Author Archives: FayeB

I believe the children are our future…

I seem to be quoting Whitney a lot these days. I have no idea why, she was only ever relevant to me during a particularly terrible set of Modern dance lessons I had in the mid-80s, when our teacher choreographed ‘I wanna dance with somebody’ so badly it shall forever be remembered as ‘the step-ball-change dance’. The next time I paid any attention she was dead (Whitney, not my dance teacher, although she might be too for all I know) and it was Glee season 3, and now suddenly I’m full of big ballads and bad disco dancing.

Anyway, I digress: what I really wanted to write about today was on a slightly more serious topic. We have just made some huge decisions on my son’s schooling, and the weight of the responsibility sits heavier on my shoulders than I ever imagined it would. The worry that you will somehow fail your child because you didn’t give them the best start in life they could possibly have is, I suspect, a pretty universal one. However I do think that expats have it particularly hard when it comes to deciding where and when to send their children to school.

When we came to Dubai we were a newly wed couple with absolutely no responsibilities to anyone except ourselves. It didn’t occur to me for a second that I would be here long enough to a)have a child and b) have to send him/her to nursery, never mind school. So I didn’t really pay a lot of attention, even when I got pregnant, and even though I was actually a teacher for crying out loud.

But now, as my son approaches his third birthday, it is crunch time. Schools here generally start accepting students from aged three, a full year before the UK equivalent of Reception class (if you’re from the US, it’s the equivalent of a Pre-KG class). They are fee-paying and predominantly run for profit and there is a severe shortage of places at the popular ones. And so the problem is, if you don’t put them into these schools at aged three, you may well miss the boat.

What is the idea on the blackboard?

Schools can be a little pushy here. Drawing by Olivia from Arabian Ranches, aged 3.  (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

People here seem to enjoy having lots of babies. The city is teeming with toddlers. The population naturally seems to thin out as children get older but many schools in Dubai are ridiculously over-subscribed at Foundation stage level.  To get into the top ones you have to register them at birth or be married to an Emirates pilot. It is horrendously competitive and nerve wracking to say the least, that you may have to take your second, third or even fourth choice of school because you waited until their first birthday to think about it. Schools can get pretty pushy about things too and over the years it has become the norm to assume that you must pack your child off to school as early as possible in order that they succeed in life. One particularly cunning plan recently employed by a very reputable school here has been to open a nursery, and then send an email to all the parents who are on the wait list for future academic years indicating that it doesn’t matter when you applied, priority will be given to the children who attend the nursery. So if you can send your child to school shortly after the umbilical chord is cut, you should probably get a place.

Which is why we have gone against the crowds and instead chosen an American school in the rural backwaters of Sports city.  Despite a plan to accept students from aged three all the way up to 18, the school is relatively new and still undersubscribed, giving it a more local feel than the other giant behemoths that operate here. It is three minutes from our house versus the half hour commute I would have to undertake four times a day to take him anywhere else. It doesn’t come with the usual snobberies nor does it subscribe to the ‘work hard, play hard’ ethos that frankly seems a little harsh to be putting on a child barely out of nappies. Instead it appears to genuinely embrace individuality, and childhood, and the sheer enjoyment of learning. To top it all off, it is the nicest, cleanest, friendliest school I have visited, with some of the best facilities. It might not enjoy the ‘Outstanding’ status of some of the more popular schools but I’m pretty sure my son will benefit in other ways from a cosy class of 15 for the first two years of his academic career – and at the same time absorb an American culture and education that, being of dual nationality, is important to us that he have, and not something that he would get from an English school in Dubai (or one in England, for that matter).

I am pretty confident we have made the right choice and now my attentions turn to the UK, to look at securing him a place somewhere that I am equally sure of. The conundrum for many expats is you never know how long you’re staying or when you’re going to leave. So you have to plan properly for a future in two different places and ensure that your child receives the best potential possible start in life on opposite sides of the world. You need to believe that the chosen expat school provides an educational experience equal in all measures to that of one at home, and you need to ensure the school you choose if or when you return home is going to be the right environment to help your child cope with a huge and often overwhelming change in circumstance. We have chosen to apply to private schools particularly to try and avoid potential issues that relying on screaming into the state school system at the 11th hour may throw up. But private schools in the UK come with the same personality disorders as they do here. I am already put off by a couple of them because they display precisely the same kind of horrid, faintly sit-com-esque middle class snobbery I have seen in Dubai. However, I have high hopes that the others I am visiting will prove to be just right. I really hope so, because if he is happy at his Dubai school, one of the most vital and potentially traumatic decisions we will face making in the future will be transplanting him to a new one in a place he is completely unfamiliar with.

It’s another thing no-one mentioned when we moved to Dubai. And they didn’t mention it when we became parents either for that matter. The responsibility to ‘get it right’ is always huge, but extends further – much further – when your child is an expat. It’s so confusing to know what to do. Our son was born and raised (to date) in the Middle East, and we (his parents) come from opposite sides of the Atlantic. Where will he call home in the future? How will he identify himself? Which education system should he follow? Will it even matter to him or to anyone else? How will it affect him, when we eventually do pull him away from everything familiar to him, from everything that he calls ‘home’, because it is categorically not our ‘home’?  I guess only time will tell. In the meantime, we hope that the decisions we make are the right ones, and do what all parents do: Our very best.

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Bat Cat

My son has been ill and off school for nearly a week now and while he’s definitely on the mend things are moving quickly from mere boredom to full-on hysteria. This morning, in between breakfast and being forced to take a toy dog for a walk around the living room, I finally managed to get 10 minutes of uninterrupted time on my computer and stumbled across this story  tweeted by the breakfast DJ on Dubai 92 FM. I opened up the link to be greeted by a rather sick/amusing (delete as the mood takes you) tale of a man who converted his dead cat into a helicopter. My son happened to pass by as I was reading the story and saw the picture. Instantly renaming the poor pussy ‘BatCat’ he insisted on looking at the photos and laughing hysterically whilst shrieking ‘BatCat’ at the top of his voice. Upon tweeting Catboy the DJ (there are a lot of cats in this story, sorry) to tell him, he then related the story of BatCat on air and dedicated their ‘Topical Tune of the Day’ to my delighted son, who is still amused and excited in equal doses about the stuffed dead cat that flew on the radio.

I am so proud.

Get back in the kitchen

Scenesetter accessories from 1969 based on hou...

Get to it girls (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In a fantastic piece of reporting the Daily Mail have uncovered the fact that women are getting fatter because they don’t do as much housework as they did 50 years ago. I tell you what – I’ll spend an hour at the gym three times a week while my cleaner does the house. I’ll stay slim, fit, and won’t have to clean the toilet, remove old food from the gaps in my sofas and vacuum dead skin off the carpets. I might not have a 28 inch waist but I will be a lot happier. I also have a greater chance of equality than my forebearers if my sole job in life isn’t to clear up other people’s crap, bake cakes and look pretty.

Oh. Sh*t. Hang on…

Get over it

It is no secret in our house that I don’t want to live in Dubai forever. In fact I think the blog name I picked out might have given a clue as to my feelings on the subject. However for some reason I feel the need to push it in everyone’s face once in a while, just to make sure they are still listening. Last night was one of those times, and my husband copped the worst of it.

Well…all of it.

Again.

Homesickness

Everyone gets homesick once in a while (Photo credit: Kalexanderson)

My desire to ‘not be here’ has become deep rooted over the course of the last few years. In truth, I don’t think about it on a daily basis and very rarely get homesick anymore, in fact right now I’m having a rather enjoyable and satisfying time of it – but the bottom line, when you scrape all of the other stuff away and get to the heart of the matter, is that I can’t shake the feeling that being here is a huge compromise. It is so engrained in me that I want to go home that occasionally when the mood takes me and I am feeling particularly vulnerable, or dramatic, or both, I cannot see past this to anything else. And because it is not within my control to change the situation I get really foul about the whole subject of when and if it will ever happen.

Grossly unfair of me when I flip out about it and never my finest hour. I wish I could just be okay with being here, like, really okay with it. Or I wish that I could not be okay with it very quietly and privately, so that other people didn’t have to put up with my childish tantrums and whining, and so that I didn’t use my anger as a weapon of mass destruction. But I can’t seem to do either of those things. I think I have parked it, accepted it, and am coping with it, and then I suddenly flare up again and go nuclear, usually at my husband, about the terrible blow life has dealt me because I can’t go home.

Which of course is rubbish and immature and frankly rather silly. There is absolutely nothing to say my life away from Dubai would be any better than the one we enjoy here. I think it’s just – and I’m going to copyright my new term of diagnosis here – ‘Ultimate homesickness’. It’s like an extended remix, years and years of missing out on life at home all rolled into one big ball of emotion that once in a while appears rather suddenly and lashes out at everything in a two mile radius until it is spent.

I talked before about ‘that permanently temporary’ feeling of being an expat. It is here again, and I think it is exaggerated the closer I get to summer, and returning home. It is a particularly sensitive time for me as I plan my days away from here, and realise once again that it is all too short a time to spend with the people I love and miss dearly.  However, faced with the reality of leaving our life here I’m sure I would have very mixed feelings about going. There are parts of living in Dubai that I have accepted, parts I actually like and some things I absolutely love about being here. There is actually very little I don’t like, and it mainly revolves around the uncertainty of how long we are here for, which of course is a ridiculous thing to spend life worrying about. Plan for the future, but live in the here and now, right? So I consider this post a telling-off, to myself, to get with the program and stop being an idiot. Feeling sorry for myself never got me anywhere and neither did going postal on my loved ones. Fortunately, Ultimate homesickness is rare and although brightly burning, it is very short lived. Now, if someone would just invent a vaccination…

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Small town/big city

In a city that is all about bigger and better, it’s sometimes nice to remember that Dubai is not exactly a sprawling metropolis. We’re always bumping into people we know – at dinner, on weekends away, in the mall – and quite often the circles that people move in are still small enough to induce that feeling of ‘where everybody knows your name’. Sometimes this is not so great – I should imagine complete reinvention is a little difficult – but often it produces a feeling of camaraderie that gives out a warm and welcome glow in such a transient place as here. This is no more obvious than when listening to the radio. Yesterday, a generous amount of airtime was being given to the installation of the new and rather controversial speed camera on Al Hessa Street. You can’t get more local than that, and there was something rather nice about the sense of belonging it gave me, to know exactly what they were talking about and why.

More amazing is that I’m feeling this generous about Dubai in 45 degree heat late on a Thursday afternoon with another eight weeks to go before I escape for the summer. Times, they are a-changin’….

Back to Black

Several things have recently alerted me to the fact that Dubai may be on the ‘up’ again:

1. I cannot, for love nor money, get a taxi to pick me up from my house after 7pm on the weekend

2. No-one has my dress size or my shoe size in anything expensive

3. I am getting endless phone calls and sms messages from estate agents wishing to buy or rent my house, BUT

4. I don’t seem to be getting as much spam about 75% off sales in Harvey Nicks

5. The DIFC (Dubai’s financial district) is packed full of busy looking suits again

6. The hotels are all fully booked

7. The restaurants are fully booked

8. Everyone is getting just a little bit more rude

9. Everything is getting just a little more expensive

10. Plans for an underwater hotel have just been announced

Yes, you read right. An underwater hotel. It’s true, despite the best link I could find being from the Daily Mail. Ambition clearly is not something this city is short of, even if the pennies have been a little lacking in recent years. And in any case it would seem the announcement of this latest crackpot scheme may well be indicative of Dubai’s apparent recovery. The Dubai Shopping Festival had a record number of visitors this year who collectively spent over AED 10 billion, and according to the latest census there are now also over 2 million residents in Dubai – an all time high. Restaurants and hotels are opening apace, and property prices are on the rise again. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great that Dubai is showing signs of recovery. After a few years of very difficult times, it is nice to see our house is now worth comfortably over 50% of what we paid for it for the first time since we moved in.

(No, it’s no good – it still hurst to talk about it. Moving on…)

Burj Al Arab and 360 degree club

The Burj al Arab: it all started here (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Tourism is most definitely on the rise, with reports of visitor numbers climbing by 9% in the first quarter of 2012. Of course we have Arab Spring to thank for much of that. Whilst many other middle eastern countries are now off the table, Dubai and the UAE in general appear to be politically stable and the city has attracted many regional visitors that may traditionally have gone elsewhere. I should imagine the rotten weather Europe has had to endure so far this spring has also encouraged a larger number of tourists from the west, particularly now the ‘Dubai-bashers’ who took such great delight in reporting nothing but negative and exaggerated stories in the British press in the height of the crash have put a sock in it. Dubai has seemingly regained it’s position as the no.1 destination for shopping, eating, sunbathing and, well – just being rather glamourous, and the punters are flocking in.

And seriously, the city is really flourishing, in new ways as well as old. There are farmer’s markets selling organic locally grown produce, the industrial zone is home to a growing number of galleries, displaying both traditional and contemporary works – and (drumroll) there are large parts of the city that actually look like they are finished. The arts scene, neglected for so long, still has a long way to go – but the sheer number of artists, film makers, actors, musicians, photographers and writers that proliferate my Facebook, and the volume of projects that are being worked on, would suggest the city is getting ready to embrace culture in a new and very different way to anything that has gone before.

When it comes to dining, I can’t count the number of incredible restaurants and bars that have opened this past year or so, and certainly haven’t had time to eat in all of them – but it would also seem every chef and his celebrity dog now wants to get their slice of Dubai. The one exceptional departure has been that of Gordon Ramsey, who paved the way for Michelin-starred food in Dubai with his restaurant ‘Verre’, opening way back in 2001. Ramsey may have gone but he leaves behind a most important legacy: his chefs. In a bold move they’ve taken Ramsay’s old space and claimed it as their own. This is pretty unique in Dubai – ‘home grown’ talent running an independent fine dining restaurant. Most celeb chefs open up, stick their name on the door, and visit once a year. Table 9 is as sure sign as any that the Dubai dining scene is not only back on its feet, but finally starting to mature into something really exciting rather than just a money making machine.

So the city begins to grow a new soul. A very different one from that which was lost during the boom years. It’s true, Dubai’s old heart beats to a different drum and is, I fear, gone, along with so many of the residents that helped build it. The interim years of property booms and money madness were ugly ones. The place was charged with arrogance and selfishness and everything glittered, for sure, but it was not gold. Recent times have been quieter, people have tended to just get on with things, and during the recession it seems the city has reshaped itself and has really grown in some ways – emotionally if not literally. It’s only now things are starting to be on the ‘up’ that I have noticed the mood shift once more. There are signs that of that old personality that I did not like – tempers are a fraction shorter and good manners a littler harder to come by as the city fills up and gets busier, and the ‘Do you have any idea who I ams’ are more prevalent than before. I hope this time, though, that Dubai will try and keep it real. To say no to the shysters and refuse to accept rude and shallow behaviour as the norm. To be generous and accepting and to give back as well as take. Dubai is an amazing city that can continue to grow in all senses of the word. And this time around, as the good times roll, we need to enrich as well as get rich. Now, where’s that taxi?

Coz you’re there for me Part twooooo-oooooo

Well I have to say it’s been absolutely ages since I felt genuinely sorry for myself. That, and not wanting to use up my precious writing ideas on my blog when I have two years of a masters degree to fill up, means I’ve been a little mean about my blog posting topics. And this week, despite my best intentions, it will be no different, because yet again I managed to run headlong into the catchphrase that invades my life on a regular basis, entitled “Why can’t we make friends in Dubai?”

Friends

Coffee-shop-tastic: The stuff expat dreams are made of (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I have blogged on this subject extensively (so much so that I haven’t provided a link in case I’m repeating myself) and I’m sure there are those of you heartily sick of hearing about it. I’m sick of hearing about it. And I’m not particularly bothered about it any more, if truth be told. But last week, I met a friend of a friend who has only recently arrived in Dubai, and it threw the whole thing back up in my face. The woman in question has been here less than six months and in that time managed to infiltrate a whole collection of my friend’s friends, plus make a whole set of her own. She knows everyone. And their husbands. She is going to birthday parties and camping and Christmas and all manner of things that I must admit, whilst I wouldn’t expect an invite from the friend in question because our friendship hasn’t shaped itself this way, would be nice to get from somebody.

Don’t get me wrong. I have friends, plenty, particularly now that I am involved again in the Dark Arts (otherwise known as theatre). But I seem to have failed dismally on the playdate front, and therefore on the ‘family friends’ side of things too, that means we might actually get invited to camping and boat trips and waterpark outings and other such fun weekend activities.

In the early days, I admit I was fussy. And socially a little awkward. And I didn’t have children which automatically put me at a disadvantage because most other people we met did. But then we did have children. Oops, no we didn’t, we had one child. Singular. Which again puts me in a bit of a situation, because most mummies like their play dates to have a convenient older or younger sibling attached for theirs to play with. And, in all fairness, I like to keep a nice house and refuse to invite my son’s toddler friends over with a hyperactive 5 year old in tow who is going to wreck the furniture and bully the cats because they are bored. But it’s not all my fault, because I have tried to break the ice with mums on several occasions and for some reason it never seems to work. At the soft play area a few weeks back we were sitting having a snack on the table next to a couple of mums from nursery who I see every day and I said hello and introduced myself (just in case they didn’t know who I was after nearly a year of drop offs and pick ups) and you know what? They nodded and then went back to their conversation as if I ceased to exist. The children were all playing together and they just let me sit next to them like a ninny. Why would they do that? It’s two versus one, it’s socially polite for them to ask me to join them, not let me hang there like a nerd at the school disco waiting to be asked to dance.

But this is the story of my life in Dubai. WHAT DID I DO WRONG? Am I such an utter social misfit that I cannot be let loose in public? Do people think I’m a)too weird b)too caustically challenged c)too anally retentive to enjoy breakfast/brunch/beach outings/bbqs/birthday parties/other things beginning with ‘b’? I know my husband charms the pants off most people he ever meets so it can’t be him that’s the problem. Maybe (she dreams) I’m just too attractive or clever or confident for the average person to handle.

Or maybe I just prefer a more organic approach to friendship, and still, after all this time as an expat, can’t be doing with making my life a continuous round of speed-play-dating in order to ‘fit in’. Meeting my friend’s friend (FF?) last week was a little like being on a job interview. She quizzed me about everything, from what I did with my time whilst my son was at nursery (tricky: do I admit to being a gym bunny and indulging in blogging and shopping inbetween house maintenance and supermarket trips or do I try to make myself sound more meaningful?) to what schools I had picked out for him (the wrong one, apparently), to whether I would want my husband to remarry if I died. As I slurped on the second glass of sauv blanc I got the distinct feeling I hadn’t got the job – that I’d been sloppy in my responses, as little too down-to-earth for her liking, and like a teenage boy on their first date, just a bit too eager to be funny.

Thing is, I am funny. And down to earth. And a bit lazy sometimes, when I’m not working my arse off to achieve something for myself or my family. I am a little weird, and caustically challenged, and somewhat anally retentive. But I want people to like me because I’m different, and therefore a little interesting, not because I’m the same. It shouldn’t stop me from going to brunches or meeting for coffee or gathering at the soft play area and yet I don’t seem to have been able to tap into what I have officially dubbed ‘The Coven Concept’ in Dubai at all.

What the hell, I was never a girl’s girl. But in the UK, over the years, I did make friends with a lot of other girls who weren’t girl’s girls either. Sometimes even in groups. On weekends my husband and I did things with other couples and no doubt when we return we will do so again, with all of our children in tow as well. I am not completely incapable of forming friendships and we seem able to have our share of fun with our friends when we see them. But for some reason I never quite nailed it in Dubai, and now I fear it’s too late. The new people coming in are new. They do newbie things and meet other newbie people and their eyebrows shoot to the backs of their heads when you say you’ve been here six years, and they assume you already have people to go camping with and have bbqs with and spend school holidays with hanging out by the pool. To a certain extent they are right to assume we have other things going on. They are in a totally different place to us psychologically and it’s hard to not end up in a weird sort of ‘parenting/public information’ role. For anyone who is not new to Dubai our place in their lives is usually relegated to the occasional dinner rather than a group gathering. On the rare occasions we are invited somewhere we are usually the outsiders in an otherwise well-established group of friends, which isn’t easy to break into either, unless you have balls of steel like my FF of course.

So, I don’t know how she’s done it, but clearly I can’t, or won’t, or don’t need to enough to make it happen. And maybe that’s the point here. We have a nice life, we have a few people we enjoy spending time with, and we have our weekends together to enjoy just the three of us which is precious in its own way. I look forward to a day when we are surrounded by enough friends and family to pick and choose how to spend our time, but if that is not Dubai then so be it. As the great Whitney said, it’s not right, but it’s okay.

I can’t get no sleep

My son slept until 6.20am today. I could count the number of times this has happened in the last 31 months on two hands and it would have been perfect…except for the 5am shout out to the masses about some grievance or another that needless to say woke me up with with a start and left me unable to go back to the land of nod. Sod’s law and all that, you might say, but it’s a classic example of the general sleep deprivation that rules our house on a near-daily basis.

There is no doubt that my son is a historically terrible sleeper. When he was a newborn, I used to think I must be doing something wrong that all the other babies around me would sleep, well – like babies. Mine would be staring at the ceiling (or more accurately at a particular spot on the top of the door frame) for hours on end whilst I frantically tried to rock him into the land of nod so I could have five minutes of down time. Once he was asleep, staying asleep was the next challenge. While my friends were busy enjoying a coffee and a chat as their cherubs snored blissfully in buggies, mine would be thrashing about within fifteen minutes flat, demanding attention or food, or both. The other day I watched with horror when a woman wheeled her three month old into the nail spa. Irritation that I would have to now sit and listen to someone else’s small child during the precious few hours I didn’t have to listen to mine was quickly replaced by envy as the baby gently closed his eyes, and as if on cue, fell asleep and stayed asleep while his mother had a full manicure. The stuff of dreams. Only not mine, because I’m never asleep long enough to dream.

Go the Fuck to Sleep

One of my favourite books read beautifully by Samuel L Jackson (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As my son grew older he adapted to a routine of about four naps a day. Which was great in theory, if only they didn’t last 20 minutes each, approximately the length of time it takes to go to the bathroom, boil the kettle, make a cup of tea you will never get round to drinking and – oh no, that’s it, he’s awake. Night times he learned to sleep with only a few wake ups…until 4.30am. Yes, for an entire summer we were woken before dawn, trying every trick in the book to make him go back to sleep and all in vain. Finally as he turned a year old, he figured out sleeping solidly at night. For six months we rested and enjoyed comparative lie ins until 5.30am. Then at about 15 months his night times got increasingly eventful until finally he decided to stop sleeping altogether. Every hour he would wake up, screaming and crying, and I would have to stay by his bed to get him to sleep again. I implemented the ‘gradual withdrawal’ method to extricate myself from the room, moving a few inches back from the bed every night for over a month until finally he learnt to go to sleep by himself again.

By this point I was actually turning into a zombie. I love my little boy but I love my sleep too. Other mothers would bemoan how they had been woken up at 6am whilst I sat wishing my child would ever sleep until that time. He dropped his naps quickly too, down to a single nap of an hour or so by the time he was 18 months old, and getting rid of that just before he turned two. I actually wept the day he didn’t sleep at lunchtime. I wasn’t ready for the relentlessness of the day without a break, and thought I’d easily have another half year or so before I had to worry about it. Wrong.

Fortunately the big boy bed arrived without too much of a hitch and he now settles quickly at night so we don’t have endless wars at bedtime like some. I must have done something right for this to happen and I am now officially the world expert on sleeping and sleep methods, so many did I try to crack the code. But we still get regularly woken between 5 and 6am, and most nights he throws in a couple of screeches or wails for good measure, that leave our hearts pounding and break up our much-needed sleep. I think now, that his sleeping isn’t so terrible, but that the residual effect of over two years of sleep deprivation means that anything less than an uninterrupted seven hours leaves me exhausted.

Parents of children who sleep do not understand what it is like, to have one that doesn’t. They suggest all kinds of things – over the past couple of years I have been given so much advice my head could burst. “When he starts solids, he’ll sleep through because he won’t be hungry.” (No, he won’t.) “When he starts school he’ll sleep no problem.” (No, he won’t. He’ll be tired but that’s not the same as sleeping.) “Have you tried black out blinds?” (OF COURSE I’VE TRIED BLACKOUT BLINDS!) “Sometimes children sleep better if they have a nap.” (And sometimes they don’t, they just won’t go to bed on time either because they’ve had too much sleep.) “Maybe you should try putting him to bed later.” (No, thanks, I quite like the two hours I have to myself at night before I collapse in a heap.) The problem with all these suggestions – apart from the obvious fact that they don’t work for me – is that they worked for the child of the person concerned. Hence their child sleeps. So back to my original statement, that parents of children who sleep do not understand what it is like, to have one that doesn’t. They only understand what it is like to have one that didn’t used to, but does now. And that is a different thing altogether.

This post wouldn’t be complete of course, without mention of the Sunclock. The magical piece of gadgetry that parents of toddlers and pre-schoolers swear by. So many people recommended this to me and assured me it was the answer to my prayers, that despite my reservations it would ever work I decided to give it a try last month. I was encouraged by my son’s quick grasping of the concept (stars out = go to sleep, sun = wake up) and was even vaguely hopeful that one day I could enjoy a 7am lie-in on the weekend. Although to be honest I would settle for a regular 6am. But folks, here’s the catch: the Sunclock only works on children that were predisposed to sleep in the first place. Children who rise early to count the stars left on the LED display do not qualify. Children that couldn’t care less if the clock has stars on it or a sun and continue to sing at the top of their voices anyway from the second they wake up, do not qualify. Children who you can hear muttering “It says “five, four, seven ‘A’ ‘M’!” do not qualify. I have been experimenting with said clock for three weeks now, just to give it a chance, and have to tell you for anyone with a child who simply doesn’t want or need to sleep any later in the mornings, it’s a heap of crap.

I live in hope that one day my son will sleep until 7am and beyond. I know that it is only another 10 years or so until this is guaranteed to happen. And from today I will never mention again how sleep deprived we are, to avoid any more well meant but unfortunately useless advice coming my way. My child doesn’t need sleep to sleep past dawn. I do. These are the facts and there is nothing anyone can do to change it. So if you see me with bags under my eyes, instead of trying to solve the impossible problem, do me a favour and recommend a decent concealer.

Arachnophobia

To anyone who is a Facebook friend of mine, forgive me right now because you have already lived through most of this saga. To anyone who, like me, has severe arachnophobia, you might want to skip reading this post – particularly if you live in Dubai. For anyone that’s left, feel free to continue…

Some of you may recall my earlier post on the various fauna we attract in these parts. Well, guess what folks, we finally got our camel spider close-up. Of course it happened while my husband was away, because my encounters with nature always do, and it happened first thing in the morning, because these sorts of things can’t wait until after I’ve drunk my tea.

A bunch of varying types of flowers at an open...

I really did try to put a photo on for you but it kept making me feel ill looking at it. So here are some flowers instead

Fortunately our inquisitive and slightly annoying cat alerted me to the issue by sniffing around under the dining table as my son and I ate our breakfast. I glanced down to see what she was swiping at, assuming it was some poor lizard that had somehow found its way in to our hermetically sealed house, and my stomach lurched horribly as I saw a pale brown coloured leg the size of a teaspoon handle sticking out right by my feet. I whipped my son mid-mouthful out of his chair and flew to the other end of the kitchen, frantically trying to find the Pif Paf on the shelf whilst clutching my son and determinedly not taking my eyes off ‘the prize’. Which by now had come out to show itself in full five inch diameter glory. Well, even the cat backed off at that point. I had no clue what I thought I would do with the Pif Paf even if I found it and a thousand thoughts filled my head at once as I a)plotted our escape from the house, never to return, b)wondered if I was scarring my son for life by letting him see me scared shitless and for letting him see what it was that was scaring me, c)debated whether I could ever get near enough to spray the insect killer in any case, d)tried not to throw up and e)cursed my husband for being away whilst I do battle with my version of hell.

Fortunately, right by the Pif Paf was the door to our maid’s room. Despite the early hour (she doesn’t start until after breakfast in the normal run of things) I tapped on her door, cried her name in a somewhat shaky voice, and when she opened up, pointed at the dining table and croaked ‘insect killer’.

Thankfully, there is only one thing that moves faster than a camel spider, and that is our maid. She whipped out the can, a dustpan and the broom and went straight in for the kill. It took three rounds of spray before the thing was finally stunned enough (and crunched up enough) for her to scoop it up in the pan and get it out of the house. Then we heard a lot of banging, followed by her coming back in and announcing “Dead, madam, in the bin” and giggling at the quivering mess that used to be me.

After I had tried to restore a slight sense of normality and joviality into the morning (toast in the playroom anyone, so that we don’t poison ourselves with the smell of bug killer?), I got a description from our maid who had clearly got a lot closer than I had – and immediately called my Aussie friend to get confirmation of its identification (as I have previously noted, it’s always good to have an Australian on hand in these sorts of crises – they don’t get fazed easily and know by heart what can kill you). Identification confirmed, I then concentrated really, really hard on not throwing up for the best part of an hour. I spent all day avoiding putting my feet on the floor when sitting and totally freaked when I trod on some water that had dripped onto the floor from my glass.

The thing is, as anyone here will tell you, camel spiders are not venomous. And therefore, as anyone who clearly has never actually encountered one of these things will tell you, there’s no need to make a fuss. Well I tell you what, I defy anyone not to have been just a tiny bit scared by this thing. I have since discovered our maid is somewhat of an expert in the art of spider killing (although thankfully not all of them in our house), but I have no doubt the giggling was as much of a nervous response as it was hilarity at my green face and shaking hands. And, as anyone who is terrified of the average UK house spider will tell you, there is no point in saying camel spiders are ‘harmless’. For starters, they aren’t harmless. They are massive, fast, and they bite, and if you want to hang around to see what kind of bite you get from a pissed off five inch arachnid then be my guest. I personally didn’t feel the need, just to get a photo and pretend to be all kick-ass about the whole thing. It was absolutely the scariest thing that has ever happened to me in my own house and honestly I’d rather have to deal with a lion popping in for lunch than ever see one of these things ever again.

Pest control have been and gone. We vacated the house for the night and they sprayed inside and out, and all around. Nothing lives and the horror is over. I have elected not to concern myself with how it arrived in our house in the first place. We live in the desert, even though we might forget it from time to time, and it could have got in any number of different ways. What remains to be seen is the effect it, and I, have had on our son. Last night he woke screaming about spiders in the bed, it took 20 minutes for me to coax him back in and I had to stay with him until the morning. We live in hope that the nightmare is a one-off and he will sleep more soundly tonight. But as he has been talking about it all day, on and off, I don’t hold out much hope. I blame myself because there is no doubt he heard me talking about it, on the phone, at lunch, with the maid. And I was probably too honest in telling him why ‘the men’ were coming to spray the house. But on the other hand, I am still thinking about what I saw too, and can’t get it off my mind. So I just hope the memory fades for both of us over time and have to accept the consequences of being marginally less than grown up in my reaction.

As a long-time sufferer, it took arachnophobia to a whole new level I didn’t dream of and it has not inspired me to ‘man up’ next time, merely to get on the fastest plane out of here. I can only fervently hope that we never, ever, ever see one again.

Lucky seven

Next week sees us mark the start of our 7th year in Dubai. SEVENTH. When I say to people I arrived in 2006 it really doesn’t seem very long ago. When I think of how I was a newlywed barely into my 30s and now my 40s are hurtling towards me at a rate of knots, I start to wonder where the decade went. When I realise I have entered my fifth cycle of friends in the space of roughly as many years (1. the ones I met when I arrived, 2. the ones I worked with, 3. the ones I met after having a baby, 4. the ones I met when my son started nursery, 5. the ones I met through theatre) I feel a little exhausted by the whole process.

Living abroad can be exciting, it can be depressing, it can be mediocre or even boring at times, and tremendously educational and fun at others. Depending on what you are doing or where life is taking you depends on how you feel about the whole expat experience at any given point. Dubai hasn’t been considered a hardship posting for years. But even for the mere housewife, between the times on the beach or in the mall or drinking coffee (which seems to be the general perception of my life even by the people who live here), it can be pretty hard work. If the summer heat doesn’t get you the incessant packing up and shipping out to escape it every year will. If living in the lap of luxury seems too good to be true it’s because there are hours and hours and hours of household management to keep it that way. If the ‘work hard, play hard’ ethic seemed like fun in your twenties then it’s a lot more like hard work a decade or two later to pull the same stunt whilst holding down a family – and a UK 10 dress size, a permanently perfect mani/pedi, a wardrobe full of up to the minute fashion and quite possibly a job. And then there’s the whole love ’em and leave ’em friend issue – the people you meet and like and fill your life with until they up and leave six months, a year, two years later and you have to work to find new ones all over again.

The gap between the different societies and nationalities that live here looms large. Miscommunication and misunderstanding of cultural differences make up 90% of why things take so long and can get so stressful. Of course, the other 10% is because a lot of people here are total shysters. That doesn’t make life any easier either, although with six years under my belt now it’s certainly getting easier to spot them. Experience has also taught me that everything takes far, far longer than planned – the Spanish ‘mañana’ has nothing on the arabic ‘inshallah‘. This particular trait appears to be cross-cultural, spanning across the entire spectrum of customer care – from trying to buy a bottle of water to wondering which decade your house will be finished in.

Dubai is a brilliant place to live – until it isn’t. After six years I have learned that when things go wrong, however big or small, it will take five times as long, be three times as expensive, and cause twice as much stress to put it right as it would do at home. The best thing to do, I have discovered, is really enjoy the bits inbetween. No doubt it is a great life we have here and when I try to imagine my life in the UK had we not come, I’m not sure where we would have been instead. Our house would have been smaller, for sure, as would my shoe collection – but there’s other things that would have been different too. I would most likely have still been on the corporate treadmill instead of realising a dream to teach, and to write. We would never have experienced living somewhere so different and life would be less rich for that. But most importantly and against all medical odds, I have a child. Yes, Dubai is a hard place to live sometimes, but it gave me my son, and there is no guarantee the stars would have aligned to make that happen anywhere else in the world. When I see the decades of pleasure I will have from this one simple act, six years doesn’t seem all that much to give in return.