Weekend round up

Another packed weekend in Al Safa. On Thursday night Dad, J and I went to the tennis stadium to watch the first rounds of the Dubai World darts tournament. Plenty of razzamataz and crowd participation with lots of cheering and music to accompany the players to the oche. We actcually saw some very good darts being played despite the breeze (apparantly this was one of the first tournaments to be played outside) with all the top players in town to compete for the US$50,000 first prize. The crowd grew increasingly raucous as the evening progressed (a quite lot were in fancy dress) with mexican waves and general merriment. Phil "the Power" Taylor was (much to his disgruntlement) knoced out in the first round) but it was very good fun and I also ran into oene of my cleints.

It was the last day of Church School on Friday so we had a half a proper lesson and then a 'boys v girls' quiz on some of the things that had been covered during the year. The acoustics in the classrooms are very poor - every scrape and banging of desks is accentuated so by the time we came to the denouement of the quiz it sounded as if there was a riot going on. The boys won fairly convincngly although there were some questions raised regarding the marking system used for some of the boys' papers!

It has been an interesting year teaching the class - having not done this kind of thing before it is difficult to know whether this was an especially lively class or whether teaching 9/10 year olds is always like this! Certainly having help with the crowd control from E. and J was absolutely critical and during the occasional lesson when I was left to my own devices, keeping everyone on track was pretty demanding.

For Friday lunch we went to Galleries Lafayete in Dubai Mall. The food Court their is very good with CHinese, Italian, general buffet and Spanish - I particulaly like the tapas (Gambas al Ajicco is recommended) and there is a play area which is done up like a little French village which the kids really enjoyed (although at AED80 a go they needed to!).

The afternoon revolved around BBQ preparations and swimming - still a reasonably cooling breeze but in the direct sun it is hot - and the water was fairly warm. I decided to be a little more adventurous with the food for the BBQ and so did a couple of tuna steaks with a soy/sugar marinade and broke the bank with a couple of lobster tails for which V. and I prepared a lemon/olive oil/garlic marinade - I found a recipe on an Australian food website which also had an accompanying video which was very helpful in terms of cooking the lobster tails (slit the shell lengthwise and cook on the soft side for 6 minutes and then shell side for 6 minutes on a high heat). It worked a treat (at AED190 per kilo, it needed to....).

We also spent a good deal of the afternoon on the telephone to various lawyers and estate agents trying to push through E's parents house sale. What a carry on! After several days of being assured everything would be done before the deadline for exchange on Friday there was a day of increasingly tense discussions with the various interested parties (developer, lawyers, estate agent etc.) before everything finally clicked into place just in time. It certainly made the BBQ more celebratory and the lobster tails in particular were delicious.

Saturday started as usual with the football and cricket at Safa Park. The kids enjoyed their cricket with V. captaining the winning team and A. bowling the other sides last man with 2 more runs to win (and taking a spectacular catch) so they were happy. Although there was still a little breeze it was much hotter than last week so footy was hard work - although I did manage to score this week (and Dad happened to be watching which was nice - I am not sure he could quite believe it!).

After a quick shower we then drove to Deira to meet some friends for a Dim Sum lunch. We do not go across the creek very often and part of the reason is the traffic - the Al Shingaha tunnel was chaotic and we were nearly 25 minutes late (it did not help that the directions to the hotel were fairly "high level" and it transpired that there were around 5 other hotels on the route that shared the same name). We did everntually find it and had a very enjoyable afternoon with K, J, and their kids as well as D. The food was OK - the dim sum lacked a bit of varety but the buffet was fine and the total cost was around AED70 each for the 11 of us.

Last night was spent at the Al Manzil Hotel watching the Heineken Cup (Leicester beating Northhampton) and the Eurpoean rugby final between Ulster and Leinster (Leinster winning). Both were good games and we also saw some of the England -v New Zealand cricket with Joe Root scoring his maiden test century at his home ground in Headingly.

This morning was an early start as we all went to the kids school to see A. get his Congratulations award for his work during science week - he prepared an experiment on paper aeroplanes to see whether the size of the paper made any difference to the distance they travelled - it doesn't - it is all about aerodynamics) and it was nice to see how pleased he was to get an award in front of his parents and Grandfather.

Gentlemen, please put your pens away and hand up your completed papers....

It is that time of the year again - exam season, and A and V are both doing SATs related tests at school. I will always assocaite exams with the early Summer - that time of year when the weather in England had finally relented sufficiently to allow more time to be spent playing football or other games outside but by cruel timing, also coincided with the need for frantic revision and long hours spent racking brains and frantically scribbling over reams of paper (I was always of the opnion that quantity of answer was much more prefereable to quality...).

I cannot clearly remember when I statrted to do exams (or tests)but it would probably have been at the end of primary school - they seem to start the kids a lot earlier these days given that V. is only 6. However, for me things only really started to get serious at O level stage. I seem to recall we did one of the English O levels (English language) a year before the main O levels but I can still recall the elaborate "revision" schedules that I prepared which gradually became more cluttered as time started to ebb away and I gradually realised how much work I would actually needed to do to be anywhere near ready to do the exam. I still get bad dreams about waking up the morning of an exam knowing that there was no way I would be able to revise everything that I needed to have learnt. Very unpleasant.

From around the ages of 15 to 19 exams were a fairly constant Summer companion (and at Law School, Winter as well). I do not miss those days at all. In fact after qualifying, I said that I would never do another exam. However, when I went to HK I had to do a conveyancing exam - nightmare (I used to hate landlaw in any event) so I found myself some 15 years after my previous exam, picking up my pen in anger again - although nowadays I imagine that it is mostly done on a PC.

A bit of a catch up....

So, after a 6 month hiatus, this blog is cranking into life again. Having looked back at my history over the last 3 years or so it seems that I have bursts of creativity during the November "blog post per day" challenge which (despite never actually managing to achieve that level of productivity) seems to exhasut any desire I have for publishing until the next time it comes around a year later. I thought that perhaps if I tried to spread my posts around the calander a little more I would actually manage to post more frequsntly. So here goes...

My usual excuse for non-posting - too much on at work - was very much in evidence again certianly up until Easter when I was involved in a couple of very big projects - one of which had pretty much fully occupied me for nearly a year. Fortunatley things are little quieter now so I can provide a recap of the last six months. Christmas was spent here in the Desert with my Father and the in-laws which was fun (and fortunately the sun kept shining).We also had a visit from my Sister and her family in February which involved visits to the beach and much fun and games for the kids with their cousins. We also had one of our old Hong Kong friends (K) to stray for the Dubai World tennis and we managed to catch quite a lot of the Men's action including Nadal's win in the final. Will definitely do it next year although the application lottery over the internet was something I could have done without!

We went back to the UK for Easter and my Father's 80th birthday. Apart from the bitter cold, it was nice to be home not least because of Dad's birthday party which saw a huge number of old friends, schoolmates and of course family gathered together. We masssively overcatered on the alcohol so there will be plenty to drink when we go home for the Summer. Apart from finally getting to put faces to the names of some of the people Dad has been telling stories about over the years, it was also a chance to catch up with some family who we do not usually see. This included D and F, two distant cousins who are very close to my age and who we would occassionally see as children but whose base in the West Country meant that we have not seen them for over 30 odd years! We also caught up with my Counsin Cris and his wife who we last saw at their wedding a couple of years ago, and of course the Irish contingent were out in force. Dad and his Cousin J (currently staying with us on route to the rugby in Hong Kong next week which I got for dad's birthday present) were watching the video from the party last night and seemed to enjoy the party as much on film as they did in real life!


Amongst the other "projects" from the last couple of months is trying to buy a house in Bristol. This has been something of a rollercoaster ride and we are still trying to push it over the line as we try to exchange contracts. One thing I have managed to finalise is the Summer holidays. We are having a bit of a tour of Europe this year. Starting in L'Escala (as last yar) we are then in UK for a few days and then going to Ireland for some time at K's place in Killarney and then off to Castletownbere for the regatta and then home for a few days in blighty before returning to the Middle East.

That's it for the moment. Hopefully more soon.

Post Script

Having mentioned my earlier post about bedtime stories for the kids to E., she reminded me that my Father used to tell my Sister and I bedtime stories when we were young which were thematically very similar. It is certainly true that the “Three Caterpillars” owe a significant debt both in terms of plot and characters to my Father’s “Three Rabbits” stories - Trixy, Mixy and Wixy who used to burrow under the fence at the bottom of their garden into the Magic Forest beyond. In the Forest lived Giant Hog, a huge ogre who the Three Rabbits basically spent a lot of time teasing and trying to steal his gold or food and in return Giant Hog spent a great deal of his time chasing after the Rabbits so he could put them in his cooking pot for tea! Usually the story would end with the Three Rabbits escaping from Giant Hog by sliding under the fence back into their garden just in time for their Mother to call them inside for tea. I must ask my Father what inspired these stories!

Apres la deluge

The 7s was, as always, great fun but this year it was particulaly memorable as a result of the torrential downpour that occurred on the Friday afternoon. I have never seen weather like it in Dubai in the three years I have lived here.

The morning was a little overcast but intermittantly sunny and we had strolled around the ouside pitches taking in the atmosphere. On our way past the Dubai Big Bus Tour exhbit we were offered some rain ponchos. Bearing in mind that the sun was shinning at this point we were in two minds whether to further clutter up our pockets but in the end I can never resist the temptation when offered free stuff and we all took one. Good move. A couple of hours later the first curtain of rain gradually enveloped the desert around the stadium obscuring Dubai's skyline in the distance and then working its way across the pitch to the DHL stand where we were sitting (under the covered bit although as it transpired the roof was to keep the sun rather than the rain out..). It tipped it down for about an hour and continued to rain on and off for the rest of the afternoon/evening. It was perhaps not as wet as the "caught in a waterfall" monsoon that occasionally we would expereince in HK days but nevertheless, having only experienced a few drizzly days in the past three years of lving in the desert, this was something else entirely and it took a great deal of explaining to my friend A who was on holiday here to escape the English Winter that, certanly in my experience, this was very unusual. Fortunately the Big Bus rain ponchos were incredibly effective so only the lower parts of me that were not covered got very very wet - it was also still warm so we avoided freezing to death and were able to continue to watch the rugby now being played on a somewhat sodden pitch.

The Saturday was fine with plenty of sunshine and I took E. and the kids in the morning (A. distinguishing himself at the Range Rover exhibit by throwing a rugby ball between two sets of tyres to win himself a ball - more than I and most of the other adults taking part were able to do) and they had fun running around like lunatics on the grass banks around the outside pitches and hurling themselves down the "ski slope" (in fact the "snow" was tiny polysterene balls which got absolutely everywhere). In the afternoon I was being enteratined in the corpoate boxes which was fun so all in all an excellent, if unexpectedly damp, weekend of rugby.

Rugby 7s

Off to the 7evens Stadium tomorrow for the annual rugbyfest. It is always an enjoyable event so looking forward to catching up with some friends and being entertained on the pitch. The Dubai leg of the 7s tour is a real family event - probably more so than Hong Kong as the main pitch is surrounded by smaller pitches outside the main seating areas and you can watch the local clubs battling it out from the grassy banks and the kids can run around and play on the bouncy castles or have their faces painted. Whilst there are plenty of kids at Hong Kong stadium, the main thrust of the event is more focussd on their parents having a bit of a party and the younger attendees to dress up and get riotuosly drunk in the South Stand (which is not to say that ther is quite a party at the Duabi 7s)!

I wanna tell you a story....

Over the years, “the Three Caterpillars” have been a regular feature of both kids ”literary” diet. It started off as a bed time story for A. when he was very little (probably around 3 years) and featured Alex, Mia and Joe as three caterpillars in constant battle with “Captain Stubble – the naughtiest pirate on the Spanish Maine”. The idea for a Caterpillar to star in the story possibly came from the “hungry Caterpillar” story which was a favourite with the kids or a project that A. had been doing at kindergarten.

I think one of the earliest stories was the tale of Alex the Caterpillar going out into the snow and getting lost with his parents only being able to tell where he was by the little ridge of snow that marked his progress as he walked around the garden. I think this may have been inspired by a Tom and Jerry cartoon and certainly in the early days, the stories mainly involved Alex the Caterpillar’s adventures around the Enchanted Forest where the caterpillars lived in a treehouse on a branch at the top of a huge Oak tree. In the early years Alex was the main character and generally he shared his adventures with Mia and Joe (Mia named after a real life friend of A’s in Hong Kong at the time who was moving to Singapore so I guess it was a way of remembering her ). I am not sure where Joe came from but by coincidence a couple of years later A. and V.’s cousin was born and was named Joseph so the name has stuck. Captain Stubble made his appearance a short time after we started to tell the stories and there were various other pirate characters including Captain Bluebeard who was a friend of the three Caterpillars (and a “good” pirate) and Captain Pink (sometimes Captain Bubble) who made an appearance after V. was born so that we had a new female character.

Most of the early stories involved the Three Caterpillars helping injured animals (usually a tiger or lion with a thorn in its foot) or thwarting Captain Stubble’s plans (usually after he had stolen something or kidnapped one of the Caterpillars). The locations for the stories were usually the Enchanted Forest, “The Harbour” in Harbour town in the Enchanted Forest where Captain Stubble (and Captain Bluebeard) kept their pirate ships or Dinosaur Island where Captain Stumble had his secret hideout. Dinosaur Island as might be expected usually contained some dinosaurs who were either trying to chase/eat the Caterpillars or had injured themselves (usually a thorn in the foot again which the Caterpillars extracted thereby earning everlasting friendship with the injured dinosaur).

Over the years the number of characters gradually expanded to included a baby caterpillar called Verity and included a number of incidental characters. Among the regulars we had Professor Branestrawn, Alex and Verity Caterpillar’s old school teacher who was an inventor (generally time machines or paint that made you invisible). He would usually send his new inventions wrapped in brown paper (and normally delivered to the Oak tree by the Jolly Postman) to the caterpillars to try out , leading to much adventure; Pete the Pilot who flew a helicopter which generally proved useful when the Three Caterpillars had to chase someone or search for a hideout; PC Plod (catch phrases “Mornin’ all” and “You’re nicked my son!”) who general appeared on the scene to take Captain Stubble off to prison once he had been captured by the Three Caterpillars after his latest outrage; Eric the Sea Horse (which I think was inspired by a visit to Ocean Park when were living in HK where there was a seahorse exhibition at one time) who was the star attraction in a Zoo and did tricks (and was therefore an attractive kidnapping target for Captain Stubble). These characters might occasionally be supplemented from “real life” characters like Tom and Jerry from the cartoons, Cousin Nell who would visit from England and we normally had an array of characters “borrowed” for particular parts eg “Trigger and Del Boy” were sometimes part of Captain Stubble’s gang of bad guys.

Generally the stories followed the same formula – Captain Stubble committed some outrage (stealing the FA Cup in one memorable story) and the Three Caterpillars either on their own or in combination with some friends bring him to justice or the story would be based on an adapted version of a book story or film that they had recently watched – we had a series of stories about a magic cushion that Alex the Caterpillar had found in an old junk shop which would transport the Caterpillars to any where they wanted as long as you said the magic words (this sometimes varied but would usually be based on Abracadabra!). Over the years, there have been many stories and (slightly) different plots and the challenge is always to find something that maintained the kids (and the parents!) interest hence the “borrowing” of story lines. More recently, A. has obviously started reading his own stories (and of course V. is now doing the same) but they still occasionally ask for a Three Caterpillar story so it is probably a good idea that I am writing this down so I don’t forget all the characters!