Give and take

I found a couple of news stories about money interesting, coming as they did at the same time.

In Oz the federal Treasurer Wayne Swan delivered the budget which included an increase in overseas aid to $4.8 billion.

At the same time Abu Dhabi announced that it was donating $30 million to our northern state of Queensland to build cyclone shelters, after the devastation caused by Cyclone Yasi.

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More old photos

Here are more of the old photos I rediscovered recently.

These I took in the fish market and the fruit/vegetable market in Deira in 1980. 

Back in the day...

I've been through that forgotten bag of old Dubai photos I mentioned the other day and scanned some of them, so it's time to share them with you.

What's interesting is not so much the buildings themselves in these photos but what's around them. Or, compared with today, what's not around them.

My first apartment was in a brand new building and I was one of the first to move in.

It was in Deira just behind Al Ghurair City. Although back in 1977 when I moved in construction of Al Ghurair Centre, as it was originally called, hadn't been started.

Mine was the top floor apartment on the right of the building. From it, three or four years later, I had a good view of Al Ghurair Centre.

 You can see that it was still  far from the built-up area that it is today - in fact it was almost rural:

Over the other side of the Creek, behind the newly-opened Trade Centre was the Hilton hotel. This photo has a note on the back that it was taken in 1979.

The Hilton was demolished a few years ago but the Clock Tower is still very much in place, although not the prominent landmark that it was back then:

The Dubai Municipality building in Deira is still there, but the surrounds are very different now.

 This one was also taken in 1979, from Deira looking across the Creek to Bur Dubai:

 No concrete banks you'll notice, just the natural sand and plenty of dhows and fishing boats.

There were a lot of original buildings in Bur Dubai too, complete with original, working wind towers.

Signs of the times

Here's some signage I stumbled across in the UK which caught my attention.

The first isn't unique to the UK of course, the stupidity is world-wide.

A packet of peanuts...with an allergy warning to buyers that it contains nuts and may contain traces of nuts.

You'd hope a packet of peanuts would have at least traces of nuts, wouldn't you.

Then a couple of local signs.

An obviously dissastisfied customer of the  enclosure solutions operative  wanted the passing world to know of his frustration.

A reply was added by said fencing contractor:

And another, this one a classic of the way the bureaucratic mind thinks so differently from the rest of us.

From their parallel world you get this:

A bureaucrat sees the overgrown shrub, goes back to the office, writes a notice, gets it printed and laminated, goes back to the site and pins the notice in place. Then presumably puts in a requisition to the environmental solutions department to carry out the necessary landscaping.

A non- bureaucrat would simply have gone back with a pair of shears and trimmed the offending leaves.

Treasure Chest

I've discovered a treasure chest. Or to be accurate, a treasure plastic bag.


Full of stuff I didn't know I had, it was hidden way back behind stacks of other stuff in the dark depths of a large cupboard.

A bag full of stuff from Dubai from 1977 up to about 1982.

I've been sorting through it and I've come up with a selection of photos and some other bits that I'll share with you over a few posts.

A real find was an old vinyl 45rpm record, one that we played at every gig we had with our mobile DuneBeat Disco.

The cover is the fabulous 'Life in the Emirates', but inside it the disc was 'Back in Dubai'...

But I did find a copy of 'Life in the Emirates', on an old cassette tape:

And there was another home-made tape, featuring 'Alex & The KayGee's, Live at the Cafe Royal, Dubai International Hotel'.


Dubai International was one of Dubai's earliest five-star hotels - it's still there opposite the airport but now changed to Le Meridien Dubai.

Back in the day it was the place to go. It had one of the city's first discos, Studio 7, and Cafe Royal, the fine dining restaurant. And it really was the best fine dining, with superb food and service and a big showband, which was Alex & The KayGees.

They started the evening with just the piano player, who was gradually joined by other musicians as the evening progressed. They ramped the sound up until eventually about fifteen musicians made up the big band, then the girl singers came on and finally Alex, the lead singer, with his big voice, big hair, big personality.

It was some show.

Here they are, with some of the Cafe Royal waiters. From memory, they were the first Filipinos to come to Dubai so they were real trail-blazers:

Cafe Royal was so popular that they couldn't fit in all the people who wanted to dine there, so on Thursdays they took the restaurant outdoors.

If you've been to the hotel you'll know it has nearly forty acres of landscaped gardens, and that's where they built a series of food stations, put down a dance floor and bandstand and had many more tables than they could have indoors.

Not a good photo but you'll get the idea. Dancers over on the top right, the bandstand just to the left of them:

Those were the days.

The Brits & weather

Three weeks in the UK and I've fallen into the habit of the weather being the first topic of conversation.

Our first week was warm and sunny, so was the third - in fact the Daily Telegraph ran a story last week headed "Heatwave to stay...with chance of 25C today"

But the week between was wet, cloudy and the temperature struggled to a peak of thirteen or fourteen celcius. But that doesn't stop the Brits stripping off if the sun comes out. 

We were huddled in a coffee shop, hiding from the eleven degrees and howling wind that took it much lower, when several women walked by enjoying the sunshine dressed like this:

Later in the week in Devon the temp dropped even more. The car told us that in the afternoon it was eight degrees:

And a few minutes later, even though there was no sunshine, they were in T-shirts, shorts, thin blouses to enjoy the balmy weather:

Last week someone said to me that people had been complaining about the cold since about November but a day of warm sunshine and they were already moaning about the unbearable heat.

I have hundreds of photos of our trip to sort out of course and I might post a few soon. More importantly, I found a bag of forgotten photos of Dubai back in the seventies so I'll be able to do a new 'Old Dubai' post when I've sorted them and enhanced the faded ones.

The fog did NOT do it!

Sitting here in the UK on a crystal clear early evening I thought I'd have a quick look at Gulf News before we find a nice village pub for dinner.

The morning we left Dubai was when the latest multi-vehicle pile up was reported, a story that has legs, as they say. I found it still being talked about in today's online GN, proof yet again that criminally moronic drivers are not being blamed for our too-frequent road carnage in bad weather.

There's an article headlined  "Timeline: crashes caused by poor visibility"

The latest big crash was "caused by heavy morning fog" we're assured.

The other eight crashes listed were also caused by the "foggy weather conditions and poor visibility"


Not, you note, by terminally stupid drivers travelling at 140kph in 50 metre visibility.

I know I've gone on about this several times in the past but I really do need to keep repeating myself. What chance is there of ever changing these driving habits when those responsible for the carnage are excused because it wasn't their fault, it was the fog's.

Note to Gulf News - the fog wasn't driving the vehicles at insane speeds. The fog wasn't driving too close to the vehicle in front.  The fog did not cause the crashes.

The crash, the death, the injuries were all caused by the drivers.

The drivers, not the weather.



Weather drives cars says Gulf News.