Dubai - the Essex of the Gulf

 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22781377

This here link got me to thinking many of my students have family ties in the UAE after all until not many years ago there was not much in the way of a border until the over-rich Emiratis bought some of the highest tech kit for too much money from The Very Big Security guys who got a suitably fat commission and doubtlessly did laugh all the way to the bank. They must have bought the updated Miserable Security Fucker staff training package too as they are truly the rudest and glummest border folk I have met and I have met many. Possibly this motley collection of portly torpid trout must harbour soul scraping resentment as Emiratis because they are of that rare and delicate species an Emirati who does actually have to work. It must be said the very rich aren't so good at having to do work  just look at our useless PM and his sidekick Gideon. Ho ho. Nonetheless, these brave protectors of the borders are doubtless being very well paid for the terrible imposition into their sleeping or shopping time.  In contrast the Omanis who do have to work are young and cheery and much thinner and give a friendly smile and never check the car on the way back which is just as well for me as it is loaded with the sort of grog I cannot find over the border. We will usually have a brief banter about football giving a mention of the Wigan keeper Oman's very own Ali al-Habsi guarantees safe passage who made the coveted No. 1 spot his own.

Anyway, a big weekend away for students and many teachers alike is to Dubai. Shopping and nights out do appeal to a certain degree but going to get ripped off in Dubai is something I have never quite got. Maybe it's just me.I have been there many times and lost much money there and yes, had an OK time the never ending champagne brunch with optional bad behaviour is always a self-indulgent but slightly grubby winner. However, the place is without doubt one huge grid-locked shit hole. Literally, well, sort of,  as there is (or was) no proper sewage system. It has a very tall building (cue Freud) which the world was meant to be impressed about until the money ran out and a bit of grovelling / fraternal support had to be sought from the not quite so cheesy neighbours in Abu Dhabi who must have quite enjoyed  baling out the overspending brash neighbours with $20 billion of aid laced with huge amounts of schadenfreude...and the Big Sheik got naming rights on the tower and as is the wont of such folks it was named after himself. There's original. Still, many folk are attracted by the sun, beaches and the very big very shiny malls which are great if you like very big very shiny malls.  They are linked by threads of blocked multi-lane roads full of loony drivers. Hard and easy work is done by expats and cash given away to locals to keep them onside just like the university degrees - certainly it was the case when I worked there. Now everybody has a shiny iPad to help their studies and, from what my sources tell me, the students still get an IELTS 5 but do very well on Angry Birds. As a South Asian working there you sell your life, as a western expat you sell your soul. Prostitution in 50 degree heat.

The cult of personality of the horse doping Sheik (he of Godolphin infamy) is quite an eyebrow raiser for someone from a culture where slagging off of self-serving scumball politicians is a given or indeed a must. The security is pretty good there too with folk being taken away as part of the paranoia of the fearfully unelected in the Arab spring and of course a self-censoring press and selectively blocked internet. Then again we in the west are pretty good at coming down hard on dissent too just consider young Bradley Manning before he gets disappeared in a super max hole for the remainder of his life and the spying carried out through Prism the sort of spying potential that would have made the hardest of Stasi blush. But these are US spooks so that's all OK then.  Well done Barack, how dumb we were to think you would be anything more than a tool for the interests of others. I digress, these arrests are something not much spoken of in the western press as naturally there are megs billion oil and weapons deals to be done.

Of course if everything is given to you  the need or desire to work removed why would you question the way the country is run? I wouldn't and probably neither would you. Huge advances have of course been made and the golden rule for some time, like Essex allegedly was in the 80s,  is mass consumption and excess and hypocrisy although in Essex there was probably less of the latter as no religious taboos were broken. Great bars and restaurants abound, a playground before the crash for footballers and those with more money than taste, these folk will continue to flock there like flies to the huge lakes of poo.

Fair enough in 40 odd years the whole of the UAE and Qatar have made tremendous economic progress, how could they not when they float on so much oil and gas with an endless reservoir of free / cheap foreign labour and chancing expats? Somewhere along the way they lost any soul they may have had was lost in substituting possessions, shiny stuff and the flaunting of extreme mostly unearned wealth. So much more  could have been and could still be done with a bit more tweaking of imagination and fairness. Just like everywhere else I suppose?



 

Broken heads

Forgot this one which should have been posted weeks back ....read on....

It seems a lot worse than when I first started my intermittent roamings back in the latter part of the last century...but that could be an aging and decaying thing and the first worrying sign of my sounding like my father. Whilst being semi-detached from home, I am hardly semi-integrated here. My Arabic is poor not least as English (or Urdu) are lingua franca so being a very non-Muslim expat makes you a step or four removed from some of the realities here. Moreover, Egyptian colleagues say in a superior kind of way that the Arabic in the Gulf isn't real Arabic anyway and among many students from different parts of this pleasantly friendly and laid back land Arabic may only be a second or third language especially among those from way down south.

Peace, love and understanding

I digress, this semi-detachment, or perhaps ignorance was seen when  driving back from an afternoon beach and easy drink combo at the delicious Crown Plaza which has an excellent view of the sunset over the sea. On return, we passed some foaming beardies who were getting whacked for their interpretations of a desert based medieval belief system outside the beautiful Lego inspired opera house. No idea why but they didn't look happy and stopping to ask would not really have been wise.

The next day at work I poked around a bit, being blatant is not good, and after murmurings among the boys I eventually gleaned that a few heads had indeed received a right royal bashing. A little later, following more murmurings, photos were passed around by the students of bruised and broken faces of those who claimed that there had been some upset at an American (of course) newly converted Muslim singing a verse from the Koran to a gentle musical accompaniment. He'd been improvising apparently and enjoying being a new Muslim and sharing his joy with the good folk at the opera house. However, as there is no music, fun or frivolity allowed in their somewhat denying world view umbrage was taken by those with too much time and certainty on their hands and a demo was held, angry of course, by, from what I saw, was about 30 beards, outnumbered massively by the paramilitary police with whom it is probably a little  unwise to argue. In Expatland these things pass you by - the students, positively, were all understanding of their new American brother and intolerant of er...well... The Intolerant which can only be a good thing. Three days growth of unsculptured and untended beard among the boys and they get called Mullah which isn't meant respectfully.

Prostitution in the Gulf

Where the mange dogs go to die or toying with prostitution

Prostitution has always been something I have had a natural aversion to, it just doesn't seem right to me either as a potential buyer or seller of services. It seems (in best pompous voice) grubby and corrupting and unimaginably degrading for both parties yet it does appear to supply a type of need. However, grubby and seamy as it may be I once lived in a flat overlooking a street in the red light district of a deep Spanish town it provided great street theatre for me and my pals up on the balcony with a glass or three of Rioja watching the amusing comings and goings. It also helps being on friendly terms with the genial women and and gypsy runners and minders in the local scoring bar watching genial whores hustle and the hustlers whore - the majority of clients seemed to then be nervous virginal conscripts who would then, a fleeting and unsatisfactory orgasm later, reappear with a cheesy grin and go and score a hunk of dope and a beer and then shuffle out with their pustulous pals. As outsiders we were treated well and were doubtlessly unaware, possibly wifully,  of any ugliness that may have been going on...

So I am well aware that the foul temptation of a quick trick does occasionally hit upon many a man good and true, especially in this part of the world in which new thrills and excitement are always sought and needed for Expatland, or at this soulless part, can indeed be a conscience free zone. Eyes can easily be turned by an exciting and tempting short deal with particularly dirty and filthy, certainly amoral folk. Yes, I held my nose and put in an application for a post to sell my undoubted talents, modesty and soul, definitely my soul, to some particularly nasty military carpetbaggers in Saudi a place I swore I would have nothing to do with, a place that is Yemen or Afghanistan with money and some medieval magic rocks, governed by superstition, a fucked up version of a messy religion and rich inbred men with beards. A candidate for the worst country in world. Yes, the Big Company - big in guns, oil, torture equipment probably too, like all Big Bad companies they had controlling shares in the appalling criminal Bush / Cheney gang. 

Lest we forget

Attractive eh? Of course,  as they and you and I know, it's only about the Very Large Salary, and great conditions - albeit in the modern Middle Ages - paid for teaching of the very lazy rich, uninterested people laced with an odour of in-breeding...and then I would be surrounded, in a luxury compound with the delights and frolicsome fun enjoyed by other well paid low life whores. It is the place where the dead mange ridden dogs go to scratch, rut, and die...I know I have met many. Refugees in the EFL world, once on the outside they tend to have a dead eyed glassy stare brought on by the soul shredding hell-Horrors they have seen and the contortions of conscience they have made, and many, most disconcertingly, are called Colin.

Whither the idealism of career entry in education? Well, everyone has their price (yes YOU do)...do I? I have done the maths and (wistfully) most tempting and tantalising I could never need to suffer the indignity of being an economic migrant, being an educational wage slave again after three years. I would never have to consider the possiblity of walking into a secondary classroom again or have a McJob in an EFL languish school......it's a tax-free temptation that's for sure. Mucky and grubby all the same.

It might be a laugh, it might indeed be worthy, I might even touch a few lives. It does happen in teaching. I have been around, seen some mostly amusing but despairing things, I have survived the worst of over-promoted incompetent micro-management  (that's you Rachel), feral students, unsupportive, failed parents and of course useless education ministers that prat Gove being the latest dangerous incarnation. I can keep my mouth shut and my head low, I can keep my face straight now when folk get all Bronze Age religious on me and try to convince me their fairy tales are true and that their god is better than the other guy's god. I can usually find the good things in a culture and people and always meet good folk on the EFL circuit who are not cat lovers, sports bores, terminally lonely, or need those special holidays in the Philippines but perhaps my biggest advantage is not being called Colin.

Choices choices....

Creeping torpor in Expatland

Well, fuck this as they say in the nose bleed inducing upper echelons of pointless professional development circles. Inevitably the initial glow of pleasure at the escape from the professional and mental constraints of living and whinging in the education micro-managed mincer of very Little England has since receded. Not that I am complaining about life being too easy here and wish to be back there, oh no, pas de tout, as I might once have said, that would be very wrong and indeed a tad ungrateful for what I have here. No, a four hour day suits me more than fine as it would most of you. I'm reasonably well paid but want a little more but not sure exactly what. Stupidity and occasional wildness would be good but that last happened during the Bad Behaviour of Xmas and New Year when friendships were amusingly breached with ladles full of ire and umbrage lapped up slurpingly by those who really ought to have known better...

...and they do, they too are just bored and want to imbibe bagfuls of ire and umbrage to give some meaning to the too long time they have spent in this pleasant but ultimately unlively neck of the Gulf. I suppose it is a kind of expat langour caused by an unstressful semi-detached life in which meaning is not always clearly defined. Some turn to extreme exercise - triathlons, climbing, cycling, sailing (does that count?) all in extreme heat. Others seek fun in bad choirs (only the former Soviet staff do amateur music well), some women (never men) snuggle up to house cats (a messed up concept if ever there was - the house cat that is) and others, usually Brits and the running dog Aussies (or is it the other way round?) lend themselves very well to genial genteel affable alcoholism, if there is such a thing,which sometimes, I am told, leads to well (coughs and blushes), inappropriate liaisons and equally healthy or not, a worrying few have taken to religion, some going native. Each to their own I suppose...

...and now it's raining, proper biblical wadi rupturing rampant storms showing up the rubbish nature of the semi-slave built buildings and roads,  as cars, goats and stray forgotten excess last children get washed away in a brown slurry of Koranic rain and cheap infrastructure. Hey, it's all part of Allah's great plan so a bit of death, destruction and muddy mayhem is nothing to worry about. And like our crap snow days in once Merrie Englande, we get rain days out here in the Gulf as the washed away roads and power cut combo means that no one has the slightest idea how to deal with anything which is actually a rather pleasant  excuse to stand outside on the balcony with a glass of red and watch the kids frolicking in the floods as ours did in the snow before it became boring.

The earth moved for me

That was fun to be part of the disaster up the road in Iran and Pakistan. There I was giving the class the most mild of bollockings, for that is what it mildly was, when the floor started moving, tables vibrating. Very weird. As I thought it was just me and feared another seizure was coming on I rode with it not least as I am a professional educator as my Yankistani colleagues are wont to say. While the floor was wobbling and furniture rumbling I continued said soft-toned bollcking-lite to some of my lovely but  lazy students. It is all that is occasionally needed as they are brought up to respect their teachers and they have the added bonus of Allah on their side but that is another story those off us working in the Middle East know all about.

Mid-bollocking however  Manic Muna, as she is fondly known, a lovely local colleague and source for local culture, came into my room and asked me quaveringly whether the earth had moved for me. She was visibly scared  and then asked the girls now relieved at the relief from their bollocking if they too had felt something, which of course they had but were too timid to say anything for fear of speaking over a teacher which can never be done here.  This was done first in English, then in Arabic and what ensued was some Richter scale madness as, in a fraction of  a micro-second, they had all gleaned from Muna and their dumb phones (set to panic mode) that they had been in a level 7.8 quake and we were all going to die.

Fortunately, being British and working in a world of excitable foreigners it  is beholden upon me to wield ruthlessly the cold wet fish of hard reality  which was drawn from my desk drawer in which it is kept for such occasions, and liberally slapped in copious blubbering faces including that of dear Muna who I escorted back to her class from which her students had decided to flee in a Hollywood style screaming girly panic and that was just the boys. One look to mine - honed over many years of dealing with semi-house trained feral Year 9s called Jordan - left them sitting more soberly realising that, as the our media might have said say, a minor tremor had occurred in a far off excitable place, no Britons involved.

I shall now be marketing the t-shirt below in a range of colours and fabrics with the extremely  annoying but catchy  slogan as below, could be my way out of teaching...

Damn, I spilled my wine

There I was having a quietish  sundown excuse of a red out on the stoop with some genial pals and assorted children, when the now unsurprising news came through that a doddery old bag holed up for her last unwinnable stand in the Ritz had died of a brain attack. Yup, my worse instincts got the better of me  along the line of the bitch is dead, fuck yeh... so I performed a merry Irish jig around the aforementioned stoop. It was the instinct and frustration of growing up as a teen during the old bag's reign coming to the fore. How could it possibly not? Awful times.  I thought I was bigger than to be happy at someone's demise...obviously not. The 80s tainted me more than I imagine.

The children around looked quizzical at the passing of someone equivalent to them as Harold Macmillan or Anthony Eden (who they?) were  for me at their age, at  least they or the outcomes of their policies  were not so divisive and damaging. The colonial commoner among us from Australia looked quizzically shocked but his pommie partner fully understood but rather than spill her wine chose only to join me in performing a round of ecstatic cartwheels and double backflips to accompanying fireworks and the Ode to Joy. Not intended, just knee-jerk instinct, as I suspect it was for millions of others.

A calculating woman with, for me, divisive ideas and outcomes which ruined and disunited my country and made it a nastier, greedier place the legacy of which lingers. Sure, well worn arguments have been had and doubtless will continue to be so as she, and those times, inevitably becomes an increasingly forgotten footnote. Arguably the best time to have celebrated was in 1990 when  she got stabbed in the front by her own as a liability for which the appalling Mail has been lamenting ever since.

That said, having an awful lot of folk crowing unashamedly at your death is the stuff of dictatorships, or demagoguery or regimes smelling cloying close to it. Ugly. Indeed, ugly in that the once impartial BBC won't play Ding Dong in full in fear of upsetting the right which kind of puts her on a par with Mohammed in terms of sensitivities among some idiots and fools.



So, yes, were I back home I may well have been up in London, for old time's sake, waiting for some dumb fuck now underpaid overtime dependent plod, or overseas private plod, to make up an excuse to bash a few heads with Daily Mail sponsored batons and spuriously nick a few folk. It would only confirm that the legacy of Thatch has only been negative, nefarious and nasty.

 


May she sup well on the sulphur with her chums Saville, Ronnie, Botha,  Pinochet et al. In the meantime good old Glenda Jackson seemed to sum it up well.

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/video/2013/apr/11/glenda-jackson-margaret-thatcher-video

Appraisal, epilepsy and green ink

Now, last time I was appraised back in the make believe weirdo world of Goveland a year or so back it was of course by my then subject leader. Leader can only be  loose and vague as terminology, as the Northern Nazi had yet to develop any leadership skills beyond those that her beardy supervisor, the weekend war gamer, a monosyllabic hairy eared knuckle dragging neanderthal caveman had told her to do. In turn these had come down in tablets of stone from the swivel eyed head  who appeared convinced that the path to academic success was through dress standards. I'm sure little Govey would squirm in squeaky delight at that.

Caricatures they may be eh? Yet, as with all such things  they are easy and simple and redolent of slack thinking but based in a fetid slurry of tiresome truth which explains why I became one of the large stat of teachers who quit the profession in the UK this year according to the BBC. Yes, I was given a hard and rotten time and told I would have failed an Ofsted inspection for not having marked books in green ink. As simple as that. It didn't help that I raised an arched and skeptical eyebrow before sniggering like a 14 year old at the bollocks thus spouted by the insecure daft over-promoted woman and the SLT caveman who had spent plenty of the lesson observation texting. Needless to say this did my position no end of good. I knew that spending the next years of my diminishing life in such a place could not happen and that I was probably on my way out then anyway.

Dark but occasionally amusing times from a different chunk of  clunky time. How easy it is here though, a world away - how cooperative, how friendly and how good-natured. Just as I felt when I first entered state education in the 90s. The head didn't really want to know about the lesson, he assumed I could teach without having to follow narrow restricting teaching by numbers strictures. He was more concerned about how I was settling in to his country, what I thought of the students and how we could improve attainment. No complete and utter bollocks about marking in green ink that's for sure. We talked briefly about the lesson he watched, went through his ticky box list  and as I thought he was winding it up, he then caught  me  by pulling out my health record, not something that has ever happened before and possibly not legal in the UK. Were unions allowed here I would certainly have questioned it.  What was the point of it all? He really wanted to about epilepsy. This being based upon the record of a grand mal full on seizure I had back in the last century which he had worryingly highlighted in green ink. Needless to say it took me off guard as it has never been an issue well, apart from when it happened - not at work thankfully. However, all sorts of  left-field concerns were raised. He went through a lengthy interminable pedantic list of pre-prepared 'what ifs...' which I had to try to assuage in detail so as not to be accused of being mentally ill,  possessed or in need of trepanning or exorcism  in the unlikely event of another overdose of electrical discharge, anything in short which could freak out deeply religious, sheltered and superstitious students and some non-western teachers too.

It has never been a question brought up by anyone other than the doc  now a very long time ago. In the world of illness epilepsy just ain't sexy. It really isn't. As far as I know it doesn't get it's own awareness day where you can buy a  pretty ribbon to show solidarity and that you really, really do care. It can be subject to all sorts of myths and ignorance in the UK - fortunately being possessed or in league with Beelzebub are no longer among them.