a gulf between us

I’m sitting looking out of huge dusty french, make that international, windows onto a 30th floor balcony. In the near distance, a 12-lane strip of traffic hums away. Further away, blocks – tens, scores, even hundreds – of highrise towers stretch and grapple skywards, dumpy and out of place. Yet more distant are what look like small towns, clusters of wobbling unnatural lights and the outlines of turrets, roofs and domes.

And from every level on all three dimensions, thousands upon thousands of lights blink, scream, twinkle, flash and stare at me, their blue, red, orange, white, green haze providing no need for any lamps or candles, the nebulous haze striking every surface with a moonlighty glow.

It’s 11pm and the temperature is in the late thirties. The humid wind carries a wave of desert dust, a drone of air-conditioning units and no whiff whatsoever of a dwindling bedouin spirit. These winds – never mind their blastier cousins, the shamaals – have blown these ways forever.

They’ve seen war, piracy, British outposts, imperious telegraph and oil lines, shipping lanes, camel races and formula 1. They’ve tickled ladies’ necks at the horse races, wafted the dish-dashas of many a shawarma-eating shebab, stopped the play of a rugby game or two and delayed many, many international flights. They’ve powered beautiful dhows towards Iran and back and have brought everything from cheap labour to musk-scented fortune-seekers and Persian rug hustling philanderers to the Gulf.

What they encounter now is unquestionably the most startling incarnation of the Gulf they have ever seen.

The winds that blow past my sister’s glass-clad balcony are a force to contend with. They push their way past tower after tower, building site after construction project after development after reclaimed island. They force themselves through the tight lattice-like scaffolding whilst making a mess of westerners’ clean washing and maids’ cleanly swept marble floors. They lift veils, expose weaknesses and strip surfaces.

By the time they get to Abu Dhabi and beyond to the F1 track at Bahrain or the flaming pires along Kuwait’s coast, these winds aren’t surprised by a thing – why would they be?

This, ladies and gentlemen, is Dubai.

QE toodaloo

It was a farewell steeped in glumly appropriate pathos. Grounded on a sandbank and limping from Southampton’s frenetic lanes, the QEII eventually left British waters on Wednesday, bound for the soupy warmth of the Gulf. 

A shallow bath awaits the majesterial vessel, her bow and stern will be plundered, ripped apart and replaced with uber kitsch, she’ll be souped-up to Sheikhy viability and her plumbing system shall be better than anything ever produced in the British Isles. It’s a grandiose nod towards history and Arab-Anglo relations, but feels more like something rather more momentous.

The QEII’s resting place in Dubai, is, surely, a fitting metaphor of the current state of geo-financial global change. If the QEII stood for Empire (at the very most) or Great Britian (at the least), then imperial clout has now well and truly passed into the hands of the world’s wealthiest men, acquired through liquid gold. How better to symbolise the financial power shift of the past century?

You say hello, I say Dubai

Another month has darted past, tail feathers sticking up and sashaying off into the distance. It’s been a mixed one – none of the late summer narcissism of September’s hedonistic timetable and just a touch of wintry pubbiness. My writing seems to have slipped backwards whilst my mind hums and whirrs, plotting and planning the not too distant future. As cold, long nights creep up, visions of sunkissed skin, warmth and beaches seep into the most mundane errands – a move towards the equator feels more necessary than ever.

But there’s something so deliciously comforting about being holed up in a pub for hours, drinking red wine and enjoying simple pleasures that makes the onset of winter actually quite a pleasing time. I know there’s more to winter than pubs, but they are so integral, so homely and so unique in their British ubiquity that they are the one thing expats always mention when asked what they miss most about home. Especially as you can’t get away with lazing around in a pub, drinking, debasing politicians, mocking economists and flirting with the opposite sex in so many exotic, far-flung outposts – and, scarier, in many new ‘global hubs’.

The pithy little epithet ‘Shanghai, Mumbai, Dubai or Goodbye’ has never rung truer, yet – in the case of Dubai - the thought of spending a warm winter in a land of dusty building sites, clogged roads, unbuilt pavements, alcohol illegality and no tolerance towards public displays of affection is not a comforting, duvety one. These relatively minor cons are far outweighed by the the shocking (and scarily underacknowledged) fact that corporal punishment still goes on just down the road. I won’t forget, during my time in Abu Dhabi, the chilling public notices published in the newspaper, declaring Sharjah stonings and the minor crimes for which they were doled out. And Sharjah is by no means far-flung – the unrelenting pace of construction in the Emirates means that Sharjah has effectivley become a suburb of Dubai.

So, whilst hungry bees head to oily honeypots and ‘bright young things’ lounge in the winter sun, my experiences of the Middle East – utterly edifying and fascinating as they were – mean that the novelty of enjoying a pint with my boyfriend in a simple, warm pub in the most liberal – albeit suffering -country I have ever known won’t wear off for a while.