2024 Round up

After a frankly quite challenging 2023 which involved the loss of my Father and Father in law, 2024 was a chance to re-charge batteries although it also signalled some fairly major changes in life-style most notably V’s successful navigating her A levels and heading off to the UK to University and E moving back to the England as well to see more of her Mother and to help E to settle in. A also switched courses to doing an MSc, so all change!

In consequence, after the big Summer holiday recounted in earlier posts, I returned to Dubai on my own and - apart from a trip to Amsterdam for work where E and I managed to catch up in November and a trip back for the Christmas holidays spent in Bristol and Kent - it has mainly been about work for the last part of the year with some cycling thrown in for good measure (mainly the Spinneys build up rides and my weekly visits to the Mountain Bike trails at Mushrif Park).

The Summer holiday was obviously a major highlight although the lead up was quite stressful as I tried to plan for being away from the Office for a couple of months - re-allocating cases and reassuring clients that I was contactable if necessary. If that was not sufficient to raise my blood pressure then deciding that given the forthcoming reduction in numbers at home (and the escalating rentals in Dubai generally), we would also move to smaller premises also lent a certain frisson of excitement  to the Summer plans.

It is fair to say that our initial foray into the property market was not very successful (mainly I suspect due to my somewhat unrealistic budget and dabbling with moving back towards the seaside) - the contrast between our last move (some 7 years ago - where we relocated from near to the beach to the desert close to the kids school) could not have been more pronounced - pre-Pandemic there was no shortage of larger individual villas at relatively reasonable rentals whereas now there were plenty of new but very small places with no gardens and eye-watering prices.

In the end, we found somewhere relatively close by to our old place (actually closer to the the kids old school and near to where some friend’s of ours live)  - still expensive but a reasonable size (although as it turned out not sufficiently large to fit in our various possessions even after some downsizing) and in a nice quiet area.

Work wise - and apart from the challenges of reorganising my caseload due to the sabbatical - it has been very busy with expansion across the Middle East - including after much to-ing and fro-ing with the powers that be - into KSA and the first part of the year included a couple of trips to Saudi and my first trip back to Hong Kong for nearly 10 years (which also took in a trip to Beijing). 

The HK leg of the trip was particularly memorable as it coincided with a typhoon which certainly brought back some (dampish) memories of our 6 years there! Not a huge amount seems to have changed in the interim in terms of people although politically it is a very different place than the one I left in 2009.

I also managed a work trip back to London for the first time since the pandemic ended and was able to combine that with a trip to Kent so the Summer period was particularly busy with A levels for V. and moving/sabbatical planning.

In addition to doing her A levels and planning a move to the UK, V turned 18 -  a birthday that coincided with our River Cruise which I think pleased her - normally the timing means we are en route either to or from holiday destinations so at least part of her birthday (as she has continually reminded me over the years) has been spent in the air - the fact (as I remind her) that she usually gets to spend her birthday in two countries does not seem to be of great consolation to her). The added advantage of a birthday on the Cruise was that the staff made a huge fuss (V being by some distance the youngest person on the boat) so her 18th was greeted with cakes and song. 

Relocating to UK and living among students was I think something of a culture shock for V which has taken a little while to get used to. However, she seems to have made lots of friends and is enjoying her course (after much debate and applications to various different courses including Liberal Arts and Linguistics she has embarked on a Fine Art degree) and she also found time to take no less than three roles in the end of term Shakespeare Society production which we all thoroughly enjoyed when we picked her up for the Christmas holidays.

Having decided to switch to an integrated Masters degree, A has also been hard at it this term although fortunately he is studying very close to V so we were able to bring them both back to Kent at the same time for the first part of the Christmas holidays.

A seems to be contemplating a PhD once he finishes his MSc so we shall see where that takes him.

That pretty much brings us up to date - prior to us all heading to Bristol for Christmas with E’s Mother and then  back to Dubai for the New Years,  E and I managed to have a day in London with A whilst we were back in Kent  - in the afternoon we saw the “Monet and the Thames” exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery in Somerset House before we headed down to the O2 Arena to see Paul McCartney -  another very sprightly Octogenarian (there seems to be a theme this year for the live acts I have seen ….) - who absolutely smashed it out of the park in front of 20,000 fans. 

It was my first time seeing him live and although his voice did struggle a little on the higher notes he was absolutely captivating. I have always been a massive Beatles fan and he did not disappoint with a wide selection of old favourites as well as some of his better known Wings tracks including a spectacular rendition of Live and Let Die during which the below pictures were taken.

Summer Tour London to Dubai

 The last leg of our long Summer break involved a visit to London to the Van Gogh “Poets and Lovers” Exhibition at the National Gallery (a chance to see some of the companion pieces to the works we had seen in US and Japan); a few days in Kent including some golf at Leeds Castle and then a trip down to Bristol to catch up with E and V (via Guildford to see Micheal Palin in his “There and Back” tour  publicising his latest book of Diary entries) before heading back to Dubai. 

Considering that he is 82, MP is remarkably spry (although the picture below does not really do him justice) and it was a very entertaining evening. As noted elsewhere on this blog, it was he who inspired me to keep my own daily Journal starting in 2021 (he started in 1969…) which has provided a degree of competition/battle for content with this Weblog but which has provided a valuable reference point for the main topic for this year’s November post a day (now extended in January…).

By way of comparison I also went to see Joanne Lumley performing a similar type of retrospective travel/film/book show when I arrived back in Dubai. Although only a few years younger than MP, JL was similarly lively and engaging and whilst very different personalities, their career trajectories and themes (TV/film/Travel shows) are very similar and of course both now have the status of national treasures.

Probably quite fitting to end the big Summer tour watching two doyennes of the TV travel show genre recounting their memories. Whilst our own trip did not exactly follow the original plan (and hopefully V and E will have a chance to visit Japan again at some point) it was lovely to be able to spend some time with all the family on the river cruise early in the Summer and to have a chance to see so much of A in Japan and the US. 

My last “World tour” with E in 1999 involved a journey in the other direction - starting in Brazil and taking in Ecuador, Peru, Chile and Argentina in South America before heading to New Zealand and Australia and returning to UK via Singapore. This trip was probably less ambitious but just as fun and I cannot wait to do it again!

Summer Tour - New York to London

Our last day in the US was spent ticking off the last couple of sights to see including a trip up the Empire State Building which once again allowed Manhattan to show off it’s photogenic best in the late Summer sunshine.

We were also able to spend a bit of time in some of the less touristy NY attractions including the Horological Society offices (A is big into his watches) which happened to be across the way from our hotel and was located on the third floor of a much more traditional  high rise including  a lift with a metal grate door and less high tech staircase than the ESB.

Also on the same road as our hotel was the Algonquin Hotel - a favoured watering hole for the likes of Dorothy Parker and other luminaries of the NY literary smartset during Prohibition-era America. A and I there enjoyed a couple of cocktails (which NY bar-tenders do very well although at remarkable expense) and a burger amongst the wise-cracking ghosts (as well as taking in some of the feedback from the recent Trump/Harris TV debate) before completing our packing for the trip to London.

I really enjoyed New York despite myself. It was definitely noisy (and had a distinctly “grassy” smell) but undoubtedly had a buzz about it and the Museums and art galleries were definitely on a par with London and Paris - we had managed a quick look around NY’s MOMA on our last afternoon and saw some excellent Dali, Picasso and Mondrian (the latter appeared to have been very much taken to the hearts of New Yorkers during his brief sojourn here during World War 2). Would very much like to return.

Summer Tour - New York Part 3

Coming rapidly to the end of the North American part of our tour, A and I took full advantage of the touristic opportunities that NY offers including a day exploring Hudson Bay, Liberty Island and Ellis Island courtesy of the Statue City cruises.

Having wrestled with the myriad offers of tours around the Statue of Liberty from various providers, we ended up catching our ferry from Battery Park on Manhattan Island on another beautiful summer’s day. 

Despite the airport style security check we were able to board our 11:15am sailing without a hitch and spent a glorious couple of hours sailing across Hudson Bay firstly to Liberty Island where we walked up to Liberty’s crown and explored the two museums telling the story of the fund-raising and construction of the Statue in France before transportation to New York in 1886; and then on to Ellis Island where the Immigration centre had been sympathetically restored and the Audio tour/Ranger tour (which we managed to tag on to) gave a fascinating (and quite moving) insight into the history of America’s role in providing opportunities for a new life for European, Middle Eastern and Asian settlors.

The views towards the shores of the Hudson River towards New York City and to New Jersey were striking and A and I then enjoyed a brisk walk back from Battery Park, via Wall Street to Brooklyn Bridge before catching the subway to Grand Central Station - very much a cathedral among train stations as the below photo shows.

Having braved the Subway once, we then took it again in the evening heading to the Yankees Stadium in the Bronx for the game against the Boston Red Sox. It was our first baseball game and whilst I cannot pretend to be very clear about the rules, the game ended very satisfactorily in victory for the NY Yankees  - terrific atmosphere and an interesting insight into US sporting culture.

 

Summer Tour - New York Part 2

As promised, some further bonus posts from our Summer trip.

One of the real discoveries made during our Summer tour was the opportunities provided by the free tours offered by some of the Museums/Art Galleries we visited. 

I guess I had been vaguely aware that these were available but for some reason I had always contented myself with  an audio guide or printed programme - probably so that I could view the exhibits at my own pace (I am notorious for taking my time going through museums to get full value….). 

In any event, our visits to the New York Metropolitan Museum and the National History Museum - a highlight of our visit to New York- were distinguished by the enthusiasm and passion for their chosen subjects by the various tour guides we encountered. I think that I had seen the tours at the Met advertised when I had booked the tickets (the fact that the banner said “free tours” was always likely to grab my attention) and I had booked A and I on for the first tour of the morning that we went. 

This entailed a relatively early start (we had decided on a traditional waffles/pancakes/bacon breakfast at the nearby by Red Flame Diner) and - due to the ongoing traffic congestion in NY - a half hour walk in the glorious New York sunshine from the Hotel via a beautifully lit Central Park.

There were only 3 others on the guided tour - entitled “Greek Portraits” - and the elderly lady who conducted us through the striking funerary portraits in the Egyptian  sarcophagus section (slightly counter-intuitively given the title of the tour) and then on through the Japanese/Chinese rooms before finishing up in the European section with a terrific Caravaggio depicting St Peter’s denial of Christ proved both entertaining and erudite. 

We were sufficiently impressed to sign up for two further tours  - an “Impressionism/Post- Impressionism”  tour (again with a surprisingly low number of participants - less than 10 including  me and A) that took in the Met’s expansive collection of Monet, Van Gogh, Manet, Degas and Renoir; and then the “Museum Highlight’s” tour which also included  Chinese ceramics and a truly splendid “Bacchanal: Fawn teased by Children” by an 18 year old Bernini and a portrait of the “power couple” of the French revolutionary period - the Lavoisiers at a table with their scientific equipment by David  (although sadly not so influential that Mr Lavoisier was able to avoid the guillotine in 1794). This left an awful lot of the Met unexplored (although we did manage to take in its Vermeers) and so we will need to return!

The following day we paid a visit to the Natural History Museum on the opposite side of the Central Park and again took full advantage of the various free tours (although they were much more crowded than those at the Met). A much younger crowd and unsurprisingly very similar to the UK Natural History Museum (including the Blue Whale)  - we headed off after lunch to go to Broadway for the “Back to the Future” Matinee which was quite the spectacle - reasonably faithful to the film (albeit now a musical) and some excellent effects and afterwards headed back to the Hotel via St Patricks Cathedral and Rockefeller Plaza.

 

Summer Tour - New York

As promised, some bonus posts to finish off our Summer adventures. 

Our last major stop prior to heading to UK was New York  - another city that I had not previously visited. 

To be honest, I had not been in a great hurry to make its acquaintance - not quite sure why as it is clearly a globally renowned City with world-class museums and a storied cultural heritage. It does however have a certain reputation for “in your face” self regard, so the jury was out when we arrived. 

As matters turned out, we had a blast. 

The hotel was very well located on West 44th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues. As a consequence, and due to the severe traffic restrictions caused by the 9/11 Memorial day preparations, we did a lot of walking around Manhattan as we were within around 20 - 25 minutes of Central Park and most of the major attractions.

In consequence most of our trips took us past Radio City (see photo below - we were a week or so too early to see Ringo Starr) and Times Square.

Our first full day coincided with my birthday and what better way to celebrate than with a bike ride around Central Park? The Park was framed by a beautiful blue sky and every where you looked was like being a film set - huge skyscrapers framed by a deep blue sky and the greenery of the park lit up by the Summer sun. I had also not realised there was some much water in Central Park - including a reservoir that provided some great views across to the towers and brownstones ringing the park. 

After a celebratory picnic amongst the squirrels (and it must  be said, rats) of Central Park, A and I made our way to the art deco splendour of the Guggenheim Museum. I have to say I am not much one for Architects but Frank Lloyd Wright was definitely on to something when he put this place together - somehow combining impressive scale with the intimacy required when viewing a collection of truly lovely artworks. Definitely a highlight amongst a tour of great museums and artworks.

We dined at NOBU - another destination that was new to me  and we were suitably impressed before ending up at the Hotel bar for a nightcap to round off a splendid day.

Summer Tour - San Francisco to New York

 We did not have very long in San Francisco but we did manage to visit the Modern Art Museum which had some interesting sculptures as well as a focussed. - if not especially large - collection of paintings. 

I must admit I have never been a particular fan of modern art in the Jackson Pollock/Mark Rothko sense but  on this trip I was  - despite my best efforts - appreciating it rather more than I had previously - particularly the use of colours and form (although I still find that I have to concentrate very hard to make much sense of some of it…..).

The museum itself was a very modern affair and had an excellent outdoor space where some of the sculptures were housed to good effect next to the dazzling glass and concrete and blue skies of downtown SF.

We also managed to book tickets to see Alcatraz. I had been before on my previous visit but A was keen to see it and it did not disappoint. The journey by ferry to it remains one of the most scenic in the World and the guided tours and audio guides provided really bring it to life. It helped that the sun was shining brightly which took some of the rough edges off the fact that it used to be a high security prison with no successful escapees - see photos below including A the sole occupant of a very blustery exercise yard. 

One added bonus was the unexpected purchase of a cycling top with the Golden Gate Bridge depicted in bright colours which was on sale in the Alcatraz visitor shop (and in fact was in the discounted items rack so presumably the other visitors may also have thought that this was a rather unusual item to have in a prison gift shop). Even better was that I found one that actually fitted me and I have been wearing it on my rides around Dubai ever since.

Our route back to the hotel took in various Cathedrals and also Chinatown which allowed us to take some photos showing just how steep the roads are in San Francisco.

Our last night in SF was celebrated in the Hurricane Bar in the depths of the Hotel - apparently something of an institution in the Fairmont and reached along a corridor displaying photos of every incumbent US President on their visit to the Hotel since 1907 when it was completed (apparently a mandatory obligation on any trip to San Francisco) as well as quite graphic pictures of the hotel and surrounding areas after the devastating earthquake and fire in 1906 shortly before it was due to open.

The centrepiece of the Hurricane Bar was a boat in what presumably used to be the main hotel swimming pool in which the resident band played a selection of popular songs - despite the rather cheesy decor (and the rain pouring from the ceiling at the end of each set) it was a really buzzy nightspot and we both had a good time.

Our journey from West Coast to East Coast was uneventful (save for having to unpack and repack our bags at checkin due to being over the weight allowance which was very strictly enforced  - we had actually weighed the bags beforehand but using the 23kg limit referenced on the American Airlines website rather than the 50lbs that was being applied by the check in staff which seemed to make all the difference…..) with our first glimpse of Manhattan being a nighttime view (see photo below).

So we have reached the last day of post a day November but due to my bad timing I have not yet managed to complete my exposition on our round the world trip in the Summer so there may be some bonus posts to complete the record - stayed tuned!