Waiting...

“You want to go seaside?”

The taxi driver’s response didn’t make sense to me. I look at him, blankly. Bemused.

“You want to go seaside!”

His volume has increased, now. He is displaying more urgency, too. It has become less of a question and more of a statement. He clearly went to an English school. He was taught that if Johnny Foreigner doesn’t initially understand what you say, say it louder; say it bolder. The meaning will strike home in the end.

And this time, to a point, it works.

I take in what he says and – on consideration - I do want to go to the seaside! But, then, I always want to go to the seaside. Don’t you? Rarely a day passes without me wishing and hoping that a trip to the seaside is imminent or inevitable. What can I say; I’m a sucker for an ice cream? Which is why I’ve made a real effort to go seek out the deep blue and the promenade, lately. Several lost days in punch drunk, English coastal towns this summer attest to this. I’ve been left struck dumb at a hell hole ‘fun pub’ in Walton-on-the-Naze, where raucous locals dress up to the nines, ready for bouts of Sunday night Karaoke and petty recrimination. I’ve, inexplicably, burned on a cloudy day exploring Clevedon Pier. I’ve stood for an hour, talking shipping economics with a man watching container ships arrive and depart England’s shores in Portishead. I’ve enjoyed every minute.

So, my answer is yes. I do want to go to the seaside. Right now. At this instant, I want to smell the salt and the seaweed, look at aging, crumbling and boarded up towns while I listen to wave after wave after wave. I want little more.

But, yes is not the answer I give. I say ‘no’, because right now, what I want and what I need and intend to do are entirely different issues. I'm going somewhere else.

I lean into the car and wave my Map App at the driver. He stares at it blankly. He clearly missed his Geography lessons and concentrated on his languages. I speak more slowly, more precisely and - because two can play at his game - I raise the volume.

“No! I want to go to Sadu House. Look. Here!” I point… Again, I wave my phone at the man. Pointless.

“Seaside? Yes?”

And then, a wall of realisation hits me; thick, heavy, and hot in the early evening air. Simultaneously, everything feels both insanely familiar and out of worldly. A mix of real, live, actual memories and déjà vu crash together. Mixed messages reach my mind. A jumbled package of laughter, confusion and sweat soaked cotton shirts.

I’m back in the Middle East.

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It’s a long while since I wrote, so I ought to bring you up to speed.

Since I visited Jerusalem (Clerkenwell) and bumped into a tall man with a bowler and a history of dirty club nights and Adam Ant videos, a lot has happened.

I’ve felt the reverberation of Humming Birds in my chest and been dazzled by electric blue moths in El Salvador; rescued a paper cut out octopus from the floor of a Newcastle bar as a gift for a friend; felt the throb of a Harley Davison through my arse and up my spine for the first time; been isolated and alone on a crumbling and rickety rooftop in Rabat being shaken down for money by a ‘tour guide’; been wooed by Dublin more times than I can remember; arrived in a Valencia Hotel with my hands, legs and face smeared in human blood and calmly asked for my room key; baby sat a bass guitar belonging to a Prog Rock band on a journey from Gatwick to Oslo; been lost in Trance in an Ibiza super club; spoken to two separate medical practitioners about how best to avoid my own death; and some stuff happened one night in Warsaw that should probably stay there.

I’ve been busy.

Which leaves me standing outside a Kuwaiti hotel, with a work colleague, talking pidgin to a taxi driver who is more obsessed with the seaside than me.

Pete tells me to get in the cab and give directions. Pete is my boss, so I do as I am told. Thankfully, Pete didn’t ask me to kill the gentleman; that would have been awkward and may have messed up my hair.

The cab is old and battered but serviceable. The driver is grumpy and seems disbelieving. He swings the car around the wide Corniche road, nonchalantly taking U-turns, maintaining a racing line and claiming any vacant car length space ahead of us with well-practiced ease. This is what he does for ten, eleven, twelve hours a day, six days a week. He doesn’t believe that we wish to go anywhere other than the seaside. He slows for each turning, each junction and each shopping centre slip road expecting me to tell him to pull over and park up alongside the sea to our right. When I eventually ask that he performs a ‘u-ey’ to return us to the old fashioned and traditional building to our left, he asks for assurance. Assurance that he understood me correctly or that assurance that I am not mad. Either? Both?

We arrive, Pete pays the gentleman the equivalent of £2.50 and the driver takes off at a speed that would get him back to 1955 if he were driving a Delorean. Destination successfully found; Pete and I take a look around a museum of traditional weaving techniques. We both agreed that it was quite good.

Dear reader; my life is, officially, more rock n roll than yours.

This isn’t my first return to the Middle East since I headed back to Blighty, last year. It’s my third. After a false start, I initially returned a year to the day after I first flew home. I’ve now popped back and forth to Kuwait three times. The one GCC state that I didn’t get to see when I was living in Khobar.

And the result is memories. They have been flashing back. Eighteen months immersed in a culture and a way of life leave their mark. Regardless of the whys’ and the wherefores’ of my leaving, I miss the place. I miss my little way of life. I was missing it before I returned, but popping through Kuwait brought it into closer focus. Conversations with Ex-Pats over in Kuwait helped to plant the memory seeds. Travels through the eternal dustbowl construction site that is Kuwait City, nurtured and fed them. Good and bad.

The heat. It was mid-September when I first arrived in Saudi. It was mid-September on my second visit to Kuwait. It was nudging 50C, there wasn’t much shade and the humidity gathered on your brow and in your pits. Three hundred and three miles north of Khobar the humidity was worse than I ever experienced in Saudi. Each breath was dust and heat. Dust and heat.

The construction. Everywhere I visited in the Middle East, regardless of its beauty had a part or parts that were forever under construction. The half built shopping centre near the Heineken Highway, or the twisted tower block being built on the corner of Pepsi-Cola Road in Khobar (you know the place, opposite Circle Café and Red Lobster). The Metro cuttings being carved out of shifting sand in Riyadh, the stadiums in Doha or the World Islands slowly washing away in Dubai. Everything is changing. Kuwait City is slowly drowning in new motorways and cuttings. In the shadows of modern steel and glass towers, concrete apartment blocks and offices rot in the heat. Mirrored glass transposed against yellow/white walls cracked, chipped and stained by water and ancient advertising. Sidewalks and pathways are littered with ill planned utility installations and uneven pavements. Trip hazards abound.

Thanks Allies. And thanks to Pete for the piccie

The night. Fifty two weeks of sunshine is offset by regulated twelve hour nights. Dusk is short lived. The sun sets like a stone. It’s dark by 7pm at the latest, even in mid-June. But the city is alive with artificial light. Not just the choreographed, dancing lights on the new office blocks in Sharq and bursting patterns on Kuwait Towers but – more subtly – in the neon shop signs of the corner shops and mini arcades that trade and hawk late into the night. Over the top but rarely too gaudy. Life starts at dusk.

Light After Dark

Juice

Inflatables

The noise. The eternal traffic. Where the indicator is ignored in favour of the horn. Where, after dark, youths make the most of the floodlit football pitches and sports facilities near the Al-Amiri Hospital. In daylight, the hubbub of traffic remains but is punctuated by the calls to prayer and Laughing Dove, Myna and White Cheeked Bulbul feasting in and around the date palms. 

The driving. The sublime to the ridiculous. A gap is a gap. An inch is an inch. Road markings are a guide. Right lanes, left lanes mean nothing in the rush. Salmon traffic. Aggression isn’t personal. Life is but fate. Beat up and battered Japanese and Korean saloon cars battle it out with Articulated Lorries, coaches, 4x4s, American Pick Up Trucks and Muscle cars. The last to the lights loses. When I left Saudi I had grown used to this nonsense. Returning a year on and I had soon come to ignore and laugh at it once more as colleagues flinched at junctions as they look left to right in disbelief at the chaos.

The food. Aside the grilled meat and endless rice on offer for dinner, breakfast in Kuwait made me question the wisdom of ever returning home. Flat bread. Zatar. Daal. Foul Mudammas (pronounced fool) – mashed fava beans with lemon and garlic, mixed with raw tomato, onion, coriander and chillis. Olives and raw vegetables. Hummus… The perfect start to a day. The shops are still sugar obsessed. Biscuits and sweets. Middle East staples. Pineapple and mango for when you want to eat healthily (ha!).

Staples

The people. I’m not a fool (stop sniggering at the back… I’m not!), I realise that people are people everywhere. When pushed, kindness can be found in any and all corners. Humans are hard wired. But, I have always found Arabs supremely friendly, courteous and helpful. So I did again, in Kuwait. If you take the time to step away from the Western strip malls and restaurants you are rewarded with a far deeper insight into a more traditional way of life. The Fish Market, the spice stores and confectionery shops. The owners seem surprised to find Westerners off the beaten track and – once they find you are not American – bend over backwards to help.

But, regardless of the above, I wouldn’t want to go back to live.

It’s not that I have regrets. I don’t. I had and I took an amazing opportunity. But it was of its time and the time has passed.

I spent 18 months adapting to a life that is far from ordinary to an average bloke from North West London. I bit my tongue, I turned a blind eye to the undoubted inequality and racism to others. I adapted my behaviours, my language and (to a degree) my dress, not to fit in but to sit under the radar; to be invisible. And I appreciated the opportunity and thrived on the experience. But – at times – I felt like I was in a prison. An open prison compared to many that I met; colleagues who had their right of exit constrained so that they couldn’t return home when they wanted or were needed; a guy outside a warehouse in Riyadh who tended goats who says that his visa had expired but his sponsor had disappeared with all his paperwork, so he had no way of ever going home. I often felt as if I was the stooge in The Prisoner, acting a role to try and get Number 6 to give something away. Captive, but still a prisoner.

That last analogy is crass.

It’s crass not just because the reality is that Western Ex-Pats have it good and a relatively secluded and sheltered life, but because the reality is probably closer to life in Slade Prison. We were all more like Fletcher and Godber than a foil to Patrick McGoohan.

The above was made clear while on a Piccadilly train heading to Heathrow, en route to Kuwait, and receiving an email from a client I was travelling to see asking whether I would have an opportunity to buy him an egg cup. The email asked if I had any idea what it’s like to eat a soft boiled egg with your hands. And I didn’t and don’t but could empathise with his plight. This was on the back of a conversation I had with him, a week earlier, where he complained that he couldn’t get his hands on Sage and Onion stuffing for love nor money. It made me recall the issues of ‘British’ food in Supermarkets (I miss you LuLu!), where deliveries were inconsistent, so you could never guarantee what you would be able to find from week to week. In September, staff at the business I was working with were sharing rumours of cheap cheese on sale at CarreFour and laughing at those who missed the bargain. You grow used to missing out on and envying others food finds while building a personal hoard of condiments on the off chance you will never see them for sale, again.

Like I say, life in the Middle East is not romantic enough to allow your ideals and morals to lead you to make a stand against any part of the life you distrust or dislike. Through chance or design, such high ground cannot be afforded when your reality is that a heartfelt and genuine desire to eat a decent cheese sandwich means that ‘Branston Pickle’ can be traded as currency.

I bought my client a shot glass at the airport. It was the best I could do. I believe that it is serviceable.

Back to Kuwait. 7:30pm.

Men of distinction, taste and style can only take so much of weaving each day. Our needs satisfied, Pete and I chose to walk back to our hotel. It was only a mile or so and the temperature had dropped to a cool and relaxed 32C.

So, we braved crossing the busy road and we went to look at the sea. The brown sea. Turd brown sea. Flat breads floating at the surface. The sea lapped against the concrete sea defences, as the smell of excrement lapped across our senses. We kept going. We walked on hoping to escape the sensory attack, to find ourselves on a concrete jetty where dishdash clad fishermen targeted the beasts of the shitty sea. Shell fish remains littered the jetty; bait from the fishermen. Stray cats lingered and quick movements at the corner of our eyes alerted us to the roaches. Cockroaches as big as our thumbs scampered across the jetty floor and along the steel, safety railings. Each creeping, crawling movement sending individual shivers down my spine. And around a small arc of sand on the seaward side of the jetty, a family had lain down a blanket and were eating a picnic meal and their children paddled in the sea amid the sour smells, busy insects and putrid fish waste.

Like I say. I may not want to move back but, I really want to keep on visiting!

I Lost My Heart To A Starship Trooper

It started in reception.

I was waiting on a lift. My driver was running late.

So I took in a map that is adjacent to the door. I’d taken cursory glances at it before but never looked at the detail. The map is of Khobar. It is several years old and – as a result – significantly out of date. I noted that the Corniche was still a work in progress but that all the key roads were present. Landmarks such as key hotels and the pepsi cola factory were all marked.

So I looked at the junction close to Silver Tower; close to where I work. And that is when I saw it.

The map contained line graphics of some of the key sites and – sitting at Silver Tower – was a picture of a space shuttle attached to it’s three fuel tanks.

Map

I asked my driver about it but my question was lost in translation somewhere.

And I forgot about it.

Except that, on occasion, something would stir it back to the front of my mind. The slow dawning that the “Space Travel Agency” – a disappointingly normal travel agent – that is still close to the cross roads may not have just been an obscure name choice but be based on a landmark that has now gone.

Those countless occasions where I would wake with that Sarah Brightman/Hot Gossip song as an incurable ear worm.

I have lost track of the number of taxi drivers I have asked about this mythical space shuttle marked on the map.

No one could answer me.

But then I stumbled on something online. A photograph taken of Silver Tower back in the mid noughties. In front of it was a sculpture. A sculpture of a space shuttle.

I was excited.

Before I go on, I need to provide some perspective. Some background. I need to explain why I had this obsession with this detail on a map.

As a kid, I loved the idea of space travel.

Didn’t we all?

I was brought up in an era of Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Dr Who, Blakes 7 and Mork & Mindy. Space travel was in my blood. Popular culture seemed to obsess with it. The moon landings and Apollo missions had created this fervour for space. For the opportunity. It seemed that the Western World had become utterly obsessed. Anything and everything looked for the space angle. Even James Bond was going there.

Dr Who was a staple, but I was one of the millions that was hooked and dragged uncomplaining into the Star Wars franchise. It was bigger. It was bolder. The sets didn’t wobble as much. It always felt like I was like looking into the future. A future where two powers both believing that they were right and the other wrong fought for supremacy.

Like the cold war.

In the days pre-video and before the films had had their UK TV premier, I was lost in the books, magazines, sticker albums, merchandise and figurines that allowed the re-enactment of the battles and key scenes. More. The lack of exposure to the movie content, it all encouraged the use of imagination to create new story lines, new epic battles and new chapters of my own each day.

I was a sucker for the space ships.

I “wowed” at the weaponry.

And Carrie Fisher made me feel funny inside… Even more than Suzi Quatro or the blonde one from Abba did. Utterly smitten.

Suzi. The Blonde One. Carrie.

Dressed in white with the silly hair ringlets, dressed for the winter exploits in The Empire Strikes Back or – obviously – the bikini scene in Return of the Jedi. I’d have done anything for her.

And then, in real world, came the Space Shuttle. The first reusable space craft. It was new. It was sleek*. It was sexy**.

Back in 1981, my family foreshortened a holiday outing so that we could get home in time to watch the Shuttle’s initial launch. We gathered around a TV in the lounge of a small hotel in Uckfield in Sussex with several other holidaying families to watch history being created. Looking back at the footage today, it all seems a bit tame. A big lump of metal being strapped to a load of inflammable material, pointed at the sky and someone chucking a half smoked cigarette into the mix to create ignition.

In 1981, it was bloody magic. It tapped into all my fantasies of travelling the universe with improbable space hardware and weaponry saving planets and getting the girl. It felt as if all the Science Fiction that I was buying in to really could be the future. Everything felt slightly tangible.

Alongside my plastic Star Wars models, suddenly models of the space shuttle were being introduced into the mix.

And, whilst my fascination with the shuttle and space travel may have waned over the years, for a while I wanted to know everything about the missions. Who was on them? What they were carrying? How the future was being shaped.

But, back to Khobar. Khobar in 2015.

It got me thinking. Why would a statue/model of a space shuttle be constructed in Khobar and – having gone to the trouble of doing so – where is it now?

The “why?” answer is simple to find. Google and Wikipedia quickly explain the cultural reference, so I won’t dwell on it. National pride.

In 1985, Sultan bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, a Saudi Arabian Air Force pilot and member of the Royal Family flew on STS-51-G. A real life Saudi astronaut.

Sultan bin Salman Al Saud

It also led me to references that show that the statue still exists and that it has just been moved. Which led to me having an adventure to relive part of my childhood, a few weeks ago.

It started on a Thursday evening as I wound down for the weekend and got chatting with a friend – Marian – online. Aside general chit chat and catch ups and Bugsy Malone, I explained that my plan for the weekend was to go searching for the lost space shuttle. It was my mission to find it. Bless her, Marian wouldn’t be drawn. Even when I started to explain that I was going to dress as Han Solo to conduct my mission, she wouldn’t rise.

I guess she liked Luke Skywalker more.

On the Friday, the sun beat down and I couldn’t face the walk the length of the Corniche from home to reach my goal. OK, the white shirt could cope with the sun but my choice of a dark waistcoat, tight, tight black military twill trousers with a red trim and black boots was not conducive to the climate.

So I flagged a cab.

The cab driver was hairy. Not just the de rigour “taxi cab beard”, but really, really hairy. Our communication was limited. The driver’s English was not good and I found that our interactions became foreshortened, direct and punctuated with gestures for directions. And guttural barks. Somehow we grew to understand each other.

We reached our destination. A traffic island just behind the main Corniche road. The space shuttle stands forlorn and slightly grubby surrounded by Date Palms.

I instructed the cab driver to pull over and wait at the roadside while I jumped out and snapped some photographs. Traffic was scarce. The roads were deserted. But the cab driver was nervous. Twitchy. He feared what would happen if the Police arrived and challenged me or him while I was isolated in no man’s land. But I was mission bound; I oozed confidence. I assured him that we wouldn’t hang around to be challenged. I knew that his white Hyundi maybe old, maybe past it’s prime, may have a few scratches, dents and war wounds but I knew that the crate could out run any other car on Khobar’s roads that day. We were safe. Invincible.

Disappointingly plastic and weather beaten. Its logos are faded and peeling. A plaque that presumably explained its significance has been stolen leaving a sad looking semi-pillar of concrete as its lonely companion.

Pleased to find it, it seems a shame that the national pride that must have influenced its commission has been allowed to fade and decay. But, still, the shuttle is there. Sultan bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud's achievements are still remembered.

Out of the way, but not out of mind.

Thankfully, my faith in the speed of the cab was never put to the test and my taxi driver drove me back home without incident.

By chance, it was only when I returned home that I stumbled over the news that Sarah Brightman's voyage into space to sing has been postponed… Hey. Such a shame... She deserves it...

Here is my ear worm...

Notes:

* OK. Not as sleek as the sports shoe shaped reality drive craft described in Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but sleek none the less.

** Ditto

England Oh England

I guess I was away for five months. 

Slightly more.

I thought that the biggest shock I would face would be the weather. I had, essentially, lived in summer from April 2014 until January 2015. Al Khobar and England are incredibly different in February. I’d watched the weather change on the weather websites with a sense of foreboding.

I didn't fancy the cold at all.

But the cold is just something that you get used to.

And it wasn’t too bad. I was expecting to be near foetal when I walked out of Terminal 4 without a coat to jump my lift back to Oxfordshire. It was dawn. It was a suitably uninspiring grey day. Damp. Dank. But not so cold. It was OK.

Somewhere on the M40. Cold. Grey. Damp. Dank. England Oh England.

I accept that the cold eventually got to me a few days later. There was a moment around 10pm one Tuesday. I walked up to Hornsey from Crouch End in the frost and ice with a shiver that was on the edge of turning into dance and teeth chattering to the point where conversation was uncontrollably retarded. This was the point where I stopped dead and demanded Lukey tell me why people accepted living in such ridiculous and uninviting cold environments. Beyond that and a moment where I had to duck into a Costa Coffee to grab a hot chocolate to thaw on the north side of Kew Bridge, the cold never really got to me.

What shocked me most was the dog shit.

It is everywhere.

I noticed it in Bloxham, where I holed up for a few days before heading back to London. Then Hornsey and Peckerwell seemed to be covered in it. Later in my trip, the area around Deptford Bridge seemed to be even worse.

You don’t get it in Al Khobar. You don’t get dogs.

Well, you do… but the dogs you see are semi-wild and they stay away from you as much as you stay away from them. Dogs are not kept as pets over here. No one walks them around town so there is no shite to clear up.

Don’t get me wrong, Al Khobar is untidy. In parts, it’s filthy. But not with excrement. Give me food waste and building materials any day. Dog shit is – well –is  just shit.

It annoyed me. Irrationally.

After a few days, I was becoming used to it. I moved on. I found other things to prickle; to aggravate.

Victoria, for instance.

I’ve never been keen on that part of town. I’d guess, because it is purely functional. It is not a destination, is it? How many times have you dreamed up a great night out in Victoria? How many times have you thought… “Oh. I fancy meeting a friend for lunch. Victoria. That sounds like an exciting Central London location to meet.”?

NB - See the little note at the bottom, where I admit to arranging to meet someone in Victoria.

Exactly!

You pass through. You move on.

But I seemed to find myself there, all too often. Dragging my luggage down Buckingham Palace Road to renew my Saudi visa; dragging my luggage up from Peckham to meet friends in the John Lewis Head Office bar (don’t get excited… it feels like a Travelodge); dragging my luggage across the station to grab a cab to St James Park; waiting for a friend at the end of platform one as a cold started to form; fighting my way into Boots to get medicine to fight said cold and; finally, battling crowds to retrieve my passport from Buckingham Palace Road, again.

I was away for close on three weeks. I swear that I spent two of them trying to find my way around Victoria’s road works.

I see that the road works will be in place until 2018. I wouldn’t have noticed, except I stopped to take a picture of two Italians in front of the hoardings in the bus station. No idea why they wanted to pose there; I had neither the language skills nor desire to know. But it did get me thinking. Perhaps they are regulars and they need something constant to measure themselves as they age. It is plausible and quite possible that, if I had wasted more time there, I would have seen families arriving from Burgess Hill, Whyteleafe and East Grinstead to measure their kid’s heights. The hoardings around the “walk way” near the bus station having been in situ so long that they have been using them over the past years to record their children’s growth spurts in the same way that the door frame to the kitchen was marked in my childhood home.

As an aside. As I was typing that, I began to wonder when all the dates and marks labelled “Alex” and “Sir” on the kitchen door frame showing our growth rates were removed. My head says that we must have redecorated while I still lived there and that they were lost many, many years before we moved out. But, my heart hopes that they were still visible when the next home owners arrived. If it was the latter, I regret not adding two final measures to record “Sir, age 19” and “Alex, age 23”.

Don’t get me wrong, though. I didn’t spend three weeks in England in a state of depression. I saved that for the days following my return to Saudi Arabia. Three weeks was long enough that it allowed me to realise just how much I miss my family and friends but short enough that it flew. It absolutely flew.

England inspired me. England is beautiful.

It was wonderful to allow myself to visit London as a tourist. All be it a really well informed and “cool” tourist, but a tourist just the same. I was blessed. Friends, intentionally or unintentionally, were able to show me things that I had never seen. Places that I had never visited or never knew. My mental maps of the city were challenged. I explored places on foot that I had never had time to find.

I took in a few places that I don’t really know. Crouch End, Camberwell and Blackheath. I got to revisit places from my past, like Upper Street, Bethnal Green Road and Hanwell. And old favourites like Barnes and Brentford and Hammersmith. I even got a few minutes in Harrow to be told all about hypertension and discuss my hopeless caffeine habit.

What sticks with me most, though, were the skylines.

Now, I can wax lyrical about the impressive nature of the Dubai skyline forever. Regardless of how I feel about Dubai generally – I’m not it’s greatest fan… I don’t like really like plastic – I cannot deny it’s sheer scale and audacity. 

Wow. Wow Squared. Not taken from an aeroplane.

A view I once caught of it from an aeroplane taking off over the sea will remain one of the most awe inspiring and remarkable sights I have ever seen. Dubai really does just appear out of a desert… Mile upon mile of nothing and, then “Bang!”, there it is, just “there”. Jagged, angular and huge. Wow. Wow squared.

But London is my home. London cannot be beaten.

You can get pulled into the classic views. Of Waterloo Bridge, Hungerford Bridge and the stunning vista’s that you can get from the South Bank. And you should. They live up to everything that has been written about them in poem, prose or song. 

I spent a wonderful Sunday afternoon with my brother and Rosie poking around between Tower and Westminster Bridges in glorious winter sunshine. Art, shopping, life, living and a really expensive gin cocktail to die for. I will level with you. I’ve visited a fair few cities that have captured my imagination, heart or soul but that part of London on its day – Southwark… pronounced “Suth-uck”… - is damned hard to beat.

Picture Postcard London

Gull

Gin with a homemade lime cordial that made you squint.
All infused with hops for extra "floweryness".
Heavenly.

But what I really loved to find again, were the views that creep up on you. The ones that are not expected. The view from the railway viaduct between Kilburn and West Hampstead on the Metropolitan line or the view of the planes heading into Heathrow you get on Barnes Bridge station. They are the views I crave and that I love. The ones that are known by the locals and are missed from the guide books. Those are the ones that I miss. And, by venturing into parts of town that I don’t really know, I got to see some more.

There are too many to single out, so I will note the luck I had with my accommodation.

Jodie’s flat up in Hornsey that allowed me to look out over the old church at Hornsey and Alexandra Palace rising up above.

Toe’s spare room that allowed a view of the city and – if you know what to look for – the top of Tower Bridge. All from Peckham/Camberwell borders.

My brother’s spare room overlooking London Bridge’s railway tracks with the awful Walkie Talkie and Cheese Grater over the river.

And Alex’s living room over Deptford Creek and DLR with a vista right across the city, Elephant & Castle, Stockwell and - if you pay close attention - the beautiful BT Tower.

Over Deptford Creek

Back in Al Khobar, I am left with memories that are gold, or oil or whatever commodity hasn’t had the arse fall out of its value yet. I was born in London. I have lived most of my life within its boundaries. I love and loathe the place with equal measure. It has treated me well and badly. And I know it will always be there for me. At the end of a three thousand mile plane ride, it will welcome me.

I shall be back. Quite soon. And I will fall in love with it all over again.

But first...

First, I shall be visiting Bristol.

My future home.

Note – OK. Admission time...

I do remember a really enjoyable lunch date that I had in Victoria, once. And I chose the venue. And it was in living memory, too. There is/was a really good little, independent café down on Wilton Road (?) where I waited an age for someone in a scarlet red coat and shared parsnip cake. Or courgette cake. Or something that wasn’t carrot cake. Whatever it was, it was good but it doesn’t really matter. In truth, I was only there for the company. xx

Not Christmas...

I wish it could be Christmas every day.

That’s what Roy Wood says.

Roy Wood is a bastard.

Bastard

You see, if his wish was to come true, the rest of my life would be spent getting up at 6:45am, getting to work by 8am and going through the processes of writing letters to support casual labour travelling to Jubail, preparing and presenting my payroll returns, starting the 2015 financial forecasting process and compiling invoices.

It wasn’t a bad day, but even Roy Wood would struggle to get an upbeat lyric out of it.

Christmas passed me by this year. I knew that it would. As you would expect from a country that only recognises Islam as a religion and – theoretically – punishes public shows of other faiths, not many people were waving the tinsel or dressing their trees.

And I didn’t miss it.

It’s not that I dislike Christmas. I don’t. But it would feel a little odd in this environment to crave it. On Thursday (as I shall forever know it…) it was a beautiful sunny day, perhaps hitting 24C. To me, it couldn’t have been less Christmassy.

“But sunshine and heat don’t mean you can’t celebrate”, I hear you say.

I know. I’ve seen the pictures and heard friends tell tales of their Christmas celebrations in Australia, South Africa and across the southern hemisphere. I get it, but the difference between those and the environment that I live in is that they will have been prepared and readied to celebrate. In the weeks before they cooked shrimps on the beach, the TV and media would be cranking the celebration up. The economy would ramp up sales. You’d struggle not to see the classic northern European imagery of dressed trees, stars, Santa Claus, supermarket queues and credit card/debt consolidation adverts.

Aside a single tree and tragic gold, plastic bells above a bar in Bahrain, I had none of that.

The closest that retail got to celebrating the season were a couple of shop displays:

The first was a women’s fashion store where all the window display mannequins were surrounded by cotton wool snow, with icy blue stars and glitter.

The second was a banner stand at Seattle Coffee Shop encouraging me to “add some warmth to the season” by purchasing hot chocolate in mugs dressed in little cardigans, topped with whipped cream and flavoured with salted caramel, hazelnut or peppermint. The image on their banner stand was all muted, warm reds, earthy browns with a blurred open fire burning in the distance.

Winter… Not Christmas.

I saw this last Sunday night. It was still 20C…

It’d had been 24+C all day.

But – despite the above - I did make a personal effort to mark the event.

A can of Barr’s Cream Soda purchased at LuLu and a Chicken Tikka Masala for my tea with my colleague, Andy. Two traditional British dishes…

And I took a few minutes out to watch this...

And this...

This...

This...

Keith's Khristmas Krackers Vol 2

And... Finally, this...

I know I am late...

But...

Merry Christmas. You Buggers!

Last time I wrote, you may recall that I was missing London and UK life. The blog appeared to be my version of wearing red sparkly shoes, clicking my heels and saying:

“There’s no place like home… There’s no place like home”.

It was as if I was having Boxing Day UKTV flashbacks.

But, the feeling has passed. As I knew it could and would.

My company has a new starter making his first visit to Saudi. I found myself in the position to be the expert; to be the person to show him the ropes. And this encouraged me to look at all the positives in the ex-pat life and allowed the opportunity to revisit places that I had been ignoring for a few weeks.

Despite Andy bringing me a cold from Scotland that knocked me out for a couple of days, all has been good.

Trawling the Souks in Al Khobar looking at the sports and electronics shops, gently picking his jaw up from the floor and fixing it back in place once he realised how cheap it all is.

Of discovering which side of Glasgow he is from when he refused the green shopping basket I offered, preferring the blue. Touring my beloved LuLu, chuckling at the lay out, collating photos of the "not" booze section. Laughing at the random brands that make it over from the UK.

Demonstrating that you should never order a starter at the same time as a main course in a restaurant because it leads to a slow procession of food in orders that you cannot comprehend…

“Yeah, thanks for all the food. But we got this far without the rice… not sure we can manage all that”

“Oh. Thanks. We’d forgotten the squid dish… nice of you to bring it with the change.”

Yeah. I exaggerate. But not much…

Today, I got chatting to a couple of Filipino guys photographing birds down by the coast. They were visiting from Riyadh. They were telling me how lucky I am to be based in Al Khobar. The coast, a more open/liberal outlook… less desert. Another Indian marketeer I allowed to queue jump in LuLu this afternoon (I’m a nice guy) was celebrating our ability to escape to Bahrain with relative ease.

It all vocalised what I had been thinking over the past couple of weeks. I’m blessed. Lucky. I live in a decent town, with a wonderful winter climate. The people are broadly friendly and open. It feels safe and – whilst it could be cleaner – it is beautiful. With the exception of “Bastard the Cat”, even the strays are good company.

Al Khobar - Where I go to remember and reflect on my luck... Palm Trees. Flamingoes. Gulls. Herons and a bridge to Bahrain on the horizon.

NB – I have met many, many friendly strays while I have been here. Most notably, two cats at my office named Trevor and Gary. “Bastard the Cat” lives on the street outside my apartment. He is so named because of the bite to the left leg incident.

Trevor & Gary. Cats.