore the island off Finland the family takes to each summer. Father is a sculptor, mother is never mentioned. Sophia's world is magical, her bafflements and quizzical nature delightful and her moments of rage and contrariness explored with an insider's knowledge. Her grandmother, bluff and all-knowingly wise, is as well able to see the magic of the island as Sophia - albeit through eyes that know they will soon close for ever.

"When are you going to die?" the child asked.

And Grandmother answered, "Soon. But that is not the least concern of yours."

Thankfully, nobody told Jansson how to write. The very first story in what is essentially a collection of sequential short stories progressing through the months of summer is 'The Morning Swim' and, horror of horrors, the POV is all over the place. One minute we're seeing the world through Sophia's eyes, the next through Grandmother's. And so it goes throughout the book, we share the world through both of their points of view with wilful haphazardness.

This lack of structured composition will horrify the Word Nazis, as will a great deal of 'Showing'. And yet both are critical elements in a book that takes its time narrating not very much at all really and yet which is enchanting, entrancing and utterly captivating. The constant POV switches are never confusing, never pull you up or jar. They just show us how two strong personalities see the same world with different eyes and yet with a charming regard and care for each other. It's not without its dramas, this celebration of Finnish island life: there are storms and malevolent cats, Venice sinks into the sea and little girls with curls split Sophia and her Grandmother.

And island life is critically important to the Finns. They have over 780 islands, from the great fortifications of Suomenlinna to skerries with single rusty-red wooden houses and bare guano-spattered rocks. The sun's warmth (and the sea's coldness), the sound of the breeze wind in the reeds, the smell of the sea and oil-cloth, cork floats and fishing nets and the whiff of Grandmother's sneaked cigarettes are in every chapter of The Summer Book. If great narrative transports us, this book has remarkable greatness in every page.

Five stars, clearly.

You can buy The Summer Book here.

Bring Out Yer Dead (Or why Lenovo Middle East Rocked This Week)

Last Friday I mentioned a need for laptop computers in Sri Lanka, after we had found a medical student was working towards his exams without a computer and cleaned up then shipped out one of Spot On's collection of trusty (if dusty) T61s. The IBM, subsequently Lenovo, T61 is a classic. You can run tractors over them and they carry on working.

I found out later that the machine was being shared by our student and four others. Anandharapura, where these chaps hail from, is not wealthy. It struck me as simply wrong that medical students should be forced to resort to sharing a laptop to prepare for their examinations - although we had at least ensured there was a laptop for them to share. So I posted about it and various people, including the lovely @shelo9 and @toffeeprincess came forward with offers of old laptops they'd cleaned up.

Lenovo got in touch on Twitter and also offered to help. And help they did - two sparkling and rather sleek ex-demo S-Series machines were duly conjured up and handed over. And here's the cool bit - with absolutely no expectation of anything in return. I had been dreading the request for a photo of the students with their new machines or something and I couldn't have been more wrong. "We're really happy to help and do let us know if we can do more," the Man From Lenovo said (@mkdubai, as you ask). I was blown away to tell the truth - left there open-mouthed clutching two long boxes full of smart notebook.

So our students are now kitted out. But there are more of them out there - students from villages and families too poor to be able to afford to give them the PC they need for their studies - and we've now established a line of communication and supply through a philanthropically inclined community Doctor we know in Kandy who has been helping identify clear cases of need. There are very many of these - we appear to have uncovered a terrible lack, but be easily in possession of the solution.

Members of the Sri Lankan community here in the UAE who are travelling home are taking the machines with them one at a time so we don't have to pay customs to the awful government responsible for this whole state of affairs in the first place. And that feels rather marvellous, as it happens. There are no middle men or administrators, this is simply a community thing. It's a much more efficient form of giving that goes straight from one community to another.

So if you have a dusty but functional notebook in your life that's given way to your sleek new Ultrabook, do feel free to clean it up (ie remove your personal data) and drop it off to The Archive (Gate 5, Safa Park), where the lovely Sarah and Bethany will happily take delivery of your bounty so we can get it over to Sri Lanka and help a young medical student rather than have it just gathering dust under the stairs. Don't for a second think you don't need to bother because others will take them along - it would appear we can use them all. So please do feel free to share a link to this post or just let friends know to drop off those old machines at The Archive.

Oh - and we could use some laptop bags, too.

And thank you, Lenovo. You rocked this week.

A New Performing Arts Venue For Dubai? It's Up To You!

I give over the blog today to a guest post from Aflamnah's Vida Rizq. Aflamnah is a crowdfunding platform that aims to help innovators in the arts, humanities and science raise the funds they need for their projects...

The Courtyard Playhouse project on Aflamnah is just 9% away from reaching its target but only has one day to go. You can still get involved by buying one of the fantastic rewards on offer and seeing the project to a successful start.

As of last night, the project had raised $16,801 through 73 supporters. Whilst you can make a contribution of $10 (and you can remain anonymous too), the most popular reward has been to have your name engraved on one of the theatre seats. Front row seats are going for $400 each with only two remaining. Back row seats where you get a plaque on the wall were recently added as a new reward and are on offer for $500.

For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of crowdfunding: it’s is a very simple idea that allows people to raise funding by collecting relatively small amounts of money from a large number of people generally through the Internet. In return, the Aflamnah model means that the idea owners offer contributors rewards for as little as $10.

The Courtyard Playhouse aims to create a more contemporary, alternative performing art space where local talent is nurtured in Dubai. Husband and wife team and co-founders of Drama Dubai, Kemsley Dickinson and Tiffany Schultz have almost realized their goal to put the Courtyard Playhouse, a unique grassroots venue, on the map. They invited the community to get involved to help complete the project through their crowdfunding campaign on Aflamnah. They're taking a bold and costly step to convert what was once a partitioned office space into a working studio theatre and workshop space.

“We’ve gone as far as we can” said Kemsley as the campaign launched in October, “now we need help from the community to complete the project and realize our vision of a vibrant theatre space created for Dubai, by Dubai.”

After years of struggle to find practical and affordable performance spaces for their acting workshops, improvisation classes and local theatrical productions, the couple decided to run a campaign on the Aflamnah.com website. Individuals donate what they can in return for ‘rewards’ to help achieve the financial goal and ensure an official opening night before the end of the year. The project is still in need of lighting, changing rooms and washrooms to complete the renovations.

“We’ve put together some truly exclusive rewards” says Tiffany, some of these are:

• to have your name engraved on one of the auditorium seats 
• have an improvised play staged about your life 
• private tuition in photography or as part of an acting workshop 
• a Dramatic Photoshoot featuring you styled and costumed as the actor or character of your choice 

If you would like to be a part of their project as an individual or a corporate sponsor, visit www.aflamnah.com/en/play-your-part-the-courtyard-playhouse/ to watch their fantastic video and see how far they have come in transforming the space. And do save the date for their Xmas horror themed event on 13th December for a night to remember!

The project is linked here.

Duck Up: Florentijn Hofman, Dubai And The Giant Rubber Duck That Never Was

This Is The Real Duck (Photo credit: See-ming Lee 李思明 SML)

Dubai used to be famous for attracting tribute bands. You'd hear announcements like 'Riverdance is coming to Dubai!' and get all excited before finding out it was actually 'Riverdancers: The Tribute', consisting of two wee girls and a couple of tired blokes clacking away in a weary parody of the massive Oirish spectacle that awed the world.

There was even a joke about it. A bloke goes home on leave only to be accused down at his local of living somewhere lacking in night life and gigs. "We've got gigs!" he contends. "Quo played Dubai last month!"
"What Status Quo?"
"No, State Is Quo. It's a tribute act."
"Who else, then?"
"The Stones!"
"The Rolling Stones?"
"No, the Roly Polying Stones. They're bigger."
And so on until he finally, with exasperation, cries out, "And Duran Duran!"
"What, the Her Name Is Rio people?"
"Yeah, them."

That, of course, was then - the UAE has seen plenty of headlining acts since and the days of the tribute band have gone. Or have they? Because this week we've seen a new first for the City That Likes To Set Guinness Book of Records World Records - a tribute duck. It's not the actual duck, but a copy of it. Because there is actually an actual duck - the work of Dutch installation artist Florentijn Hofman.

Eagle-eyed (award winning!) blogger and culture wonk Hind Mezaina first caught the whiff of sulphur surrounding the announcement, by the UAE franchisee of car washing company Geowash, that Hofman's globally famous duck was going to be coming to the UAE. Geowash had apparently been bandying it about that this was that duck as opposed to a tribute duck, but quickly backed down when questioned. It was a tad late - local media had already announced the event in the usual breathless tones.

The 18 metre duck that set sail on Dubai Creek to coincide with the UAE's 42nd national day was, in fact, an imitation duck made in China. Or, if you prefer, a tribute duck. Hofman's reportedly hopping mad that someone nicked his idea - and rightly so: his giant yellow duckie has been raising smiles around the world for months now and it's clearly a unique and original concept.

7Days gleefully led today on the fake duck farrago, something of a PR disaster for Geowash which had apparently thought up the duck stunt as a way of raising awareness of water scarcity. The company's Facebook page is quick to link to post-'clarification' stories about the duck, but omits to mention earlier stories that clearly state the Dubai duck is Hofman's Duck. In fact, one link to 'The National' actually links to Gulf News - because The National's story mentions the original dubious provenance. Mind you, Geowash also blithely makes use on its Facebook page of images of Donald and Daffy Duck - trademarked properties of Disney and Warner Brothers respectively. One can only presume they do so under license as they would understand, as a franchise business, the value of intellectual prop...

Oh, never mind...

The Bloke In A Pinstripe Suit

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It's always tickled me pink, the idea of the bloke in a pinstripe suit. He'd likely have landed in Abu Dhabi, but I've got him landing in Dubai - possibly even Sharjah. He'd probably have walked down the steps of a Vickers VC10 into the warm air of the Gulf, which would have had him in something of a sweat, although he'd have gone to great lengths to avoid that showing.

He would have gone to the consulate in Dubai for his briefing before going on to the meeting he'd flown here for. By the time he got there, his copy of The Times would have been decidedly sweaty and rumpled. But he would have, of course, remained cool and composed. He was to tell the assembled Sheikhs of the Trucial States that Great Britain's Labour government had decided to cede its colonial role in the administration of all territories east of Suez. They were to have two years to found a nation or whatever it was they wanted to do. But regardless of their decision, the people and government of the United Kingdom were to play no further role in the administration or protection of the Sheikdoms of the Trucial Coast. It was undoubtedly a shameful way to end a close relationship that had spanned well over a hundred years.

I can only imagine the consternation that would have greeted our pebble-glassed visitor's news. The British had long governed the Trucial Coast, providing pretty much all of the tools of administration including defence and foreign policy - defence, at the time, being particularly crucial to the tiny Sheikhdoms that clung to the shores of the Gulf. It was called the Trucial Coast simply because the Sheikhs had all been signatory to the Perpetual Maritime Truce of 1853, following a British campaign to eradicate the endemic maritime piracy in the Gulf. By the end of the century, a further treaty had formalised the British protectorate over the Trucial States.

The bloke in a pinstripe suit would have left a chaotic scene behind him as he headed for the airport. Two years to agree a form of government, write a constitution and build the whole administrative apparatus of a nation state. It was an insane task.

It was made worse by the British government's parliamentary opposition - the Conservatives - who promised they'd reverse the move when they won the election. They lost and their promises came to nothing except wasted time.

Two men were to play a crucial role in the coming two years: the rulers of Abu Dhabi and Dubai respectively - Sheikh Zayed Al Nahyan and Sheikh Rashid Al Maktoum. To this day, Zayed is known to Emiratis as 'Baba Zayed' - the father of the UAE. Both were remarkable men who transitioned from being tribal leaders to the heads of a modern nation state. Alongside them, the rulers of the seven Emirates that made up the Trucial States worked to pull together a single country from a tribal map that looked like a giraffe with measles. Constitutional experts were brought in from Egypt, talks held between rulers not only of the seven trucial emirates, but Oman, Qatar and Bahrain about forming a federation of emirates. A whirlwind of activity started that was to see negotiations about borders and the division of rights and responsibilities from healthcare and education through to foreign policy. Zayed's leadership - and, yes, his deep pockets and ready generosity thanks to Abu Dhabi's oil - were to be critical.

It's hard to imagine how dangerous this period was - there were larger forces all around waiting to fill any vacuum the British left. The tiny new fledgling state faced a precarious start.

But as that frenetic rush to meet the insane deadline commenced, my thoughts are with the bloke in a pinstripe suit, sitting in his VC10 as it banked over the dazzling waters of the Gulf, sipping his English Breakfast Tea and thinking what a colourful bunch of chappies those Sheikhs had been as he headed home to write his memo confirming we had drawn a line under our colonial heritage in the Lower Gulf.

It'd be fun to see his reaction if he came back today. A former colleague of my Father's was amazed to hear I lived in Dubai. He'd served there during the war. "Dubai? What'd you want to live there for? It's just a bunch of mud huts on a creek" he'd exploded.

Quite.

Happy National Day, people. I truly wish you all the very best as you celebrate the 42nd birthday of this nation I have called home for the past twenty years.

PS: If you're interested in exploring the history of the UAE, this here book by Frauke Heard Bey is THE definitive work. It's an expensive buy, but worth every penny.

Book Post: A Question Of Trilogy

It was never meant to be. Olives - A Violent Romance was originally written with a mild idea of an 'interlinear' to follow - a retelling of the story from another point of view, possibly Lynch's. There's a lot to retell on the Lynch side of things, we have the possibilities of balancing Paul's jaded view of the man who is blackmailing him, as well as Lynch's negotiations with the Israelis and the Jordanian authorities as he tries to keep his young victim alive long enough to fulfil his destiny. And then there's Paul's future - Olives originally started with Lynch sitting in the wreckage of Paul's house before the young journalist moves to Beirut (where Lynch arranges a job for him working on a newspaper) to wait for Aisha.

Beirut - An Explosive Thriller isn't linked to Olives in any way, except its events commence with the eventual fate of young Stokes and, of course, it features Lynch. But that's where it stops. The events retold in Beirut might be contiguous to Olives, but there's no link. And so with Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy: the book's events take place a year after those of Beirut but are otherwise in no way linked. Some of the same characters pop up. Others don't make it through. I have a nasty habit of killing those I love the most.

Three very different books set in the same rough timeline do not a trilogy make. I intended to write a romance, a thriller and a tragedy but most certainly not a trilogy. It's a little appreciated fact, for instance, that all of the Bond books are written in a contiguous timeline. I realised this when I bought them all last year and read 'em one after another. It made me appreciate quite what a grim, sexist old soak Ian Fleming was - I discovered, for instance, in every single Bond book the female protagonist is referred to as a "Stupid bitch" except one, narrated in the first person by the female protagonist - she does not neglect to call herself, however, a "stupid bitch." I'm not a fan of unsuccessful writers (me) slagging off successful ones (Fleming) but I also found I disliked his writing in general. Mind you, re-reading Alistair MacLean had me in a blind impotent fury.

However, protest as much as I like, people keep referring to the three books as a trilogy. Even early reviews of Shemlan refer to it as 'the third of McNabb's trilogy of Middle East thrillers'. Clearly I'm out of step and might as well just go with the flow. It's either that or write a fourth Lynch book just to prove everyone wrong and I'm not about to do that.

In the meantime, on the offchance you haven't got around to doing it, here's the link to buy Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy in print or as an ebook. If you want to start reading the trilogy with Olives - A Violent Romance, that's linked here. And then Beirut - An Explosive Thriller is to be found over here. See? Three clicks and you're away!

No, no, it's fine. My pleasure. It's nothing, really.

A Helping Hand

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I need your help. And no, I'm not asking you to drop a review of 'Beirut' on Amazon.com (although if you could that would be nice). It's much more important than that.

For various reasons, I ended up cleaning up one of Spot On's old laptops (Thanks, Spot On!) and sending it to Sri Lanka, where pal Deepika is sponsoring a young man from a poor village near Anandharapura through his medical degree. This small gesture has turned out to be transformational for him, allowing him to finally get access to a resource we take for granted and which he desperately needed. He's sharing it with four other students right now.

Although that's better than nothing, clearly there is a need for more machines. And each machine could end up playing a small role in saving people's lives. We could use at least five more laptops.

So I wondered - if you're UAE based and want to clean up and get rid of that old PC and let me know, I'll come and pick it up from you and take care of getting over to these guys. Clearly, the machine needs to be functional, but it doesn't need to be the hoochiest, coochiest laptop on the block. A couple of generations on from the illustration would be nice...

It's a small enough gesture for the likes of us, yet it's a huge deal to these young men.

So can you help? @alexandermcnabb, leave a note on the comment form on www.alexandermcnabb.com or dump a comment here.

And do please share this post!

Thanks.

UPDATE You can take machines to The Archive in Safa Park and leave 'em there to be collected. Ta!

Book Review: Neuromancer - William Gibson

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I came to this particular party almost thirty years late. But oh, my, what a party it was!

I romped, giggling, through this book. I read it standing up, I read it waiting in the car, I read it when I should have been editing my own work. I devoured it with glee. It's so very well done, you see.

I gave up reading sci-fi decades ago. I can't remember what did it in the end, I think it might have been Frank Herbert's 'Yet another Dune book that milks that last drop from something that used to be better', but sci-fi became 'just not quite my thing.'

I'm going back now.

William Gibson's book invented 'cyberpunk' and gave us the setting for films like The Matrix, Blade Runner and The Fifth Element. Cyber-thief Case has had his ability to 'jack in' to the matrix burned out of his cortex by his vengeful employers and is on a fast track to drink, drug and crime fuelled suicide when he's rescued by a mysterious chap called Armitage.

Armitage fixes the damage, but he's got a purpose for Case who embarks on a race against time as Armitage complements his repair job with sacs of time-release neurotoxin placed in Case's veins. Do the job fast or get fried is the message. Case and murderous sexbomb Molly (Who calls a murderous sexbomb 'Molly' for pity's sakes? Only a lunatic or a genius, I figured) embark on a rampage through spaceports and Case gets down and dirty inside the cyber-world of the 3D realised network that is the Matrix. And oh my, it's fun stuff.

That I could be so blown away by this book today only had me wondering what this did to readers back in 1984. And that Gibson only trips up twice with his future technologies, as far as I could see, is little short of miraculous. In one scene, Case is fencing a valuable contraband of three megabytes of RAM. Well, I remember in 1984 three meg of RAM was like ten Yottabytes now. It was a huge amount. We were creating pioneering samplers using an Apple IIe with, wait for it, 64k of memory. My car key's probably got 3 meg in it.

In another technoflub, Case uses a payphone. Cute. But that just added to the fun for me, a little like playing a vintage synth that still sounds better than today's smartest sampler. This book is truly a classic and I'm very glad indeed I picked it up in a 'don't know what to put on the Kindle next' random moment.

If you hadn't got the message by now, let me just add I can't recommend it highly enough.

Five Stars.

Here's the Kindle book at Amazon.co.uk.

Salmon Fishing In The Emirates

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So it's official. A company is to develop an on-shore salmon farm in Western Abu Dhabi, chilling sea water and using 'recirculating aquaculture' techniques to farm the fish in tanks cooled to 13 celsius. Reuters reports on the story here.

The 500,000 square metre farm is to be developed in two phases at a cost of a tad over $27 million and will produce 4,000 tonnes of fish a year in its final phase.

They're looking at a UAE market of around 1,000 tonnes of salmon a year, currently airfreighted here from Norway and Ireland at a cost of something like $4-5 per kilo. Other gulf countries will take up the rest of the crop.

The company behind the scheme, Abu Dhabi fish farming and production company 'Asmak', isn't kidding. It already has major farming operations in the Gulf, with farms in Saudi Arabia and the UAE currently producing over 2,000 tonnes of fish a year - and a processing, distribution and 'value-added products' business.

There are major concerns about the health risks associated with consuming farmed salmon, particularly given the diet farmed fish are fed and the way it introduces toxins into the fish which we, in turn, consume. The furore really kicked off ten years ago with a scary study by Albany University which recommended eating very little farmed salmon indeed to avoid increased risk of cancer. There has been huge debate recently in Norway following advice issued to pregnant mothers to avoid eating farmed salmon - which brings the Norwegians in line with UK health advice, incidentally.

I give you this link to the story in the Shetland News. I love the Shetland News strapline "Great is the truth and it shall prevail".

Some of the media round here could do with a touch of that...

Anyway, it'll be interesting to see what Asmak intends to feed its fishies. Shame none of the local media covering the story asked... but then they just hacked the Reuters piece into make-up.