My lovely friend Caroline and her blog are my inspiration for starting up blogging again after a five year gap. So it’s only fair that I promote hers, in particular because a) it makes for very interesting and fun reading and b) she is doing something that ‘gives back’, in the form of some fantastic hand made Christmas cards in aid of Shelter – the very wonderful UK charity helping the homeless and supporting those who need help to keep a roof over their heads. Don’t groan…take a look and do your bit…Fifty New Things This Year.

This week saw the publication of a short video aimed at new arrivals in Dubai, with tips from longer-standing expats on how to survive and integrate into life here. I thought I would post my top tips because actually, we all need a little reminder from time to time.

1. Buy the biggest bastard car you can afford. Leave behind the desire to apply any basic sense of driving etiquette. Assume a war stance before starting the engine. It’s survival of the fittest.

2. Don’t get carried away buying stuff (the car excepted) and forget the reason you came in the first place was to save a bit of money by living tax-free. Shoes and handbags look very pretty but will not pay the mortgage.

3. However annoying someone is being, don’t swear at them.

4. Do not spend summers here if you can absolutely help it.

5. Learn to smother your surprise/dismay at the fact that it can take up to 4 people to do a simple task such as grouting a tile. Larger jobs, such as fixing a leaky bath, may take up to 7 people to accomplish. All of them will wander into your house at individual times with no warning, and leave the front door wide open for the duration of their visit. Expect there to be more mess and damage left behind than there was before they came, and then see no.3.

6. Don’t wear skimpy clothes to the mall. Chances are you will look terrible in comparison to the average eastern european sporting the same thing in a much smaller dress size, and it really is completely disrespectful to do it in any case, given how easy it is to wear something that isn’t skimpy.

7. Don’t use arabic phrases in everyday conversation. You will sound like you’re just taking the piss or, at best, like a bit of an idiot. If you don’t speak cockney rhyming slang in London, or drop Gaelic phrases into conversations whilst in Swansea, why do it here?

8. However well put together you think you are, you will learn more about personal grooming here than anywhere else in the world. Who knew that you could actually get your entire face waxed, for example – or that it was even necessary?

9. Tip generously. Whatever they are doing, they are earning significantly less than you.

10. Wear sunscreen. You will arrive home looking incredibly old if you don’t.

Well like it or not, I appear to have been ‘outed’ in the local press and my readership has gone loopy as a result. I’m half chuffed to bits and half terrified that I’m going to get a boatload of e-backlash from people that violently disagree with me about one thing or another. Not that this should necessarily be any more of a worry than with my nearest and dearest who have been reading from the start and would, I assume, be the more critical audience if I wasn’t ‘keeping it real’. I’ve never been shy to say what I mean and feel in this blog and anyone that actually knows me will know that I don’t edit much out in real life either. So I don’t see why I should fret, or try to change. But still, its a little scary knowing there’s a whole load of people out there in this small town who are now in possession of my deepest (and mainly darkest) thoughts. It’s made me finally consider the proper implications of blogging, which I guess is no bad thing.

But on this note, whilst I am incredibly flattered to have been quoted as the opening line of The National’s article on the subject, I would like to very quietly, and without any fuss, make a small but important point. (well important to me, anyway).
Please do not call me a ‘mummy blogger’. It’s such a terrible description – right up there with ‘spinster’ in the Dictionary of Really Unflattering Ways to Describe People. If you want a label, I am a Mother Who Blogs. Or a Woman Who Blogs. Or indeed, an Expat Who Blogs. In fact, I’m all three, in no particular order.  I have absolutely nothing against actual mummy bloggers – the true definition, I assume, being that one writes primarily about one’s experiences of day to day motherhood against the backdrop of the rest of life. But my blog is waaaay more narcissistic than that – the whole point of writing it is that it is all about me – and I’ve been careful to steer clear of ‘what I did with my son today’ unless it directly impacts the subject that I am writing about because otherwise, well, it would just be too ironic.

For me, blogging is a creative outlet to explore the themes of life as a woman, an expat, a wife and a mother, and about the choices, dilemmas and challenges facing me and countless others out there in the same boat. By ‘the same boat’ I mean Trailing Spouses, although I know that many readers identify with me in different ways, which is absolutely fine by me – it’s up to the individual to find their own reasons to keep reading. But I blogged long before I gave birth and the last thing I want is to be pigeon-holed because I have a child. It’s precisely WHY I started writing again in the first place, to get me away from thinking about nappies and Gina Ford. My personal aim was to help me find ways to integrate motherhood into my life rather than watch it consume my life, by doing something I enjoyed and had time for. I chose to make my blog about the broader experience of living away from home because I for one find it infinitely more interesting to write about. This has and always will be my main focus on these pages, whilst integrating the relevant parts of my life to form a coherent, multi-dimensional whole.

So now I’ve got that off my chest (whatever ‘that’ was) I’m off to enjoy my 15 minutes of fame and figure out what on earth I’ll write about if we ever move home. Keep reading…

Well I have to say from the confines of our Chelsea rental the violence of the past few days just a few miles from our front door seems a little unreal. But real it is, and so many people are posting their thoughts and feelings onto Facebook and their blogs that I decided to write a bit too and tick that political category box for once.

The looters and rioters, as far as I can see, are a random group of individuals setting about their nightly vandalism in the hope of achieving notoriety, gaining power over the authorities, and acquiring a few bits and pieces they can sell or boast about to their mates. They have no cause, no aim and no respect for anyone or anything outside of their own anti social community of thugs. They don’t care that they are destroying the very place they live in because these people completely lack the kind of moral compass that makes the rest of us so shocked that this is happening. Why any of this is so surprising to anyone who’s lived or worked in London for any period of time is beyond me.

London is full of violence and crime. I’ve lived alongside crack dealers in Brixton, carried a Stanley knife to protect myself walking through Lewisham and had my car stolen in New Cross. I’ve heard numerous stories of muggings and thefts first hand from my friends, watched a local from the pub I worked at in Hither Green stick another mans head through a shop window and broken up a fight with a pool cue in that self same pub. Thirty, twenty, ten years ago or now, there are areas in London, and anywhere else for that matter, which are always subject to random crime and mindless violence by people who consider themselves above the law and immune to the idea of common decency that the rest of society lives by. The past few days is merely what happens when all these issues rise to the surface and gain momentum.

The kids who are doing it are only partly to blame. I’m sure they are mostly poor, badly educated and bored, surviving in a street culture which rewards this kind of behaviour. They are the football hooligans and the hoodies on street corners who make you wish you’d chosen a different route home. They have little to do with real communities and are part of a ‘me’ generation who think of no one and nothing but themselves. In order to survive and be counted, they must fit in – like any other band of teenagers or young people, they depend emotionally and spiritually (and unfortunately sometimes physically) on being part of a group and they shape their behaviour around it.

Of course they must be stopped. Today. They know nothing of reasonable behaviour and have no respect for anyone, so I doubt asking nicely if they can all go home now will have the desired effect. I fear the police will have to get tough and instill fear to regain their authority , and worry about the social welfare of these kids another day. But it does need to be considered, that action must be taken to help these lost children who parade our streets with knives and fire and guns and drugs. When this world is the most real, the most attractive, the most prosperous, a new incentive must be found in the longer term to counter it and rescue them from this bleak existence. Since the Brixton riots of a whole generation ago too little has been done to control the spread of inner city problems of poverty, crime, poor education and violence. The bigger surprise is that this kind of mass outbreak hasn’t happened before now.

I love London and whilst the events this week are deplorable and frightening I still believe they are in a large part preventable or at the very least controllable. I commend the men and women who have to work on the front line to stop it, and I pity the politicians who have the unenviable task of trying to fix the problem literally overnight to the satisfaction of the general public. There are many opinions on how to get both jobs done and I don’t know enough about either to add my voice to the mix. I watch and wait and hope the streets of this great city are safer soon.

“It is never too late to be who you might have been” George Elliot

Tragically this quote is not an indication of a brilliant mind, but is merely the stolen last line from the season finale of ‘Brothers and Sisters’, which I watched during one of my son’s lunchtime naps last week. As well as saying my farewells to Kitty, Nora, Kevin et al,  in the past week I have also completed a Cougar Town series 2 box set and the last ever episode of ’24’. My husband has been away for a couple of nights too which has meant I’ve had to tap into my reserve recordings and start watching the last five episodes of ‘Desperate Housewives’, which I have been trying to save because there will be no new TV until September and after they are done I have nothing left to watch.

A quick assessment of all of the above tells me that a) I watch too much trashy TV and b) if I have enough downtime in daylight hours to waste it watching this crap then maybe I should stop procrastinating and get on and do something with my life.

Problem is now would be a rubbish time to start, given I’m just about to go on the road for seven weeks. So having made the decision to turn off the TV and do something less boring instead I now can’t do anything until normal service is resumed in September. What I can do, though, is figure out the what. And suddenly, while this post is in its draft form, things are coming my way without me even looking. I was offered a one day acting ‘gig’ last week that could lead to more of the same, doing something that I love and am good at. I’ve also started meeting with potential business partners to get another, completely different project off the ground. It’s slowly taking shape, and as I begin to figure out how to manage this new phase of my life, my default ‘can’t do’ attitude is gradually being replaced with the faint whiff of optimism and entrepreneurial spirit.

Maybe sometimes all it takes is someone else to spur you on, so that you don’t feel like you’re going it alone. Being asked to come and work for someone because of the skills I had to offer gave me a real buzz that I haven’t felt in a long time. A different kind to the one you get being a mum, because it was all mine. And I realised just how much I have missed the kinship of working alongside anyone these past few years when I had my first meeting with my potential business partners. Motherhood is such a lonely job. I don’t think you ever realise how lonely until you stick your head above the parapet. To be able to share ideas and experiences beyond those of the under-3s was so refreshing – it made me feel like I’d given my brain a cold shower. Under a waterfall. In the middle of a beautiful rainforest full of birdsong. And talking to another person in a professional context who is also a mother made me realise that all my worries are for nothing – there is not a single issue I have that can’t be worked out somehow if I put my mind to it and turn off the damn TV.

I worry that I will make a wrong turn and what I commit to now will turn out to be just another notch on the career bedpost. I don’t know when I became this careful. Certainly when I was younger I never thought twice about the consequences of doing anything. My CV reads like about seventeen different people contributed to it. But on the question of what to do next with my life I keep getting stuck. As a world-class perfectionist of all things (or at least an attempt thereof), I  don’t want to change my mind, or to fail, or to compromise my family for my own selfish needs. I live daily with the guilty knowledge that I can’t even be the full time mum I dreamed of being because my patience, or lack thereof, turns me from Mummy to Monster if I don’t get time off for good behaviour. I feel I failed myself by not living up to my own expectations, however unrealistic, and I vow everyday to be better. But at this point in my life I can’t and won’t repeat these feelings of inadequacy in my professional life as well. I want to be successful at whatever I choose next. I live with so much uncertainty – if or when we will leave Dubai, where we will go when we do – the tendency is to let these issues overwhelm my ability to make decisions, or to make change, or to do anything other than tread water.

But the more I think about it, the more I think: so what if it’s not the last job I ever have? I’m never going to be a doctor, or a lawyer, or an accountant, I don’t have a ‘calling’ as such, so why not just pack as much in as possible? Maybe a little reincarnation every few years isn’t such a bad thing. And why should my temporary situation in Dubai stop me from doing anything? I think I’m finally figuring out that I need to relax a little – and that it’s ok to make change as and when it feels like the right thing to do.

I’m not sure even in a perfect world, that there is ever a right time to go back to work, or start a business, or have a baby for that matter. It’s clear that returning to work in any capacity will alter life not just for me, but for my family too, and I want to make sure as much as I can that it is a positive experience for all of us. But I’m learning to accept (albeit rather slowly) that we will adjust, and although it might take a bit of time to get the balance right, we will get there.

And now I have an opportunity, or two, I don’t want to regret not taking them because I’m worried about what might happen if I do. I live in the land of dreams for goodness sake. If there’s one place in the world where you should aim high and believe anything is possible, it’s in this small city with (still) such big potential. It is, as Mr. Elliot rightly says, never too late to be who you might have been. But why leave it that long, especially when you have so much to get through?

Image via Wikipedia

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.