Wanted! Wine Gums, Pain-Killers and Muddy Vegetables
Many an expat blog discusses the foodstuffs, home comforts and edible luxuries unavailable to them in their overseas posting. Sometimes I imagine them all – thousands of variously dispersed blogging Brits – soaking up the sun somewhere suitably exotic, and longingly salivating for a decent pickled onion or a packet of Scampi Fries. In Dubai we are lucky enough to have a wide variety of shops representing the equally wide variety of nationalities living here; we English folk frequently hug ourselves with glee when we remember that Dubai has branches of both Waitrose and Marks & Spencer in which to find comfort and familiarity (or is that just me with the gleeful self-hugging? Oh. I see… Do have a look at my post, The Worldwide Waitrose Web, for a cheery discussion on the perks of aggressive globalisation). The dry foods and frozen stuff stocked in Waitrose are pretty much as they would be at home (with less choice and no alcoholic or pork-based ingredients of course – Christ, it was murder finding a proper Christmas pudding…), but many fresh or perishable goods are locally sourced or imported from countries nearby. This, along with UAE legislation, means that, try as we might, certain items are simply unavailable out here…
The first of these elusive indulgences is a pack of good old-fashioned wine gums. My husband has an actual addiction to wine gums (please see this photographic evidence of his shameful private stash. It’s a sorry situation, isn’t it. And made so much worse by the fact that he stores them in a KFC Binge Bucket). You can’t get wine gums here in Dubai, though there are plenty of ludicrous sugar emporiums in which you can buy just about every other sweetmeat and confectionary on the planet. There can’t be a porky issue here as wine gums are made with bovine gelatine, so we have therefore concluded that the absence of wine gums can only be because UAE customs officials have been foxed by the word wine. Wine gums do not, of course, contain a single drop of alcohol (although, if they did, it might at least go some way towards explaining my husband’s obsession). To complicate this legal quirk further, wine gums are, bizarrely, very popular in Kuwait – a totally ‘dry’ country. Wine gums were invented by Mr Maynard, Junior, in the early years of the 20th Century and were called Wine Gums to make them sound like a more ‘grown up’ sweet for an older target market – the connoisseurs’ candy, if you will. Although it may have been that Mr Maynard, Junior, was just trying to wind up his father, Mr Maynard, Senior, who was a devout Methodist of the teetotal, temperance variety. The red and black ones are his favourites (my husband’s, not Mr Maynard’s) – I think they are called Port and Claret. Thinking about it now, I wonder if wine gums are actually meant to appeal to children who want to play at mimicking sophisticated adult vices… Like those candy cigarillos… or Babyccino ‘coffees’… Whatever next? Champagne Chupa Chups? Caviar Dip Dabs?
For those amongst us who suffer from nasty headaches or backache, it can be tough getting hold of good painkillers out here, as UAE law prohibits the sale of any medicine containing codeine. There are days when I miss Syndol like I miss the company of an old friend (if I had any old friends who were particularly efficacious analgesics, that is). Syndol is an over-the-counter painkiller, marketed in the UK for ‘tension headaches’, as it not only contains paracetamol and codeine, but also a rather jolly muscle relaxant. The result is a couple of hours of pleasant, floppy, pain-free fuzziness. You feel as if you are hiding in a dark, warm cupboard at the back of your own brain. If you’ve never tried it, I can assure you that a weekday afternoon spent curled up on the sofa with a couple of Syndol, a cup of tea, a bar of Fruit & Nut, and a double-bill of Murder, She Wrote is a very special kind of bliss. Maybe it’s just as well you can’t get hold of it in this part of the world, come to think of it – I’d never get anything done…
Photograph courtesy of the amazing Blue Cicada Photography
A somewhat healthier craving I harbour is for fresh, organic veg. When we lived in Canterbury, we would often potter down to the farmers’ market, The Goods Shed, on a Sunday morning, and stock up on local seasonal vegetables for our roast dinner (do have a look at of their website: http://thegoodsshed.co.uk or check out my fellow WordPress blogger’s reviews of some of their amazing foodstuffs on her site A Canterbury Food Love Story. Most supermarket fruit and vegetables here are imported and many are chemically treated and hermetically sealed in cling film – I’ve purchased many sad bananas, tragic avocados and melancholy mangos that go straight from rock hard to rotten without ever being truly ripe. Here in this perpetual summer it’s also hard to keep a sense of what is actually seasonal. I often think about how lovely it was to choose from piles of fresh vegetables just plucked from the earth, the leaves glistening with that morning’s dew. You can’t beat a rummage through a pile of muddy carrots and grubby parsnips. The word ‘organic’ is often horribly misused over here, meaning anything from ‘Vegetarian’ or ‘Containing fresh ingredients’ through to ‘Vaguely healthy. Probably. We haven’t actually checked or anything…’ There are, however, some pioneers of organic farming starting to make a real impact in this part of the world. Heaven knows how they actually manage it in a desert, but if you’re interested in finding out, have a look at the website of these admirable and very groovy people: http://www.greenheartuae.com/
For all those non-perishable items that are legal but still maddeningly unattainable there are some rather wonderful companies who will put together parcels of goodies for you or your expat loved ones. There are quite a few great British websites doing this, and my current favourite is Home Comforts Goods: http://www.homecomfortsgoods.co.uk/ Wowsers – they actually stock wine gums too! For heaven’s sake, nobody tell the husband…
Culture Shock
Everyone who moves abroad expects a certain amount of what is known as ‘culture shock’: the feeling of being disorientated by the fundamental differences that surround you. All the things you have been conditioned to accept as ‘normal’ are, in fact, far from normal in your new home; 
your brain has to totally rewrite the concept of ‘normal’ according to the rules, rituals, customs and expectations of this unfamiliar, alien place. Most people anticipate the big stuff – the climate, the pace of life, how religion has shaped the culture, perhaps… But it’s the small stuff that is actually the most difficult to adjust to: the fact that a taxi ‘booking’ here is more of a foolishly optimistic plea than anything else; or that the indicators on a car are purely decorative. And I don’t think I’ll EVER get used to someone snorting, hawking and spitting their viscous phlegm – totally unapologetically – just a few inches from my feet. Par exemple.
Human beings are remarkably adaptable creatures, though, and most of the significant differences are rapidly assimilated. So much so that, on returning home, I suffer from a kind of reverse culture shock – a phenomenon I have named WEIRD! Syndrome – Wobbly Englishwoman In Repatriating Disorientation! (This reads a bit like an awful local newspaper headline, doesn’t it – perhaps for a dramatic and heart-rending story about a returning expatriate who accidentally got on the wrong bus). My first instance of feeling WEIRD! on my last trip to England was in the M&S Food shop at Heathrow, Terminal 3. For about three or four minutes I just stood there staring at the alcohol – amazed that there were bottles and bottles of it, just sitting there on the shelves! For people to buy! Dubai is, of course, an Islamic city, so if you want to drink or purchase alcohol you have to obtain an alcohol licence – which is absolutely fair enough… Obtaining the licence is a valuable and enriching cultural experience in itself (and in no way a desperately frustrating quagmire of bureaucratic bilge) involving many forms, letters of no objection from employers, tenancy contracts, passport photographs and visa photocopies. And cash. Our licence is due to expire soon, and one wonders if the occasional G&T and glass of Sauvignon Blanc is really worth the headache (of the paperwork, I mean – not the hangover. Although…). The booze shops are tucked discreetly away, attached to the back of supermarkets or malls and have blinds over the windows, heavy metal doors and bold, red warning signs. One feels that owning a year’s alcohol licence is very much the same thing as leasing your soul to the devil for a twelve month tenancy. But here, back home, and in M&S of all places – the booze was freely and fabulously for sale. I was genuinely surprised. I wanted to buy some JUST BECAUSE I COULD.
My second WEIRD! experience was on the Underground – just minutes from Heathrow – when I found myself staring at a couple who were having a bit of a snog. I felt a brief jolt of panic – What are they DOING? In PUBLIC! Are they MAD?! She was wearing a very short skirt too, which made it all the more appalling for my newly cultivated prudish persona. Revealing clothing and public displays of affection are considered immodest and insulting here in the Middle East. Holding hands is supposedly ‘tolerated’ in Dubai, but anything more intimate is offensive to local culture and can, in extreme circumstances, get you into rather hot water. It took a few seconds for my brain to register the fact that while their behaviour may have been a little indecorous and impolite (especially for the poor so-and-so squashed up right next to them), it certainly wasn’t illegal.
The Tube itself came as something of a shock – the rattling darkness, the dust, the dust-coloured mice darting about between the tracks – it all felt so gothic and archaic. Just for a moment. While I adjusted. While I remembered. Coming from a place in which just about everything is new and shiny, it takes a while to get used to the presence of old things again. (Don’t get me wrong – I like old things very much. I’m rapidly becoming one.)
I’m reminded of the feeling of returning to one’s home after a long holiday. For those first few moments when you open the front door, you see everything with the eyes of a traveller – as if you’ve never seen them before: the colour of the carpet, the arrangement of furniture and, most noticeably, the smell of the place all strike you as unfamiliar. But it only lasts for a few seconds; soon it is Home again and all these things become as wallpaper – familiar and unnoticed.
While WEIRD! Syndrome is indeed rather weird, what’s even weirder is how quickly the novelty disappears. Within a matter of hours it’s as if I’ve never been away from England, and three whole years of my life evaporate as if they had never happened. Dubai melts away in my mind like a strange dream from which I have awoken. ‘Normality’ is restored.
Et in Arcadia Ego
I found it hard to write about being back home while I was actually there. Like a painter sitting too close to my subject, I lacked perspective and context. Much of my writing about England is, of course, idealised, romanticised nonsense, and it’s very difficult to romanticise something when it’s right there in front of you; it’s frankly a bit awkward, too – like gibbering about a person’s ethereal beauty while they look you steadily in the eye. The part of my brain responsible for hopeless sentimentality (the Hallmark Greetings Card Lobe, perhaps?) obviously needs a bit of space to airbrush the flaws and add the requisite imaginative detail.
My visits home are primarily about spending time with much-missed family and friends, but they are also steeped in a selective and entirely self-indulgent nostalgia. And on this trip, not without a hint of self-irony, my chosen reading was Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. I’m my own worst enemy, I know… Just like the time when I actually ate a box of chocolates whilst watching Forrest Gump, I’m afraid it all got a bit ‘meta’… The decision I appeared to have made was to fill my thoughts with nostalgia both as an intellectual concept and literary theme whilst simultaneously wallowing in my own actual, personal nostalgia: it was a sort of experimental double-whammy, just to see if I could make my own brain implode.
Brideshead Revisited recounts the emotional entanglements between Waugh’s narrator, Charles Ryder, and the various members of the aristocratic Flyte family, starting in the golden, hazy summer days of the early 1920s. In his 1959 preface to Brideshead Revisited, Waugh all but apologises for his sumptuous, romantic prose and blames the darkness and uncertainty of the Second World War in which the novel was written:
It was a bleak period of present privation and threatening disaster – the period of soya beans and basic English – and in consequence the book is infused with a kind of gluttony, for food and wine, for the splendours of the recent past, and for rhetorical and ornamental language, which now with a full stomach I find distasteful. (Waugh, 1959)
The opulence of both content and style is at its height in Waugh’s depictions of Charles and Sebastian (and Aloysius, the teddy bear) at Oxford, drinking champagne in the morning, picnicking, getting drunk at luncheon, and dining on plovers’ eggs; or their long, dreamy, drunken summer at Brideshead, tasting wine from the cellars and painting lavish pastoral scenes on the Rococo panels of the colonnade office. One can understand why, writing from such a distant and different time, the blithe freedoms and indulgences of the past would burn so much brighter. When writing about things lost to us, we become magpies – picking out the glittering and jewelled fragments of memory.
Nostalgia and homesickness can, I think, be seen as siblings – one is temporal, the other geographical – but there are significant areas of overlap and both can make the heart ache. So I would like, if I may, to dwell on Waugh’s words of self-criticism and use them in my own defence… I’m not saying that living in Dubai is in any way like living through the Second World War (though it is, for some reason, rather tricky to get hold of a decent bunch of bananas out here), nor am I attempting to compare my own bewildered witterings with Waugh’s magnificent prose; it’s the concepts I’m interested in – the magnetic retrospective, the plaintive echo of ‘how things used to be…’, the similarity between time and place when they exist purely abstractly: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” (L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between). It’s all about contrast, separation and wanting what you can’t have. It’s about the grass being greener – whether that remembered greenness exists twenty years in the past or twenty thousand air-miles away. It may not necessarily make my occasionally saccharin prose any more palatable, but it does, I hope, make it more forgivable – the linguistic equivalent of hot, tinned chocolate pudding with custard on a lonely winter’s night, maybe.
But Waugh’s novel is much more than a languid yearning for the heady irresponsibility of youth or an elegiac Paradise Lost for the old regime. It is about profound and lasting change – and we all struggle with that at times. The themes of Brideshead Revisited are complex and, frequently, antithetical: youth and middle age; war and peace; sin and innocence; faith and agnosticism; darkness and light; drunkenness and sobriety…
Perhaps writing indulgently about the things we long for is a bit like a sort of mild, pleasant drunkenness – removing oneself ever so slightly from the here and now, blurring time a little, a romantic softening of the edges of things, simultaneously numbing and warming…
And we would leave the golden candlelight of the dining room for the starlight outside and sit on the edge of the fountain, cooling our hands in the water and listening drunkenly to its splash and gurgle over the rocks.
‘Ought we to be drunk every night?’ Sebastian asked one morning.
‘Yes, I think so.’
‘I think so too.’
Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh (1945)
Related posts:
The Rose-Tinted Glasses
Top Ten Nostalgic Puddings
Windswept and Winterstruck
So, for all my homesick yearnings and complaining about how mercilessly hot it is out here, it seems I have acclimatized after all. After three years, my internal thermostat must have recalibrated to Middle Eastern settings, because I was totally, profoundly shocked by how cold it was back home in England.
I don’t mean just “Brrrr – that’s a bit chilly;” I mean literally not caring about what I looked like so long as I was warm enough – frequently resorting to wearing all my clothes at once. Never before have I angrily ransacked my own suitcase, thinking to myself, What’s wrong with me? WHY don’t I own a balaclava? At times I had to improvise by pulling my bobble hat right down to my eyes and nestling my chin into several layers of thick jumpers. My feet were encased in so many pairs of socks that they resembled woolly trotters. Even so, my skin responded to the cold by cracking and peeling off, while my husband’s lungs went into shock and he developed some sort of wheezy, sub-zero-induced asthma. What had happened to us?
In my mind (and idealistic, highly selective memory), British spring days are brisk and blowy – showery perhaps – with brightly changeable weather and fresh, crisp air which promises warmth soon. Spring is a time of optimism: “Though April showers may come your way, they bring the flowers which bloom in May”; a season that is so energetic and cheerful it inspires (allegedly) the urge to spring clean (mercifully, I have never experienced this terrifying phenomenon).
Motivated by this entirely theoretical optimism, on one bleak, sleety morning in Rye, my husband and I set off for a walk in the beautiful Sussex countryside. It really was very cold. VERY cold. Bitter. We cut across the salt-marsh towards the sea and walked past a herd of sheep and their tiny lambs, shivering beside the ancient ruins of Camber Castle. After a few miles it started to rain and we stumbled numbly across a pub in 
which we sought refuge from the unseasonal weather. We sat beside the fire and sipped hot chocolate, watching the wind whip freezing rain against the window. We decided to walk home via the coast (I don’t know why we decided this. The cold must have dulled our powers of reason) and our spring stroll in the country somehow turned into a grey, eight-mile trudge, leaning into a frozen coastal headwind. Our hot chocolate-fuelled warmth and good humour soon faded. A grim silence fell between us as we both considered the possibility that we actually might die on the snowy wastes of Winchelsea. Like many Arctic explorers before us, we knew that there was nothing to do but keep walking. If only we’d thought to bring a team of trained huskies. We saw no one on our walk apart from one small cluster of hikers who had apparently made the same terrible mistake as us. As we passed them, we raised our eyes and looked into the blizzard, meeting the narrowed, terrified eyes that peered out from beneath their waterproof hoods.
We didn’t die. We caught a bus home. Back in the safety of our hotel room we turned the radiators up to full blast. I decided I needed a hot shower and was startled (not for the first time on this trip) by how brutally cold the water from the cold tap was; in Dubai the tap water never gets any colder than tepid. In the summer months, when the pipes are heated under the baking ground, you don’t even need to turn on the hot water to have a shower, it pours out of the ‘cold’ tap piping hot. This is of course a problem when you are desperate for cool refreshment. Last year I once resorted to putting ice cubes in the wash-basin. Sometimes I think my life has become bizarrely polarized. Back in Rye, I used the hairdryer to warm the bed up and snuggled beneath the piles of extra blankets I had asked for, at last deliciously, luxuriously warm… Until I woke in the middle of the night needing a glass of water. My husband deserves a medal for getting up and launching into the icy air for this selfless quest. He wrapped a thick dressing gown around himself and groped blindly through the frozen darkness, muttering the fatalistic words of Captain Oates – “I am just going outside and may be some time…”
One of the benefits of this unexpectedly cold weather was that it gave us an excuse to do little more with the rest of our holiday than sit in lovely pubs and tea rooms and eat delicious food and toast ourselves in front of roaring log fires. If I were to make a list of the things I miss most about home (other than friends or family of course), a log fire on a wintery afternoon would definitely be in my top ten. We gazed at the hypnotic miracle of the dancing orange flames. We sat in comfy chairs and dozed and did crosswords for hours at a time, sleepily absorbing the luxurious, crackling heat. We became experts at when it was time to ‘put a couple more logs on’. I think one pub landlord thought we had moved in, we made ourselves so much at home.
But the weather did change. One beautiful blue-skied Saturday, back home in Kent with my family, spring finally arrived. I went for a glorious walk with my brother for which neither balaclavas nor bobble hats were required (nor a team of huskies for that matter). There were the beginnings of buds and blossom on the trees. Spring flowers which had been frozen closed in a strange stasis finally decided to risk opening their petals. And high in the blue sky above us, a tiny dot of a skylark sang his little heart out with such zeal that it was as if he himself had banished the winter with his song of unalloyed joy. It seems spring is a time of optimism after all.
Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!
Bird thou never wert -
That from Heaven or near it
Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.
Higher still and higher
From the earth thou springest,
Like a cloud of fire;
The blue deep thou wingest,
And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest…
from Ode to a Skylark by Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1820
Fly Away Home
This time three weeks ago, Homesick and Heatstruck was soon to be Happily Homeward Bound. I hadn’t visited England since last summer and, while the last eight months had trotted swiftly by, it somehow felt like I hadn’t been home in years. On returning to Dubai in August, I had made the somewhat bizarre decision to fly back in my flip-flops, leaving all my warm, waterproof, closed-toe shoes at the bottom of a wardrobe in my parents’ house in Kent. I am, however, a huge fan of anticipation, meteorological diversity and occasional shopping missions, so it was with great pleasure that I followed the terrifying weather reports (Minus two and snowing! SNOWING! And it’s SPRING!) and pottered down to the nearest mall in the 35 degree heat to buy myself some fur-lined boots.
I have decided that travelling anywhere is all about the art of waiting. Airports sort of funnel you from waiting in one place to waiting in another until eventually you’re waiting to board, waiting for the plane to take off, waiting for dinner, waiting to land, waiting to disembark and waiting for your suitcase to sidle up to you on the baggage carousel like an embarrassing old acquaintance at a dinner dance. I’m getting very good at waiting. I’m an expert wait-er… waitress? Perhaps I should start a weekly support group for fellow flyers who need help with their intercontinental patience … I could call it Wait Watchers. Ahem.
As a seasoned traveller, the taxi to take-off usually sees me casually passing the time by gripping the plastic arm-rest with one sweaty hand and frantically pumping Rescue Remedy onto my tongue with the other. I don’t like take-off. I never have. I have little understanding of aeronautical engineering (let’s be honest, I have no understanding of aeronautical engineering whatsoever) and so the whole process seems highly unlikely as far as I’m concerned. I think it’s much more likely that 560 metric tonnes of aluminium alloy and fat expatriates will just hurtle obstinately along the ground and straight into the sea rather than leaping lightly into the air like a spring sparrow. In my imagination, the pilots are all crouching in the cockpit with their fingers crossed, desperately whispering “Wingardium leviosa!” But the Emirates A380 took me completely by surprise. Take off was delayed due to some startlingly incompetent and inconsiderate passengers who had checked their luggage in but then inexplicably missed the flight, so I started reading a book. A few chapters later I glanced out of the window and realised we were in mid-air. And the book really wasn’t that good. It had all happened with very little noise or fuss. I was astounded. And frankly rather impressed.
The flight passed as all flights do. I enjoyed a nice film or two, tried to doze, got cross with other people’s screaming children and went to the loo once or twice, just to check my legs still worked. The bit of a flight I most dislike is after the meal, when the trays have been collected in and they turn out the lights and turn up the heating. I don’t mind the darkness and the warmth so much, it’s just that it all gets a bit… well, farty. The woman sitting next to me had the most god-awfully stinky feet I have ever encountered, so it was never going to be an olfactory voyage of delight, but as people’s stomachs churned up the ‘gourmet’ lamb biryani and they relaxed into a post-dinner slumber, the air positively thickened with the smell. Imagine how bad it must have been for the poor devils who had to climb on at Heathrow and tidy up for the next flight. They must have needed oxygen tanks and anti-radiation goggles.
Still. None of this suffering could begin to dint my joy at returning home. I had a window seat and, as we flew up and across Europe, I gazed out of the window, watching the ground grow greener and the clouds start to gather. Over the Channel, the clouds merged and deepened. Thick, swollen pillars of cumulonimbus rose up, with occasional cauldrons opening between them – the cloudscape yellowed and darkened into shadowy wells through which I could glimpse the wintery world beneath. It was wonderfully dramatic. Landing was every bit as uneventful as take off and, before I knew it, we were on the runway and the thick oval windows were being pelted with sleet. As I moved from plane to tube to train – changing and waiting, changing and waiting – I was positively giddy with the joy of anticipation – a feeling I usually only get on a dark and sparkling Christmas Eve. The festive feeling was heightened by the icy winds and snow that greeted me as I hopped off the train that had carried me from London back to Canterbury. All that waiting had been worthwhile. I was home.
This post is for baby Tom – my brand new gorgeous godson. I would fly 4000 stinky miles for him anytime.
A Wonderland Behind Glass
I’m usually fairly cynical about the phenomenon of the shopping mall. They are, after all, very strange, entirely artificial environments, devoid of fresh air and natural daylight – coldly glittering cathedrals of consumerism. Spend long enough in a shopping mall and the advertising and displays will inevitably brain-wash you: you’ll begin to believe that there is simply nothing else to do with life except shop and eat and shop a bit more. And then get frozen yoghurt. As the temperature here starts creeping up towards its blistering summer zenith, the prospect of several months confined to the apartment, hotels and shopping malls looms before me like a sweaty prison sentence. There is, however, one thing about shopping malls that I cannot be cynical about, no matter how hard I try: I love a wonderful window display.
I don’t mean the usual arrangement of fashionably and expensively clad mannequins – they hold little interest for me (unfashionable and impoverished as I am); I mean those really beautiful, cleverly designed tableaux that take a whole week of artistic endeavour to install. The emerging theatrical secrets are hidden behind hoardings until they are ready to be revealed… And they really are theatrical – that’s why I like them. The really good designs have a lot in common with stage sets in terms of their originality and imagination, their use of colour and lighting. The Harvey Nichols displays are always worth stopping and gawping at. Last month, to mark the beginning of the Chinese Year of the Snake, the Harvey Nichols display featured a huge serpent, weaving its way through the windows and the ceiling of the entire ground floor: the audacious ambition of it was jaw-dropping (part of me always wonders how much such things must cost and what they do with the giant bits of snake afterwards…). This month’s Harvey Nichols display is about spring fashion – so the designers have created a series of windows with an edgy, urban feeling – chic, colourful clothing against an industrial corrugated iron background with huge metal springs appearing to burst through the edges of the tableaux: a playful and energetic visual pun.
The sheer scale and spectacle of these designs reminds me of the wonderful Harrods displays I used to walk past every day when I worked in Knightsbridge a few years ago. Every morning I would emerge from the dark depths of the Piccadilly line like a scruffy blonde mole. I would walk, wide-eyed, past the Harrods windows, clutching my hot, take-away cardboard cup of Earl Grey tea. Every morning, come rain or shine (usually rain, let’s face it), I felt lucky to be there – walking towards a job I loved, in the heart of London, surrounded by these beautiful tall, red-brick buildings and the tradition and opulence of Harrods and its surroundings. My favourite display was the extraordinary celebration of the 70th anniversary of The Wizard of Oz, in the winter of 2009. Harrods became an Emerald City, its distinctive high, honey-brown walls covered with squares of sparkling green lights. The windows featured fabulous scenes of Dorothy, the Tin Man and friends, showcasing Harrods’ products in all sorts of clever and artistic ways. But the best bit was at the side of Harrods, just by the Tube station: sticking out into the street were the enormous feet of the Wicked Witch of the East, shod with the iconic ruby slippers – it was as if the whole of Harrods had just plummeted through the air and squished her. It was utterly fantastic.
There’s something about the idea of a fantasy world behind glass that has always fascinated me – ever since I made my own ‘television’ with Neil Buchanan on Art Attack (it was a tissue box with a hand-drawn backdrop of some fields and a few Lego men stuck inside, with cling film stuck over the hole to make a screen). I loved creating child-sized worlds, safely contained miniature theatres, in which I could play God. I would gaze into the swirling snow of a snow globe imagining the chilly little lives of the beings that dwelt within. Our goldfish tank was a glorious fishy-fairy-tale microcosm, subject to my various eccentric, artistic whims: I would arrange the brightly coloured gravel into sweeping contours, position the driftwood and the little painted castle in an intriguing way to create secret nooks and crannies; the elodea would be planted to make a miniature forest for our beloved goldfish (Bergerac, Albery Finney, Axl, and Von Smallhausen) to explore (while Fernando the water snail was generally happy to just cruise up and down the glass, nibbling at algae). I loved sitting and watching the aquatic adventures of our boys in this watery wonderland that I had created.
Talking of wonderlands, fashion store, Étoile, currently has an extravagant Alice in Wonderland display in its windows: it is whimsical and 
delightful – featuring a huge White Rabbit, mushrooms, floating hats and flowers amongst the label’s spring fashions. Such displays are all part of the glitzy nonsense of Dubai of course, but the work of these window designers and dressers is superior to much of the superficial, showy-offy bling out here: these shopping mall displays are often beautiful and quite brilliant. In the deadening heat and silence of the UAE summer that is nearly upon us, I’ll get my glimpses of Wonderland wherever I can…
Alice opened the door and found that it led into a small passage, not much larger than a rat-hole: she knelt down and looked along the passage into the loveliest garden you ever saw. How she longed to get out of that dark hall, and wander about among those beds of bright flowers and those cool fountains, but she could not even get her head though the doorway; `and even if my head would go through,’ thought poor Alice, `it would be of very little use without my shoulders. Oh, how I wish I could shut up like a telescope! I think I could, if I only know how to begin.’ For, you see, so many out-of-the-way things had happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible…
(Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll, 1865)
Bog Blog: It’s a Matter of Convenience…
My mother’s favourite sayings about not doing housework went down rather well with readers last week (you’re clearly all just as slovenly as I am), so here’s another of her wonderful maxims that made me the woman I am today: “Never pass a toilet without using it.” Now, it’s probably sensible to take this one with a pinch of salt, particularly if you’re in a well-facilitated office or shopping mall and have things you actually need to achieve with your day – some of the malls out here have loos every fifty yards or so and if I took Mum’s advice literally it would take me all day to get from one Starbucks to the next. But the essence of the advice is very wise indeed: you’ll never be caught short if you make the most of a convenient convenience.
One is unlikely to be caught short in the average villa or apartment in Dubai. As I mentioned in a previous post about food poisoning, our two bedroom apartment boasts no fewer than four toilets. FOUR! We have two each! We can rotate or alternate, just for fun! It is a blessing not to have to decide who gets to go first on returning home from a long journey, and we don’t have to take turns in the morning when getting ready to go to work (waiting for someone else to finish in the bathroom is a desperately unique and lonely agony).
That’s the private privy, though; the public loos out here are actually quite diverse and their style depends entirely on the part of town you’re in. 
Some restaurants, parks and malls feature the traditional squatter – a horror that never fails to make the average expat recoil in utter dismay. I’ve seen many a poor woman queue up for ages only to have her anticipatory relief cruelly shattered by the sight of a perilous, porcelain hole-in-the-ground. They stop, reverse and return to the queue; their silent eye-contact seems to say, “Quite frankly, I would rather die.” Such lavatories are of course fine if you’re familiar with the procedure and have a cunning clothing strategy, but I wouldn’t usually choose to use one. Any port in a storm, though, and I have sometimes had little choice when travelling and in a bit of a tight spot… On a trip into the desert last year, the only loo available was a filthy squatter at the back of an old petrol station. I’ll spare you a detailed description of the loo itself – I’m sure you can picture something suitably stinking and medieval – but here’s a photo of the alleyway outside it… I know, I know. I should have been warned. I should have turned back. It doesn’t exactly lead one to expect a glittering palace of hygiene, does it?
I was interested to read in the UK press this week that unisex toilets are increasing their presence back home. Brighton and Hove City Council are pioneering these ‘gender neutral’ facilities for many reasons – partly to make public toilets more family friendly and partly for the inclusion of transgender individuals (for those of you with suitably poor taste, feel free to insert a pun here about coming out of the water closet…). Presumably it’s just a more economical and pragmatic approach too. I understand these arguments, and I’m sure many parents will be delighted that baby-changing facilities are no longer to be restricted to the female facilities, but – am I the only one who finds public unisex loos a bit disconcerting? I once worked in a school that had unisex staff toilets and I have to say, it was simply appalling. It’s easy to get emotive about something so personal, but it felt fundamentally wrong to be washing my hands and straightening my tights whilst standing next to my male head of department. Of course there is also the issue of dignity and privacy – again, I won’t get bogged down with unpleasant details, but, when it comes to strangers of the opposite sex, there are certain sounds and smells one simply shouldn’t have to be subjected to… My measured language here belies my true strength of feeling on the subject: inside I’m screaming, IS NOTHING SACRED?!!! In my humble opinion, unisex public loos could only work if each individual cubicle had its own hand basin and mirror, was self-cleaning, sound-proof and HERMETICALLY SEALED.
Some ‘washrooms’ in this part of the world are dazzlingly high-tech, with toilets that flush themselves, automatic taps and soap dispensers with invisible sensors and those extraordinary air-blade hand dryers that blast you dry in five seconds flat, rippling the flesh on the backs of your hands. It’s easy to get used to these modern facilities and I sometimes find myself in public toilets in Britain, waving my hands about in a vague and confused way, only to experience the extraordinary revelation that I actually need to rotate a handle or address some sort of lever in order to make water and soap happen. On flying home, the contrast between the glossy, automated loos of Dubai airport and the grubby grief-holes of Heathrow never fails to startle me. After disembarking the plane, it’s my first real taste of home and what a vile taste it inevitably is… For prodigal daughters of England and indeed travellers from foreign lands, these airport loos – with their broken locks and toilet seats, dirty floors and absence of toilet paper – are a rather sorry welcome to our green and pleasant land. The toilets on the trains as I complete my journey home are equally awful. Have any of you experienced those strange, large loos with the automatic semi-circular door that slowly rolls open to reveal the toilet within – as if it’s the top prize on Family Fortunes? The system of buttons is horribly confusing for anyone vaguely intimidated by technology, and there’s the feeling of not quite being in control… On a deeply primitive level, one likes to be within leaping distance of a door handle, lest the toilet door should suddenly fly open (is that just me?). In such loos, there is always the horrifying thought that the automatic door might just start slowly sliding open to reveal not only the Family Fortunes prize but some poor, startled punter perched atop.
I was taught to appreciate a good loo from an early age. On camping holidays as a small child, my mother and I would always pop in to inspect the facilities before we settled on a particular camp site for the night. I was never exactly clear about what our objectives were with these missions – there were no rigid criteria – but there were obviously certain complex, unwritten codes of hygiene provision that needed to be met. Many of the facilities in this part of the world would more than meet my mother’s high expectations, I’m sure. Some of the loos here are marvellously ostentatious and luxurious. The Ladies in the posh hotels are simply a joy to behold: they sparkle with gold and marble. There are huge white hand basins with shining taps, softly lit mirrors and beautiful upholstery like a prima donna’s dressing room. No soggy, sagging roller-towel dispensers; these lavish lavs have piles of soft, freshly laundered handtowels. There is something quite blissful about choosing from a range of fragrant soaps and hand creams, sitting in an armchair and doing your makeup with a place to actually put your handbag down without it getting soaked. A really good bathroom isn’t purely functional, it is a peaceful, sanitary sanctuary. Beautiful loos are to be appreciated on both an aesthetic and an anatomical level and can be a pleasure in themselves. So, dear readers, to amend my mother’s advice ever so slightly – never pass a really nice toilet without using it…
Opposite, Above and Beyond: Ponderments from a Balcony
From my fourth floor apartment’s balcony I have a spectacular view of… someone else’s balcony. In our particular part of town, the apartment blocks are packed together so snugly that, should one choose to sit on the balcony and soak up some sun (for the seventeen minutes a day when it isn’t eclipsed by other apartment blocks), one can enjoy highly entertaining, picturesque scenes of people hanging out their washing, taking in their washing, or (if you’re lucky) having a fag. What’s more, the mirrored glass of the apartments opposite allows us to observe these same fascinating happenings on the balconies above, beside and below ours.
In the evenings, when lights are switched on, we can watch the goings on in other people’s living rooms. There are so many to choose from, it’s a bit like having split-screen television where you can watch several programmes at once. Incidentally – that’s what most people are doing of course – watching television. Occasionally we see people sitting around and eating together, or children running about. We saw a couple having a big argument once. It’s all a bit Rear Window…
Growing up in Kent in the 1980s, I didn’t know anyone who lived in a property with a balcony. Balconies seemed impossibly exciting and romantic: a part of the house that is outside? That’s virtually Narnia! Balconies spoke to me of fairy tale and romance – dramatic escapes and passionate serenades, stately homes or Romeo and Juliet. After a wonderful summer holiday in Spain in 1985, balconies came to be associated in my mind with sunshine and views over the Mediterranean, and that kind of joyous, penetrating warmth that soaks right into your British bones and melts your cold, tight muscles. Balconies should be slightly tatty, with cracked marble floors and a layer of sun-bleached paint peeling away in the heat; they should be covered with ivy or attractive climbing plants such as, perhaps, wisteria or, in hotter climates, bougainvillea. They should, in my mind, be a place to sit and contemplate, to drink tea or a G&T, perhaps – a place of peace and perspective… Not a noisy, voyeuristic, dust-clad misery-shelf that represents a terrifying health-and-safety hazard for our accident-prone cat.
We used to grow plants on our balcony, but they didn’t last long. We went away for a few days in the scorching summer months and they got cooked in their pots. Like a husband left alone with a tempting sheaf of takeaway menus, plants in pots are incapable of looking after themselves. We tried growing tomatoes, but they couldn’t cope with the unnatural combination of intense heat and little direct sunlight, and the total yield of our six plants was just one small red fruit. It was so pitiful I couldn’t bring myself to eat it. It sat on the windowsill in the kitchen until it puckered, withered and died. Oh, how I long for a little bit of earth!
On the balconies of the building opposite, maids and cleaners have sneaky cigarettes and tearful telephone conversations with their families back home; they beat rugs, sweep the floor and wipe the dust from the balcony railings. When one lives in the desert, wiping the dust from the balcony railings is a task akin to the painting of the Fourth Bridge. I gave up on it long ago. “Where there’s dust, there’s peace,” my Mum always says. And peace would be lovely – but it’s horribly noisy on our balcony: the incessant churning of the generators on the building site opposite, the angry beeping of cars stuck in traffic, the screeching of tyres or revving of powerful engines. As I write this, at 6.26pm, the sun is setting, the traffic is growling and stagnating, and the call to prayer can be heard from the nearby mosque, its resonant, mystical notes soaring above the noise and the heat and the dust.
As I sat here yesterday, a scrap of paper fell onto the balcony, dropped or discarded from a balcony above. It appeared to be some sort of list written in Arabic. In my mind it was something cryptic and exciting but it probably just said: milk, eggs, washing powder. This happens all the time – bits of other people’s lives falling into ours. It’s usually disgusting bits of other people’s lives, like cigarette butts and chewing gum, but occasionally there’s something more interesting – a torn photograph and, last week, a nail file…
There aren’t many birds in this part of town. Regular readers will know that birdsong is one of the things I miss most about home. But sometimes a passing laughing dove will flap at the window, or a common myna will alight on the railing, whistling shrilly, as if to taunt the cat. She sits, rigid, on the other side of the French window, doing a silent, snarly face, opening and closing her jaw, as if she’s biting down on its jugular in her little, tigery imagination. But, because we’re so divorced from nature here (and because I’m a sentimental fool), a brief visit from a pigeon can feel ridiculously symbolic. Like a dove with an olive branch, these rare, feathery messengers tell me that there is life, there is nature, there is hope… somewhere beyond the tower blocks…
The Sheep-Brain Curry
As a child, I was a notoriously fussy eater. My catchphrase as a four-year-old, “There’s a little bit of black in it,” was stubbornly repeated when rejecting any food that was well-cooked, new, mixed up with something else or prepared with herbs or seasoning – so just about everything interesting really… (Parents of fussy children, take heart – I grew out of it, developed a taste for strong and exciting flavours, and now pride myself on being an extraordinarily hearty and adventurous eater.)
My infinitely patient parents persevered and eventually won through, though not every battle can have been an easy one: I remember the ‘escargots showdown’ when on holiday in France, that resulted in me having a disproportionately dramatic tantrum in a small restaurant. I did actually try a snail in the end and remember finding the taste quite inoffensive, but the chewy texture simply appalling. I think I sobbed and spat it out on the table… (belated apologies to my long-suffering Mum and Dad). Anyhow, our tastes change as we grow older and so, every once in a while, I would try something I had previously disliked only to find it was in fact utterly delicious. I love escargots now and will gladly gobble them down with a good glass of French wine, soaking up the garlic butter with soft, fluffy bread.
And so we go from snails to brains… For an average English girl raised on Sunday roasts, mashed potatoes, Heinz Baked Beans and garden vegetables, the sheer concept of eating something’s brain is a disconcerting one. Perhaps partly because when we use the word brain it’s almost always to do with intelligence or thinking, in a very human context (‘brain-storm’, ‘brain drain’, ‘all brawn and no brains’, ‘she’s very brainy’, ‘he’s got cricket on the brain’, ‘do you mind if I pick your brain?’, ‘I’ve been racking my brain all day’ etc…). But here I am, living in the Middle East, and there are plenty of people living in this part of the world who consider goat and sheep brain to be a delicacy. So, I plucked up the courage to try it. After all, what’s the point in living abroad if you’re going to stay in a safe little expat bubble?
The Pakistani restaurant we went to is in bustling Satwa – one of the louder, livelier, more interesting bits of Dubai – bright with neon lights and beeping, double-parked cars. The streets are packed with people and the restaurant kitchens open onto the pavements so the wonderful cooking smells – grilled meat, hot bread and spices – drift enticingly in the cool evening air. We found our friends at the restaurant, already seated at a plastic picnic table. I was expecting to see goat-brain curry on the menu, and was mildly and inexplicably disappointed to discover it was actually sheep. I know goat meat isn’t likely to spring to mind when one fancies something really tasty – I would expect it to be a bit stringy and, well, goaty – with that ripe, farmy, animally smell that strong goat’s cheese has. Nevertheless, there was no goat available – it was sheep brain or nothing. I had set my heart on brain (that’s a weird arrangement of words / bodily organs, isn’t it) and I was determined to have it, be it caprine or ovine.
As far as I am aware, I have never previously eaten anything’s brain (although I have eaten a lot of cheap beef and onion pies in the past and if those weren’t at least 60% sheep-brain / horse-meat / road-kill, I’m a duchess) so I was a little apprehensive. I think I was afraid it would still be brain-shaped… (see my photograph from last week’s post. The idea of slicing into one of those frontal lobes would definitely have been a bit 
much for me…) But I was pleasantly surprised: it looks pretty good, doesn’t it? Particularly if you tell yourself it’s actually a minced chicken or egg curry (it’s all in the mind, you know). When I picked up the first forkful I thought I was going to have to shout “Raaaaargh!!” in order to stop myself thinking about it and just put it in my mouth (like a warrior charging into battle or something), but I managed to control myself, and in it went. It was a bit like the escargot incident (although you’ll be pleased to know I didn’t spit it out on the plastic picnic table): the taste was fine, but the texture was quite upsetting. It tasted a little like chicken liver – smooth and mild with that subtle tang of iron. I mostly tasted the spices I suppose – ginger, turmeric and a lively amount of chilli; it was nice – offally good really (sorry). But the texture was unnervingly creamy and soft. I don’t think I’ve ever used the word negatively before, but I can’t think of a better one: it was silky. Eerily silky. Like a limp, moist handshake. Or a shaved cat. Or the soft voice of a psychopath. As I chewed it, there was simply nothing in the way of healthy, meaty resistance. I managed to eat a fair amount of it in the end, mixing it in mouthfuls with big chunks of chicken, buttery paratha and a delicious tarka daal (the lentils very successfully disguised the soft texture of the brain). And, strangely enough, I felt like I had achieved something.
To be honest, the worst of it came later. Oh it stayed down, don’t worry about that. But a brain burp is a dreadful thing: the ghost of silky, spicy cerebellum haunting you as you try to get on with your evening and enjoy a nice cocktail or two (I bet Hannibal Lecter never had that problem). Heavens but that brain repeated on me. Then I discovered that I had a bit of it stuck in my teeth. I panicked. “I’ve got a bit of brain stuck in my teeth!” I whispered urgently to my husband, noticing that I sounded like an oddly hygiene-conscious zombie. He bought me another drink and I managed to wash the brain completely away with a strawberry margarita. Tequila often has that effect on the brain, I’ve found.
So all’s well that ends well. I had met the brain challenge, head on, and I had not been found wanting. Are you tempted? Have a look at this Indian cooking blog for a curried goat-brain recipe: http://simplyspicy.blogspot.ae/2006/12/brain-fry.html And this BBC page features a buyer’s guide to sourcing good-quality brain in the UK (do let our top universities know if you find any – ho ho – http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/brain). Warning: the instructions for preparation are not for the faint-hearted; they utilise one of the most upsetting words in the English language: membrane (shudder). Eating brain is one thing, but preparing it myself? I don’t think so. In some ways I’m still a bit of a squeamish four-year-old…
[Apologies to my vegetarian readers for another horribly carnivorous post. I promise I’ll write about something more pleasant next week…]
Fancy trying brain curry? What’s the weirdest or most unnerving food you’ve ever eaten?
I’m so hungry I could eat a horse…
In a way we should be grateful for the current horse-meat scandal, shouldn’t we. It has made us think a bit more about the things we do and 
don’t want to eat and just how much we are prepared to pay for good food. A lot of people have started to question the ethics surrounding this whole meat-eating melee – this dodgy sausage circus, this carnivore’s chaos, if you will… In a rather thought-provoking article on The Making Progress Blues (please see link in the Blog Roll to the right), a fellow blogger raises the interesting point that the horse-meat fiasco was pretty much inevitable following years of consumers demanding more food for less money, supermarkets driving down prices, farmers and local butchers being forced out of business and unregulated overseas providers filling the resulting ‘meat-hole’ in the market (apologies for the unpleasant turn of phrase)… What did we think was going to be in a Super-Cheap’n’Nasty-Value-Discount-Family-Sized-Lasagne costing just £1.78? Wagyu fillet steak?
Blogging pals of mine in mainland Europe (namely Englishman in Italy http://englishmaninitaly.wordpress.com/ and Multifarious Meanderings http://multifariousmeanderings.wordpress.com/ ) have written about the fact that in Italy and France horse-meat is considered to be tastier and healthier than beef; Europeans are confused and amused by the British media meltdown. Well, yes. But there is of course the moral and legal issue of the misleading labelling, and the problem that potentially dangerous chemicals and hormones could have found their way into our foods through this criminal cost-cutting…
The meat we choose to eat is an emotive issue. The European media have been mocking our pathetically sentimental horror of horse-meat. And let’s be honest (my frequent references to The Wind in the Willows notwithstanding) the British do tend to anthropomorphise any hapless creature that is friendly, appealing or vaguely domesticated. Just look at Jedward.
Horses are of course integral to British rural life and our relationship with them is a long and loyal one. The coat of arms for Kent, my home county, features a prancing white horse above the motto INVICTA (undefeated or unconquered); there are several huge horses carved into the ancient chalk of England’s hills; Shakespeare’s Richard III was prepared to give his “kingdom for a horse”. From Boxer’s tragic death in Animal Farm through to Michael Morpurgo’s wonderful War Horse, our equine friends are usually portrayed in literature as noble, intelligent, faithful, beautiful creatures of great worth. But the symbolism of horses in English literature is sometimes a bit more sinister… In a weird little scene that is often cut from performances of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, shortly after the bloody murder of Duncan, it is reported that the King’s horses have become cannibalistic:
ROSS: Duncan’s horses, a thing most strange and certain,
Beauteous and swift, the minions of their race,
Turned wild in nature, broke their stalls, flung out,
Contending ‘gainst obedience as they would
Make war with mankind.
OLD MAN: ‘Tis said, they eat each other.
ROSS: They did so, to th’amazement of mine eyes
That looked upon’t.
Well, it’s all a far cry from My Friend Flicka, isn’t it. British writers seem to be interested in using horses to portray mankind’s darker side – our fear, our cruel and violent instincts, our madness: have a look at Peter Shaffer’s Equus or The Rain Horse by Ted Hughes… There must indeed be a strange and complex connection between horses and the British psyche; these disturbing tales just wouldn’t work if they were about goats. Or pigs.
What about pigs, I hear you cry? Pigs are clever creatures too – just a bit more… comical. Following a childhood obsession with E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web and Dick King Smith’s The Sheep-Pig, one might have thought that I’d never be able to stomach a bacon sandwich. Believe me, one couldn’t be further from the truth. Of course, bacon can be a bit tricky to lay one’s greedy hands on over here. As it’s a Muslim country, few restaurants serve it and most shops don’t sell it; those that do are legally obliged to set aside a separate, secret part of the store as the ‘Pork Room’. I get a ridiculous little thrill as I wheel my trolley through the plastic curtains of a clandestine pork emporium.
We have a fascinating mixture of cultures here in the UAE, and a correspondingly fascinating variety of meats available… A restaurant in the older part of town near the Creek serves camel burgers (which I imagine to be a bit tough and goaty… They may well be delicious of course. One day I will eat one and will tell you all about it. I promise), and the unexpected selection of body parts for sale in my nearby Lulu’s Hypermarket never fails to astound me. Their fridges frequently feature delicacies such as lamb’s testicles, cow’s feet, and sheep or goat brain. And people actually buy them. Willingly! Their mouths watering with anticipation! (I expect.) As you can see in this photograph – the brains are quite reasonably priced (10.80 AED is about £1.93) and could probably feed a large family… Hmmm. Perhaps the UK supermarkets should have a change of direction and start stocking some of these honestly labelled unusual animal bits, rather than persisting with their deceitful discount brands and flogging the proverbial (and not so proverbial) dead horse.
Post Script:
Little did I know when I photographed this sheep brain that the moment was more than just a meeting of minds: at a Pakistani restaurant last night, this brain and I had a date with destiny (and a rather nice daal)… Tune in next week to read about my encounter with The Sheep-Brain Curry.
