Apple Mac

I bought an apple macbook recently - or more accurately, talked the company into buying it for me. I became an apple zealot in about 5 minutes. It's easy to use. It just works. ALL the time. With no software downloads at all I can synchronise my Palm PDA, my Sony Erriccson phone and the apple contacts/calendar sytem with the click of one button. Worked first time. No setup, no hassles. My one big regret? I didn't do this years ago.

The mosques here are amazing. This is one of the bigger ones in Ras al Khaimah. There are literally hundreds of them - I counted 14 within hearing distance of my house. And all of them sing the call to prayer at 4:30 in the morning... it's going to be strange to hear church bells if I move away from here. I have so much more to learn from this culture..

All the fuckwits are here..

I've just gone throught the blogs here, and all the people i liked to chat to on the mweb blogs are now here. This is brilliant, tomorrow will have my last blog entry on mweb....just wish i could download all my blogs. There's a lot of history there.

Those were the days..

In my undergraduate years I was a dronkgat student. How I ever passed my exams and persuaded them to give me a BSc for drinking I don’t know. The Pig ‘n Whistle in PE (yes, there is one of those in every town) was in the basement of a hotel on the beachfront. It was a dingy dirty sleazy place, and on a Friday night it would take you at least 20 minutes to get to the bar, unless you were such a regular that you were personal buddies with all the guys working there. There was always a one man band playing in a corner – they seemed to change them every three months or so.

I went back a few years later to do a post grad degree. After the army, after working on the gold mines. The pig was still the same, except the girls were so young. I remember going there one evening just before closing time. I’d gotten to know the guitar man quite well by then, we were about the same age, we’d both grown up in East London. And his last song of the evening was a Crosby Stills and Nash song..

When you see the Southern Cross for the first time,
You understand now why you came this way,
'Cause the truth you might be runnin' from is so small,
But it's as big as the promise, the promise of a coming day.

I still remember the moment. We looked at each other and nodded. Most of the people hadn’t even heard of Crosby Still and Nash, and many were pissed off cuz it wasn’t a rock song that ended the evening.. But for some reason it’s one of those songs that has stuck in my head all these years..

A feast for one..

Ali flies choppers for the air force. As a sideline he has some water tankers that supply our labour compound with drinking water. His brother got married on Thursday. I was invited, but for various reasons couldn’t attend. So Ali promised to send a plate of food around…

I get a call at about lunch time from reception, telling me they’d put the food on the boardroom table. There wasn’t one plate of food. There were two. The first was a bowl of fruit, about half a metre in diameter. Must’ve weighed about 20 kilo’s. The second plate was even bigger. It was a metre in diameter (I actually measured it). The base layer was a bed of spiced rice, about 15cm thick. On top of it, the meat. One whole roast goat (hooves, tail, head teeth, roasted eyeballs – the whole goat). Next to it, half a camel (ok ok, I exaggerated a little bit – there were four joint knuckles. But they each weighed about 5 kilos). How the fuck am I supposed to eat all of this by myself? I tried – the camel meat is delicious. I had one knuckle. And nibbled on the goat, cuz by that time I was well and truly full. I gave the camel joints to the two Jack Russels at home, who spent the rest of the weekend growling at anyone who came within ten metres of their bones. The goat? I gave it to the guys in the compound. It lasted about five minutes..

A new beginning..

Right. My new blog. Welcome. I've wanted to use blogger for a while, now Mel & Guy have made the move easy. More shit to follow..