A little song for you:
Dashing through the sand,
In a blacked-out four-by-four,
O'er the dunes we go,
Honking all the way,
Horns and flashing lights,
If you get in my way,
Oh what fun it is to drive at high speed here tonight...
Oh, Jingle Bells, Dubai Smells,
Sharjah's even worse,
If you're lucky your landlord,
might leave dosh in your purse,
OH! Jinle Bells, Dry oil wells,
At least we've got the malls,
Spend and buy on credit
Till they have you by the balls.
I imagine someone will find reason to be terribly offended by that. Sorry if that's the case, I just made it up in 5 minutes.
Well, what a frankly stupendous and baffling couple of days we've had. It all started on Monday morning when I woke up in AF at 5.30am. I told the WIFE and she sighed and said, "Oh God, not again..." or something along those lines. The good thing is, it went back to NSR within 3 hours, after I went back to sleep for a bit. I thought I should see the doctor, so went along to the hospital and he told me that it was probably a mixture of stress (traffic! money! banks! work! visas!) and over-doing the exercise. Well I had given it LARGE at the gym the night before and was shattered. I think that I have been doing too much too soon, so I think I might rein it in a bit.
Anyway, the doc advised me to take the rest of the day off, even though I felt that I should really go to work because work would be getting a bit peeved with all this time off. But I went home in the end and rested up. I had a bout of dodgy old belly that afternoon as well. Dunno if it was IBS or some bug, but it disappeared by the evening.
The evening...oh yeah. We ended up seeing doctors again, but this time it was the GIRL who was the patient. Somehow she managed to wedge her finger into a kitchen cupboard door hinge and got it stuck. The WIFE pulled it free and it was cut badly. There was a lot of blood, and it didn't look like a band-aid would do any good, so we clamped some kitchen towels over her finger and rushed her to the clinic round the corner at Springs Village, where they stitched her up. They needed 4 people to hold her down while an impatient doctor put the stitches in. Telling a 2-year-old to stay still when you're doing that is pretty much a waste of effort. The WIFE was in the room with her, and I waited outside with the BOY, listening to nearly 45 minutes of shreiking and wailing coming from the room. The poor WIFE didn't have that luxury and had to endure her daughter begging her to get them to stop. Both of us would have taken her place if we could.
About half-way through the poor little thing's ordeal, I decided to take the boy and go to the ATM out in the entrance area, across from the Choithrams shop. I needed to get that shreiking out of my head, if only for a moment. So, I walked out and was hit by a completely surreal moment. In the opposite entrance lobby near the shop, there was a Grotto of sorts, consisting of random, scary-looking models of animals wearing winter clothes, and a scruffy Santa sitting there looking bored beyond tears. There weren't many kids around, and no-one going to talk to Santa, and the sound that reached my ears told me why.
Coming full-blast from a portable stereo was a Christmas song, but it wasn't any Christmas song, it was Kevin Bloody Wilson singing "Ho Ho, Fucking Ho, What a Crock of Shit" in his inimitable style. The Santa and his elves stood around completely oblivious to the filth spewing out and echoing around the lobby as people ushered their young children past whilst blocking their ears. After stifling a belly-laugh and remembering I had the BOY with me, I cleared my throat and asked Santa if he knew what the song was about. He didn't, but then other people started complaining as well and they eventually changed the music. Absolutely bizarre! You could not make it up.
Then last night we had our office Christmas Party at a hotel restaurant. It was seafood buffet night, so the turkey and brussel sprouts were nowhere to be seen. The wine and beer flowed, the cliques formed onto their own tables, mainly along nationalistic lines followed by seniority. I somehow managed to position myself on the Big Cheese table with a few members of the upper echelons of our company, and even had a brief chat with the MD about my work (good), my health (bad) and my future (who knows?). When he asked me to give critical feedback I did slip a mention about the administration problems in there, but I kept it reasonably polite and not too strong. He listened and made his own points, but before long the conversation moved onto penis-size and the next thing we knew there was a drinking game going on called The Boat Race, which is basically a line of people downing pints in sequence, and the first line to finish all theirs wins.
From there, it rapidly went downhill. One or two of the staff were starting to get extremely drunk, and one or two were looking to stir up fights. Apart from a few drunken threats and raised voices, nothing really nasty happened, and everyone dispersed into the night, catching taxis home or on to other venues. For some reason, I managed to get press-ganged into moving on to a night-club. I'm too easily-led for my own good. I wasn't drinking any more (I'd drunk enough, despite telling myself I should only have 2 glasses of wine) but it was getting late, and I should have called it a night there and then. But no, I ended up in a club called Rattlesnake.
Rattlesnake sounds dodgy, and it is. Entering the place was like walking into a Zombie movie. All the faces were ghostly blue-white with dark, sunken eyes in the UV lighting, and as we walked to the bar, desperate hands clawed and pawed at our arms. Instead of "Brains! Brains!", there was the call of "Luvyoolongtime. Fiedorra" or something equally spooky. Thankfully, I saw sense, and extracted myself after one drink, breaking free from the moaning, meowling masses, climbing into a taxi and speeding home to my waiting bed.
Work today has been an ordeal. Not really hungover, but really, really tired. Early night for me tonight.
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