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Apparently according to the blog fanbase I may have veered too far into whinge territory with my last post. Apologies. I was cross and hot and fed up and wasn’t thinking straight. So here is my attempt to rectify the situation and get back to just being a bit on the dark side. Who knows, eventually I may surprise you all with a blog made entirely of happiness and optimism (but that wouldn’t make for very interesting reading now, would it?).

There is a category on here called ‘political’. I don’t know why I put it there, I think maybe at the start of things I had grand ideas about broadening my horizons but quite honestly it’s unlikely to happen. I’m not big on politics. It might not be very 21st century-woman of me to say this but it’s a massive effort for me to find it at all interesting. Even large-scale world news does not beat its path to my door very often unless I’m watching it whilst on a cross trainer blasting Brittany Spears through my ipod at the same time. The collapse of the News of the World this week is the first piece of news to really make it into my life since the Royal Wedding, and that could quite possibly be because I was alerted by about 50 of my friends posting on Facebook. Shameful I know, but when it comes to current affairs I am more Katie Price than Kate Adie.

To give you an example of this, my husband has been banging on about ‘Arab Spring’ for a good few weeks now. Having successfully masked my confusion at the time and furtively conducted some further research on the matter I have discovered that this is not a gymnastics manoeuvre but is in fact a reference to the recent uprisings in the Middle East. Last week I nearly booked us on a plane to Thailand before he politely reminded me the reason why the flights are so cheap might be due to the steady stream of political unrest that has been plaguing Bangkok following its military coup in 2006. Oh yeah. I remember now.

And suddenly, politics loom large in my life, because I’m trying to book a holiday for November and there is not a SINGLE place we can go within a 7-hour flight radius that isn’t at war, recovering from war, occupied, protesting, bankrupt, religiously extreme, disappearing under the sea, covered in nuclear waste, over-populated and poverty-striken, raining, cold, maleria-ridden or really bloody expensive.

Now, clearly I’m not a glass half-full kind of person usually but surely, I hear you cry, even I would find it difficult to turn booking a holiday into a miserable experience. But no, instead of having the wonderful adrenaline rush of gazing at the room/pool/beach of our chosen destination and envisaging hours of uninterrupted bliss lying on a sun bed reading a book whilst my toddler frolics happily with his daddy in the surf, I got completely depressed at what a mess everything was in and gave up altogether on the world ever turning out the way John Lennon hoped it would. (Which, for the optimists amongst you, is the closest I can come to describing what it’s like to live in my head. A John Lennon wishlist graveyard.)

So instead we’ve ended up booking a hotel in the desert about 4 hours’ drive from here. It’s a very nice hotel in a very pretty part of the desert and because we didn’t have to pay for a flight we’ve bagged a great room – with the added bonus of being able to load the car with as many books/toys/dvds as we can fit. The weather will be perfect, and there are no land mines, tidal waves, radiation sickness or violent crimes against women reported from the area. It seems a shame not to leave the UAE but on the other hand when we do eventually move from here I doubt we’ll come back too often so it’s nice to explore it while we can. Also despite being plonked firmly between Europe, Asia, the Sub-continent and Africa, with an airline that flies to every conceivable destination from 40 minutes down the road, there is apparently absolutely nowhere else to go.