Southgate's Cat

The weather has been bizarre this last week. We had sandstorms for a couple of days, which meant driving round wasn't as pleasurable as it can be. All the familiar sights were obscured by the sand in the air as we drove past them, with the ghostly shadow of one or two large landmarks just visible through a creamy murk. Walking from the car to any building involved adopting a troubled, twisted expression, with mouth firmly shut to prevent sand getting in.

After the sandstorms and the increasing humidity that was building up, we had a short burst of thunder storms on Saturday night. The thunder storms can be quite impressive here. We saw several awe-inspiring examples of fork lightning as we returned from a meal at Ibn Batutta mall. The storm passed overhead very quickly at about midnight, and sprinkled some rain on us. This was most annoying, as I had taken the time to hose my car down to rid it of the thick layer of sand left by the sandstorms, and when it rains here, our slatted-roofed carport spills more sand onto the cars.

At least the storms took the humidity away. It was much fresher on Sunday as I headed back to work after another all-too-brief weekend. The airborne sand was also gone, and the familiar sights of towers and cranes and more cranes were visible once more. A stiff breeze was still blowing, though, and on some places on the roads, ribbons of fine sand rippled across the tarmac like other-wordly snakes coming back to claim the desert from all this maddening development.

Oh, and I've been feeling shite again. The dust and sand are playing havoc with my sinuses, and I've been feeling just generally bad, even dizzy at times. I rebuffed a friend's invitation to visit the Hatta mountains over the weekend, and decided to visit the doctor on Friday. So I laid there on the surgery bed, submitting myself to his probing and prodding, waiting for the verdict. After a moment he stepped away from me, straightened up and sighed.

"How old are you?" he asked brusquely
"Er...Thirty six," said I, almost as a question.
"And you have SO many diseases!" he said, shaking his head.
I had no answer to that.

Turns out I had a sinus infection. Yes, I am a wreck. What can I tell you? I've been through it all before; the dodgy ticker, the shagged hip, the sinuses, the things I won't mention... I'm a walking medical text book, and a hypochondriac to boot. They call it CYBERchondriac these days, because people like me spend hours looking up symptoms and diseases on the internet at the slightest twinge. I think I've worked my way up to "T" in the medical dictionary. There's definitely some ringing in my ears.

It would be great to wake up and have a day when I didn't feel rotten. I can't remember how that feels. I can only hope.

Enough, enough! I'll be setting of down that path of self-pity again, and that's half the problem, I reckon.

Onwards and sidewards. If you're wondering about the post title, I am about to reveal all. If you're not, look away now. I may have mentioned before that I am a a supporter of, or at least a fan of Middlesbrough Football Club. Being an exiled fan is something of a unique experience. I remember being in the USA in the 90s and having to listen to BBC World Service on my short-wave radio for snippets of news about the team. The only games I saw on TV were the FA Cup final and some World Cup games, and with the time difference, I watched most of them at 9am.

Nowadays, English football benefits from blanket TV coverage all over the world, and every Saturday (and Sunday), expat bars around the globe fill with supporters of various English Premier League teams hoping to see their team win. There are a few bars in Dubai that show every single game that is on, thanks to having wall-to-wall TV screens. I've been in a few of them, and it can be difficult to concentrate on one game with all the others going on around you, especially when people in various replica shirts jump up and shout at a goal in the game they're watching.

Of course, weekend games are the best, because they usually kick off at 6pm or 7pm here depending on the BST/GMT situation in the UK. Sunday games are sometimes a little later, but it's quite nice being able to go out for a drink on an evening and catch a game. But then there's the midweek games which invariably kick off at 7.45 or 8.00pm in the UK. If you're a die-hard (read NUTTER, but each to their own. You NUTTER), that's OK, you just stay up till 2am to watch the game. That isn't for me. I have enough problems with lack of quality sleep as it is, (Oh God, not again...) so I'm not really keen on staying up to watch late matches, especially on a school night.

The problem with this is that I've missed all the replays this season. Boro have got to the Quarter Finals of the FA Cup this season, and have contrived to need replays in the last 3 rounds. That's all of them, I think. Hull, Bristol City and West Brom. We've also had to win 2 penalty shoot-outs to get here. And as fate has it, we drew with Manchester United just over a week ago, and need to go to a replay at Old Trafford (We might as well not turn up, if I'm honest, but who knows). Every time this happens, I go to bed at the normal time, and the game is played as I sleep, or try to sleep at least. In the morning, I wake up completely oblivious to the result of the game until I get downstairs and switch on Sky News just in time for the sports bulletin. So in the period between waking up and watching the report, as far as I'm concerned, anything could have happened. Boro could have won gloriously, lost heavily, won on penalties, or just decided to forgo the game and go shopping for manbags. I really don't know, and until I see the result on the news, all the possibilities still exist. For me at least. Tonight, I will be going through this again, even though in my heart I know Boro have about as much chance of surviving as a sausage roll at a Meatloaf after-gig party.

Now this is what those boffin types refer to as the many-worlds interpretation or MWI (also known as relative state formulation, theory of the universal wavefunction, many-universes interpretation, Oxford interpretation or many worlds). It's all to do with quantum mechanics, apparently. A clever Austrian physicist chap called Erwin Schrödinger came up with a theoretical experiment involving a cat locked in a box (see Schrödinger's Cat) with a vial of poisonous gas that had a 50% chance of being released by a switch connected to a geiger counter which is placed near some decaying radioactive substance of indeterminate type. Until the box is opened, no-one knows whether the cat is alive or dead. It is in a state of flux, and both states (dead and alive) exist at the same time. There is also some guff about the interference of the observer and whether it has any influence on the result, and how there could be an infinite number of universes (multiverses) based on all possible outcomes of all situations that have happened, EVER. All terribly complicated and brain-troubling. I imagine any Geordie readers are dribbling on the keyboard mumbling about cats in boxes right now. I'm not far behind, to be fair. It's really deep shit, man, and would become much clearer after a nice big spliff, I imagine.

So, there you are: Southgate's Cat. If Boro win tonight, the cat will live. If they lose, the cat will be sent to the nearest labour camp.



Don't worry, there isn't really a cat. I'm off to give my brain a rest now.

OY!

Someone's nicked all my comments!

I had about 50 comments yesterday, then noticed that the last one (quite a good one about my last post) had disappeared. It seems any comments by non-subscribers have been deleted, and non-subscribers weren't allowed to comment when I checked my settings. So, sorry to all those whose comments have vanished. It wasn't me! I've re-enabled them now.

THIS SECTION REFERRED TO THE BRITISH EXPATS BLOG SITE.

But there we go. It's been a while - again. Time seems to be squeezing together like some mad accordian played by Buster Bloodvessel, and all the daily occurences are just falling on the floor and flowing down the drain. We are nearly in February 2007. Yesterday it was June 1996, I'm sure it was. I've already been in Dubai for 6 months, and it's been a veritable BLEEEUURRRGH. It's good to be occupied, rather than bored. Boredom depresses me and makes me want to eat bad, bad things that will make me fat again. With all the time in the gym and with the WIFE becoming a cyber-addict (she's been playing a particularly annoying and addictive game called Zookeeper pretty much every waking hour...she didn't notice what I did to her the other week while she was sat playing...maybe she'll notice when the bump gets between her and the table...) I've had less time to go on the computer. But that's probably a good thing. I spend all day on the bloody things at work.

But yeah, that good old gymnasium. I've been going for a 2 full weeks now after joining up at the local place, and the weight is dropping off. I'm trying a programme I found on a Men's lifestyle website which only takes 35 minutes, 3 times a week, but which leaves you feeling really quite tired, as if you've done an hour and a half of hard work. There is little cardio work, just 5 minutes warm-up and cool-down, and the rest of it is resistance training, on the basis that muscle burns more calories and is denser and more compact than fat. The trick is the slow cadence, and doing a low number of reps till failure (listen to me, I sound like a gym rat). 4 seconds to lift, then 4 seconds to put down. Try it and see - you get a proper burn. So far I've managed to double pretty much every weight that I'm lifting. The only area I'm struggling with is my shoulders, but I'll keep working on it.

The best bit is going to a gym that is quiet. I rarely, if ever, have to wait to go on a machine. And that's 15kg (33lbs) down, 23 (51lbs) to go to reach my target. I like the metric system. It sounds much less. At 1 kilo a week, I should be down to target by July or August. I went to see the heart doctor again last week and he seems to be happy with what I'm doing. Getting drug-free 6 months down the line would be brilliant.

In other news, we finally got the two cars we've been waiting for so long to get our hands on. The actual buying process was smooth and trouble-free. Once the car dealer had the money, they arranged the insurance and registration, and I picked them up the next day. At the same time, the WIFE and kids' residence visas came through, so we got the WIFE her driving licence and got rid of the 2 hire cars. Now, in a weird kind of juxtaposition, I (the large man) drive a little sporty coupe car and she (the little lady) drives a 7-seater MPV.

Worryingly, I'm now driving something like a local. I flash my lights and beep my horn and occassionally weave between lanes when I get frustrated at the chap in the ageing white Nissan Sunny bumbling along at 80kph in the middle lane without a care in the world. But I'm getting to thinking that it's the only way to be, because hesitancy here can get you into bother. Of course, I draw the line at some things. I always strap the children into their seats nice and safely. I never drive on the hard shoulder. I don't send SMS messages whilst driving at 180kph (140 is the limit), and I'll never, ever plaster pictures of my country's leaders on my car's back window. Can you imagine seeing that in the UK? I reckon anyone who put Tony BLEEEUURRGH's insincere grin on the back window would probably get a brick through it. And rightly so.

As I drive around this place and get used to the anarchy on the highways, I'm starting to realise that a lot of the people in this part of the world live in little sealed-off bubbles. It's not malicious, they just don't think about consequences, particularly when other people are involved. The oft-used phrase "Insha'allah" is starting to make a little bit of sense. It's the culture, the upbringing to just carry on regardless, and leave the worrying about it all to God. It was similar in Taiwan. The people were lovely and friendly and hospitable, as they are here, but when they get in a car (or sometimes just in public), they just throw a switch and the bubble surrounds them. They must wonder what these flashing orange light things and shiny appendages attached to the doors are, because they don't bloody use them. Queues? They have a Barbie in front, don't they?

And then, there was the incident with the drill, which completely threw me out of kilter the other night. I think it was Thursday. I was sat at my laptop at home, minding my own business. It was late. The WIFE had gone to bed. From nowhere, the incredibly loud and wall-juddering sound of an electric drill burst into life. I looked at my watch. It was 11.25pm. Someone next door (in the adjoining villa that's been empty for 3 months) was obviously moving in, and had decided that this was the right time to start auditioning for DIY SOS. I can't remember the exact thoughts that were going through my mind, but I think the words "what", "the" and "fuck" were in there somewhere, amongst others.

I let it go. I ignored it. It couldn't go on all night. Could it? The WIFE, the BOY and the GIRL didn't seem to be overly upset by it upstairs. The kids could sleep on the runway at DXB International Airport (or the suburb of Mirdiff, as it is known round here). It kept going for another half an hour, on and off, and finally ceased just before midnight. It's a good job they stopped, because I was getting more and more annoyed, and was even thinking about going to bed in a bad mood. Again, I put this behaviour down those cultural quirks I was talking about before, you know - that unwitting, unintended selfishness. It was like my first few weeks in Dubai which I spent in that flea-pit hotel that the fleas had moved out of, and the banging doors and shouting and general hoo-hah that occured every night after midnight. It's not malicious. These people have just been brought up that way, and don't know any different.

The next day, as we pulled out of our car port and set off for Al Ain, we saw the culprit getting out of his own car with some curtain poles.

It was a Westerner.

You know how it was quiet?

Well, since then I've had a bit of a week, I can tell you.

My health problems continue to annoy and frustrate me (along with the frustration of dealing with banks in this country - maybe the two are related) and I have been in hospital again for various tests and something-oscopies galore.

I think they are all probably all linked, actually. I'm not the most easy-going of folk, as I might sometimes allude to with my rambling rants, and I tend to let things wind me up a tad. The last month has seen some really frustrating times trying to get car loans and finalising visas and various other things. So, it's probably no coincidence that my gastric reflux has been playing hell with me and that in turn plays hell with my arrhytmia, triggering ectopic beats and short runs of AF. The cycle of worry spirals downwards in ever-decreasing circles.

I finally managed to badger my cardiologist into referring me to see another doctor about the reflux, and the new doctor was only too keen to stick cameras into every orifice available. Fortunately the insurance company only authorised the gastroscopy, which is the one down the top end.

I've had the colonoscopy before, and believe me when I say that it ain't pleasant. Not only did I have to starve myself for a day, I also had to take industrial-strength laxatives that rapidly compelled me to sit on the porcelain throne for hours with a roll of chilled toilet roll within easy reach. Then at the hospital, I had to have an enema using cold water, before losing what was left of my dignity as I laid on my side in an ill-fitting hospital gown and had a long black tube forced up my arse. The only blessing was the sedative, which wasn't that strong last time, because I felt a considerable amount of discomfort. I was half-expecting Lloyd Grossman to appear on the screen and say, "Hooow liyuvs in an Arse like thus..?"

As it was, I only had to do the endoscopy this time, and they must have used some good shit on me, because I was out like a light only a minute or so after they injected the sedative. I have a fuzzy, vague memory of the nurse putting some kind of guard in my mouth and strapping it round my head, then there was a little bit of gagging as they put the endoscope in, but then nothing. When the doctor said, "Bring out the Gimp", I may well have been dreaming.

I woke up after an hour of dreamless, blissful sleep to see the WIFE, the BOY and the GIRL sat next to me, and I wondered what they had been saying about me. I had a chicken sandwich and a few more minutes sleep, then after a quick chat with the doctor they gave me a DVD showing what they had done and let me go. I had an ever-so-slightly sore throat, but nothing untoward, and before long we were on our way home.

At home I watched the DVD, and was treated to the sight of my insides being explored. It was quiet interesting, and not too scary until this little metal pincer device appeared from under the camera to take biopsies of my acid-scarred digestive tract. I say little, but on a large TV it looked massive, and reminded my of Ridley Scott's Alien taking chunks out of people's heads and chests with its extendable mandibles. When the pincers withdrew there was blood where it had taken the sample from, and the sight of this made me shudder somewhat. I'm glad that I was asleep when it actually happened.

It turns out that I have something called Barrett's esophagus, which has absolutely nothing to do with cheap shoes or poorly-built houses. The doctor casually told me that it is a pre-cancerous condition where the lining of the esophagus has been eroded and is changing in cellular structure. It has to be managed and monitored very carefully, which involved more drugs, more gastroscopies at regular intervals, and aviodance of certain types of food, and naturally the nice ones like chocolate, caffeine and red wine. So if I want to live a long, healthy life I have to live it like a monk. A monk that doesn't attend mass or communion, that is. Losing more weight will help matters too. Oh well, I did want to lose weight, and I still am, despite having a slight break from the diet over Christmas.

*Crap Joke Interval*

Two Trappist monks were walking along the street. One turned to the other and said absolutely nothing.

*End of Crap Joke Interval*

Drugs, drugs, drugs. The esophagus doc gave me two more types to take, and I happily added them to the list. I have had to create a plethora of reminders on my mobile phone's calendar, which now bloops at me at certain points in the day to remind me to take the tablets for my blood pressure, my arrhythmia, my cholesterol, my nightly happy pill and now for my bad belly.

All was well until Sunday. I felt rotten, and really tired. More so than is usual for me. I thought it was probably the after-effects of the sedative, so took the day off. But on Monday I felt even worse, and was starting to wonder what was going on. I was actually physically shaking by this point, and aching all over. I wanted to sleep all the time, but when I laid down, I just couldn't get comfortable.

So I went back to the hospital to see my doctors. They did the usual tests - blood pressure, bloods, ECG and so on. They found nothing. Then I happened to bump into the doctor who had done the endoscopy and when I showed him the bag of drugs I had with me, he took a disconcertingly sharp intake of breath and told me to stop taking a particular drug straight away. Then I saw the heart doctor and he halved the dosage of a couple of the other meds.

Well it worked. I'm now back to just feeling crappy, rather than utterly rotten. The whole episode has been a little disturbing if I'm honest. I have said before that the medical facilities here have been impressive so far, and you can't fault the level of attention that you get. You can see a doctor any time of night or day, and at weekends, and you don't have to wait weeks and months for an appointment with a specialist. But then you would expect that with private health care which is paid for with insurance, I suppose.

The down-side is that you are seen maybe too quickly, and with profit margins being involved in the private sector, however much you try and dress it up, the bottom line is what ultimately matters, so there is always the potential for these kind of medication mistakes (not to mention others) to be made. The liaison between the different doctors seemed to be limited to an initial referral, then it was up to me to keep each doctor informed of what the other was up to. That isn't my job. A good mate of mine has said that this is par for the course in these parts, and advised me to get second opinions on any major diagnoses that I get. I'm starting to wonder if he might be right. I'm just thankful that my level of awareness (some might call it paranoia) on these matters brought about a swift end to the problem.

By Tuesday I was feeling right again. And then the unthinkable started to happen. The fates have started shifting, and I might just get my finances sorted and get the car loan I've been trying to get for a month now. Thanks to certain people at my company I should now be able to sort out the payment cycle problems and remedy the knock-on effects of the late salary payment in November and December. I can start to enjoy living here instead of banging my head against the wall.

It's a bloody good job as well, because in little more than three weeks we have our first visitors coming from the UK. The WIFE's mother and sister are coming to stay with us for three weeks in February. I want everything to be in place for their arrival, and Insha'allah, it's starting to fall into place.

Of course, there will be more glitches and hitches and hiccups. When I got home last night after a good day, the GIRL was in the process of vomiting copiously. It seems she has a touch of gastroenteritis, bless her. The WIFE slept in her room with her last night after taking her to the doctors and getting a pile of medication for her, and I checked it thoroughly for anything dodgy-looking. She's never been sick like this in her short life, never had anything worse than a cough and cold, so I imagine it's as confusing and scary for her as it is worrying for us. In the UK it was the BOY who was always getting sickness bugs - almost every month he would start throwing up, usually in the car on the way to Middlesbrough (easy now, M). What with her cut finger and now this, she's had a hard time since arriving in Dubai. Fingers crossed it'll get better for her.

Is it me, or are these posts getting longer? I'm posting less frequently, I think, so have to get more info into each one. I hope whoever's reading is still with us.

TTFN.

'Tis the season to be jolly...

Falalalalalala and so on.

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.

The sands of time...

slither grain by grain, inexorably towards an unknown future. With every second that passes, another life is made, another life ends. Somewhere around this rock floating in infinite, inky darkness, someone falls in love. Somewhere in Dubai, my puny skills are no match for the DARK SIDE OF THE FORCE.

Random picture.















Er...

Ahem. Sorry about that. Where were we? Well, I'm still waiting for the visa. I found out today that I haven't got HIV. Which is nice. Now I only worry about black holes and comets. I never worry about curries, unless they're really hot.

But work has been interesting. I've been working like a dawg. In an office at a computer, which isn't really what dogs do, to be honest, but I don't care. And yet, my company, who shall remain nameless, still haven't paid me for the month of November. They keep putting me off and saying the equivalent of "the cheque's in the post". I also found out I have to fork out a load of money to sponsor my family. Which isn't nice, especially with Christmas just round the corner, approaching it like a white Land Cruiser with the obligatory blacked-out windows on the SZR, lights flashing manically. So I'm slightly peeved, if truth be told. The administration in my company is somewhat erratic. I don't understand why we can't be paid by automatic electronic transfer on a set date every month instead of relying on the vagaries of senior management's movements in order to get the requisite 2 signatures on every pigging cheque.

The atmosphere has gone downhill of late. We've all been told that we MUST wear ties at all times. Mine gets wet in the shower, but it doesn't wash... (groan) Everyone's up to their eyeballs and panicking and snappy and grumpy and when a few of us sit together for lunch, we invariably moan about work, particularly the management and the administration. They haven't even announced a Christmas Party. Maybe it's been cancelled this year. Maybe I'll turn into Tiny Tim. The sad thing is, a happy ship is a productive ship. An unhappy ship loses its deck-swabbers and its cabin boys like that (clicks fingers). I've lost count of the number of times people have said that they're going to quit. It's not as if there's a shortage of work round here.

Anyway......

I'd better be careful. The ears have walls and the eyes have hills, etc. At least I ain't writing this at work.

Waiver: The opinions stated in this blog are a load of old bollox. Names have been changed (and not even mentioned) to protect the guilty. The writer is a highly-strung muppet with a penchant for self-pity and self-righteous bluster. Please send cash now.

So, I'm still doing the gym thing. I'm going every night of the week, and the WIFE and the BOY are not really happy, because it means I don't get home till after 8.30 or 9.00pm. The thing is, the hotel where the gym is located is just of the SZR, which means it is best to go straight there from work, rather than going home first then driving back the wrong way (with all the traffic heading back to Deira/Sharjah, etc.) because even at 8 or 9pm, the traffic is still a complete bleeding nightmare. I have tried it once or twice, and a 15-minute journey can take up to an hour going that way. I've decided that when my free membership is finished, I'll join the gym here in Springs. Then I can come home, see the kiddies and then go to the gym to get all sweaty.

I had a good session tonight, as it happens. I wasn't keen on going all afternoon, especially after walking around the Cityscape Exhibition at lunchtime (it was HUGE, and some of the buildings and developments looked amazing and staggering - they had an 8-foot high model of the buidling that is meant to emerge from the Big Hole in the Ground), but in the end, after getting annoyed at work, I decided to have a quick blast. The quick blast ended up as a long work-out, with cross-training (yeah, I was cross) and lots of upper-body resistance work. I feel somewhat puny struggling with really light weights, but I'm getting better and stronger and my stamina is increasing. My waistline is shrinking rapidly, but I seem to have stopped losing weight at the fast rate I was before. I suppose that's a good thing, because if it's too fast, it's unsustainable, and as everyone likes to say - muscle weighs more than fat, and I'm definitely putting muscle on with the exercise. I am sort over wavering at about 8 or 9 kg less than I was when I started, which is pretty good going for just over one month.

Crikey, it was a month ago that I went into hospital with my last AF episode! It's flown by, and with the new drugs and eating regime and the exercise I am feeling so much better, and my heart flutters (which used to be frequent) have quietened right down. Long may it continue. My goal is to be drug free, healthy and my ideal weight in a year's time. Oh, and rich and famous would be nice, too.

Clerical and Medical

Fecking hell.

What a bloody palaver that was.

Excuse the language, but BUGGER ME!

I went to do my medical today, which is the compulsory blood test and chest x-ray everyone coming to work and live here has to take. They test for HIV and TB, and if you have either, you get summarily and unceremoniously deported. Being a worrier, I wonder if there's the slightest chance that I could have got HIV from somewhere. Even the minisuclest (is that a word) odds of something occuring will not matter if it's something really bad. I worry about asteroids and wandering black holes and stuff as well. Bibble.

But anyway, the test. It was carried out at the Maktoum hospital (this name is everywhere - do they own the place or something) which is in Deira, which is over the creek. I was told to go early - before 7.30am ideally, so as to avoid queueing for several centuries. I was also advised to park at work, i.e. just this side of the creek, and catch a taxi to take me there and back. My advisors told me that this would only take an hour or so. What does that WRONG noise from Family Fortunes sound likeagain? EH-URRRR!

I drove to work, got the cab, so far so good. The traffic in Deira was a mess. Vehicles of all shapes and sizes crept along the roads, blocking up junctions and roundabouts. The drivers amused themselves with some kind of free-form jazz played on car horns, which provided a constant staccatto of noise in the air all around. Asian and Arab men gesticulated at each other, and I shook my head.

We had been stuck on one roundabout for nearly 10 minutes, when the driver cheerily announced that the hospital was just round the corner, so I got out and walked. It was 7.35am. I entered the hospital gates and thanked Allah that I was a privileged Westerner with private health cover. The Maktoum hospital is grim, let's just leave it at that. I quickly found the Admin office (this is gonna be a cinch, I remember thinking) and entered through the Female entrance. They sent me packing, even though I offered to show my (now-reducing) breasts as evidence, and I entered the Male waiting area. 5 minutes later I had handed over my documents, paid my money and was in possession of my Government health card and a slip of paper which would get me the requisite tests. But it had to be typed up in the Typing Office first.

Then it started going tits-up. It took me an age to find the Typing Office, where I had to get something or other typed. It was in a pre-fab hut hidden round the back of some other building. I was told 15 minutes by the man who was sat there doing not very much, other than drinking coffee and picking fluff out of his navel. To give him his dues, it was only 8 minutes, and then I got another piece of paper. Go back to the Admin office, was the order, so I trudged back round there and paid some more money and got the proper typed-up slip for the tests. Now go to the testing room. Er...where's that? Over there somewhere (nonchalant wave in some general direction).

After another 10 minutes of fruitless searching I found the X-ray department, but I had to go for the blood test first, so they told me to follow the green line backwards to the blood test laboratory which was over near the side entrance. Well, it could have been the main entrance. I really don't know. I entered the Male section this time and was greeted with a large room full of chairs, set out like church pews, and four hatches at the far end. Above the hatches was an electronic display board, showing a group of three-digit numbers that flashed and changed at random intervals. Sort of like Argos in a mental home. Looking as stupid as possible, I wandered towards the windows and a kindly young chap with a mischevious face told me which window to go to. I handed over my papers and was directed to sit down.

My papers then moved from the first window across to the last one, in some kind of process that had me wondering what was for tea tonight. Then a large group of subcontinental labourer types entered the room and sat together in a tight, protective huddle at the other side of the room. A man with them dumped all their papers at the LAST window, and then all their numbered tickets started appearing as if by magic. I think this annoyed the mischevious young man and his mates. He went to the windows and spoke in rapid-fire Arabic. I reckon "How come they got to push in?" was the gist of it.

Time was dragging on. I resigned myself to waiting a long time. So much for the early start. Then, out of the blue, my name was called and I got my numbered ticket. 327. I sat down again, and 5 mintues later the board changed about a dozen times, bleeping manically each time, then settled on a group of numbers ending in 327. I moved to a smaller waiting area with about 10 chairs in it, sitting amongst Indian and Pakistani men of different shapes and sizes who watched me impassively. The moment they got the chance, they moved away from me. Hey, I showered last week, mate!

Then my number was shouted brusquely from the next room, and I entered a veritable factory of blood testing. There were 8 or 10 chairs with doctors and nurses sat next to them, waiting to take our blood, and I sat down at the nearest free one. As the doctor stuck the cold steel into my vein he made some small talk about where I was from, yadda yadda. I barely felt the needle, I've become so used to the whole process, I could probably do it myself.

Then, with a plaster holding a lump of cotton wool over the hole in my elbow, I walked back to the X-ray department, where there were more windows and seats, but not as many. I handed more documents over, and was soon doing a contortionist act against the chest X-ray screen. Not too bad, I thought, but I checked my watch and it was just after 9.15am. What a kerfuffle. All these administrative tasks could be done in one place, yet they choose to separate them into the smallest components and make something that should be simple really quite complex. Is it to give people jobs? It must cost a fortune!

Anyway, I headed out of the hospital and started the search for a taxi to take me back over the creek. This was the worst bit of the whole experience. Being a man of short patience, I didn't do what I should have done and waited for a taxi to drop someone off at the hospital, I wandered out towards the main roads, thinking my chances were better there. As it was, I saw loads of taxis, but they were all occupied. I saw maybe 3 unoccupied cars, but they zoomed past, ignoring my increasingly desperate waving and shouting. I ended up walking to the creek itself, well the road alongside anyway (near where we parked a while back after brunch at the Hyatt). I don't know how far I walked, but it was over a mile, I'm sure of it. Eventually a taxi dropped someone off at a large office building and I leapt into it, relieved, hot, sweaty and completely stressed out, as is my wont. I just couldn't believe that a place as busy as Deira would prove so difficult to find a taxi in. Lesson for today: stay put.

I expected the drive back over the creek to be horrendous, but it wasn't. It took less than 20 minutes, and I got back to the office at around 10.30am. I was glad to get that over with. This is one of the last steps towards getting my full visa. If everything is OK, I will have it within 10 days to 2 weeks. Fingers crossed. It has been a frustrating first 4 months in the sense that I haven't been able to establish myself fully with my own car and proper banking facilities, and a liquor licence, etc. It looks like we're finally getting there. INSHA'ALLAH!

"What's a Gime?"

Said Homer J. Simpson walking past a gymnasium one day...

Well, Homer, a gime, or gym as we like to call them is a place of torture were sado-masochists go for their fix and watch other, more muscly people admiring themselves in the mirror. Or so I used to believe.

Tonight I went to a gym and tortured myself for over an hour with exercise bikes and various resistance machines that wouldn't look out of place in a medieval dungeon. The Inquisition boys would have loved this place.

As it happens, the things I hate most about gymnasiums - other people, who are generally healthier, better-looking, musclier...you get picture - weren't there. I had the place ALL to myself. Now this is because it's a fairly small gym at the top of a hotel. Hotel gyms aren't very busy at any time, so I'm well in here. It's got a pool and a jacuzzi and a steam room and a sauna and really very plush faciltites in the changing room with brilliant white bowl-style sinks and frosted glass on all the doors and little uplighters on the walls. All the equipment is brand new and the cardio machines have little TVs that can be toggled on and off with the exercise data, or even shared with it.

But the reason I'm going to this particular gym is that I won a month's free membership by answering a few questions on the radio a few weeks back. I also won a meal and a night in the hotel for two, which is nice. Anyway, the good thing is, it's given me a reason to go along and start off the exercising phase of my new healthy lifestyle. Stop laughing at the back. I've been sticking to my eating plan, which is a sort of modified paleo diet. I don't eat bread, pasta or potatoes. Well, some , but not very much at all. I have bread maybe once a week now. Most of my food now is lean poultry and fish, vegetables, rice, oats, fruit and proper nuts (not peanuts or cashews, which aren't really nuts at all). i've found myself going right off junk food. Even when we went to the Johnny Rockets burger joint (a fabulous stainless-steel-plated American diner) last week, I thought about treating myself to a burger, but went for the chicken club on brown bread instead (easy on the mayo), and it was very tasty. I couldn't even face more than 2 of the WIFE's chips. They tasted greasy and bland.

So far, I've lost 7 kilograms, or maybe more, because I didn't start weighing myself immediately. That's 15 pounds or just over 1 stone for any imperialists out there. I seem to have switched over quite easily to this way of thinking, and I put it down to what happened a couple of weeks ago with my visit to hospital. I've never felt so motivated to do it and have never felt so sure that I can do it. I've even got a cold, which always seems to happen within 4 weeks of starting these regimes, but I'm nearly over it, fingers crossed, and I can get on with it for real.

Anyway, the gym session was hard work. The little life guard / trainer man (who was small but strong, as he showed me when demonstrating machines) was a great help and showed me how to use everything, and even took me through a slightly shortened general workout with cardio and resistance training. He counted my reps and gently encouraged me to do the leg extensions, shoulder presses and hyperextensions (not hypertensions).

After I finished and had my shower, I felt like I was walking on air. I had a real buzz. The only little annoyance was a bit of acid reflux during and after the session, but I put that down to the very acidic Strepsils I've been taking for my cough. I drove home, hearing the new U2 song on the radio (which is superb) on the way, and had some grilled fish and veg for me tea. I am in danger of becoming a bit of a health bore with all this, but if I keep the right mindset going, I don't really care. Like I said just a few weeks ago, I'm sick of being sick.

OK. Enough of that.

I should just mention a mate of mine who is having a really hard time at the moment. He's split up with his wife and had an accident in his jeep and all kinds of other things, and yesterday he found out that he had 9 broken vertebrae in his back. They were talking about doing a major operation on him to fix it, and naturally he's worried about it. I hope his luck turns soon, and I hope he gets well as quickly as possible. Our fingers are crossed for you, M.

Doha or bust...

I get the feeling Doha doesn't want me to enjoy its charms again. The week after Eid I was meant to go and talk about the Big Hole in the Ground, but I couldn't find a hotel room for love nor money nor sexy shenanigans in the pantry, so I had to call it all off. Then last week, I managed to have a hotel booked, but ended up in the much-vaunted hospitel, so again the trip was off.

Today, back at work, and the owners of the Big Hole in the Ground are still insistent that I should go to Doha for a few days. Well, fine, but let me find a hotel room. I spent most of the day chasing various people hither and thither, than I finally phoned a lady who was supposed to help, and it transpires that I might actually have a room, but it ain't 100% certain, and the room in question is really expensive. There's the small matter of the Asian Games approaching, you see. There are tales of hotel rooms being rarer than an egg-laying bird with a smile like Tom Cruise and stories about the place not being ready for the event. They say it about everywhere they hold one of these things. People just like to whinge. Don't I, dear?

But anyway, I am undeterred. Tomorrow I'm getting on that plane for the short (but still nerve-wracking) hop to Doha. Even if I end up kipping in a bus shelter, I've got to be there and do my stuff. I've even changed my hospital appointment with the cardiologist so I can go. Committed? I should be.

Anyway, I think an important lesson today was (again) not to sweat the small stuff. I get stressed out about things far too easily, and it has to be affecting my blood pressure. A friend told me today that the frustration of living here with all the traffic and the bureaucracy and the over-use of the word Insha'allah was understandable. He also said that some people are just more stressed than others, and being told to calm down by other people is the worst thing they can hear. I agree with that sentiment. It makes me even angrier when someone says it to me.

But then, if it's my nature or not, I need to control it or focus it or something. I need to laugh more. And this picture of the under-construction Dubai Metro makes me laugh:

Wherever you go in the world...

there are universal constants, undeniable truths that will never change.

The sun sets in the West.

Beer gets you drunk.

Quantity Surveyors are boring.

And, most pertinent of all...

Hospital food is crap.

Anyway, it rained the other day. I missed it, because I didn't wake up in my private room in the hospitel (hospital/hotel) until it was gone. I opened the blinds to see strange marks on the car park tarmac which seemed to suggest that precipitation had occurred. The sky was white, misty and almost chilly-looking. The WIFE confirmed that, Yes indeed, it had rained that morning and it was that "really fine stuff".

Oh, yeah. I was in the hospitel because last Sunday, the day after my last posting, the day I was meant to fly to Doha, I had another episode of the dreaded Atrial Fibrillation. I thought about sitting it out and letting it go back in its own time, but since I was unsure of why it had happened this time (there's usually a definite trigger), I went to the local health centre. The doctor there was very nice and reassuring. He did an ECG on me, and told me what I already knew - I was in AF. Between us we half decided that my new diet might well have been the trigger this time. I'd been on a form of the Paleo diet since the 1st November, which was 4 days ago. Something didn't ring completely true to me, though. I was feeling quite good in myself up till Sunday night. I had got over the initial slight dizziness and my appetite was adjusting. More importantly, my ectopic beats (skipped beats that can be a precursor to AF) had reduced by a significant amount. What else could it have been, though: the ginger and lemon tea the night before, or the large diet pepsi consumed at lunchtime the day before, maybe even the handful of walnuts eaten as an evening snack? I was confused.

The doctor decided to send me to see a cardiologist at a new hospital in the Bur Dubai area, near Port Rashid. We got directions and more reassurance, and with the WIFE driving, we headed along the SZR towards the hospital. We landed and I booked into the ER. Another ECG was performed, then I was transferred up to a small white, functional room in the Intensive Care/Cardio Care Unit. That may sound alarming, but they have the best equipment for dealing with matters of the heart. Well, maybe not broken ones, and we all know that Padme Skywalker died because of a broken heart.

I digress. I told the WIFE to go home with the GIRL because the BOY needed to be picked up from school. She knows the drill by now, and so do I. I was soon covered in wires and needles were stuck in various places on my hands and arms. I ended up with 2 IV drips this time, one in each hand. They tried a drug on me, but it only slowed the fast rate down, so they ended up putting me under for a few minutes and zapping me with the defibrillator. I've had it before, and it invariably works. The best bit is being gradually more drugged up with various legal substances, which make you feel like you've had a bottle of wine in 30 seconds, then the oxygen mask descends and they add the real knock-out stuff. It was ever so slightly disconcerting to hear the nurse ask the anaesthetist if it was 50 millilitres, and the anaesthetist replying in a loud panicky voice that, No, it should be 15 millilitres, but before I knew it I was having a strange dream about being inside a computer or something, and then I was awake and back into blessed Normal Sinus Rhythm. It's hard to describe the feeling. It's one of utter relief, after being in AF and on edge for several hours. It's as if a huge, not agonising but naggingly painful splinter has been removed from your bum. Lying there with AF is pretty crappy. People can tell me it isn't life-threatening in itself, etc., but when your heart is doing a dance like a drunk uncle doing the birdy-song in your chest, it isn't nice. I always end up praying to God, and making deals with him about how I'll be good from now on, even though I'm a sworn agnostic with a leaning towards (without the utter certainty of) atheism.

I thanked the man who put me to sleep, who was a genial Libyan chap with an impossible name who had lived and worked in various UK locations for a good deal of his career. He melted back into the hospital hubbub as quickly as he had arrived, and I was left wondering what time I would be let out. Wishful thinking is what they call that. The cardiologist came and spoke to me and told me he wanted to keep me in ICU overnight, then transfer me down to ward for observation tomorrow. Blimey. In the UK, I've been pretty much sent home 2 hours after going back to NSR. The last serious obs and tests had been over 2 years ago when the AF had resurfaced. Not this time, though. This doctor wanted to watch me and prod me and poke me, so who was I to argue. The only worry for me was the insurance. Would they cover it? Would I have to pay it and reclaim it? I rang the WIFE and told her the good news. She was also surprised that I was staying overnight.

So I spent that night in that small white room. No TV. Nothing to read. I did get some food, nd it was pretty good, but then all food tastes great when you've not been allowed to eat for hours. I didn't get much sleep. The automatic blood pressure monitor inflated every hour through the night and then the nurses came to take more blood every 6 hours, and with all those wires and tubes, I defy anyone to sleep well under those conditions. In fact, they should use it at Guantanamo Bay as a new form of torture. OK. Maybe not. Anyway, I was ready for some more of that magic bottle of wine in a syringe from The Affable Sandman of Tripoli.

The next morning I rang work and the WIFE and the BOSS and told them the score. I was going down to the ward and was likely to spend at least another night there. Finally they released me from the drips and monitor wires and I performed a very unsteady stand up routine that wasn't funny at all, and managed to walk around for a bit. They wheel-chaired me down to the ward, and I was in for a bit of a surprise. Being used to the good ole' NHS, I expected a large ward full of old men in ill-fitting pyjamas surrounded by bored relatives. But of course, all healthcare is private here, and I got my own private hotel-style room, with a separate lounge and 2 TVs and a wardrobe and...an empty fridge. A minibar might have been too much to expect, in hindsight.

So I ate increasingly poor food and drank water and watched The Golden Girls on TV. The family came and went, soon getting bored of seeing Daddy in a open-backed dress. The vital sign checks and blood pressure tests carried on at 4-hourly intervals, but just before bedtime (Ha! You're always in a bed in hospital) they noticed my BP was up a bit. They took it again to check about half an hour later and it was down a bit. The next morning, as I waited for the doc to come and tell me to go home, they took my BP again, and again it was high. They started getting a bit more urgent about it, getting doctors involved, and another 2 checks later, they were asking me about hypertension and family medical history and all kinds of things. Hmm. Me - Hypertensive? Don't be so bloody stupid!

I was given a really nasty dissolving tablet to stick under my tongue and promptly wheeled down to the Cardio Outpatient clinic where they performed an ultrasound scan of my ticker. After 10 minutes of prodding with a gelled-up device, the doctor told me that I was definitely suffering from hypertension and my heart was showing signs of it that indicated a long-term problem, maybe going back 3 or more years, and which has avoided detection until now. He told me that the high BP was making my heart work harder, and it was now over-muscly, like some mad keen body-builder. The problem with big muscles is that they get stiff and eventually weaken. Oh bugger. But then, it dawned on me, and the doc was alluding to the fact that the hypertension could be the major factor behind my AF. It's not often you are happy to find out you've got a condition, but this time I was, because if it's true, I have found out what has caused all this crap I've been putting up with for the last 6 years. Now I can treat it. Now I can beat it.

I knew what was coming next. The doctor told me I had to stay another night. He told me I had to go on medication. He told me to go on a diet. He told me to exercise! Well, duh! The list of drugs was growing. Anti-arrhythmics, anti-cholesterol, anti-aircraft, and now anti-high blood pressure. It's kind of at odds with what I'm trying to achieve with this Paleo diet, because they are yet to dig up the remains of a Homo Erectus branch of Boots the Chemist from 100,000 years back. C'est la vie. I went back to the ward with a strange sense of elation mixed with terror. Now I know what has to be done. If I do it right, and lose the requisite weight and lower my cholesterol and blood pressure, I should be able to get off the meds within a year or two, one by one.I knew that from now on I held my destiny, or at least a great deal of it, in my own hands. I have been given control.

I left hospital yesterday, and was glad to get away in the end. The hotel-style room had impressed me to start with, but after 2 days in there, I was bouncing off the walls. The TV was my only companion for much of the time, and it was starting to grate with its repeats of Roseanne and Different Strokes and straight-to-video movies. I did see a couple of good ones late at night, mind. The doc gave me a final pep talk and told me that while nothing was outright banned now, I had to remember the simple golden rule - the more legs an animal has, the worse it is for you. It's like Orwell's Animal Farm in reverse - 4 legs bad, 2 legs good. No legs even better (Fish, that is). I wonder if this was a case for cannibalism, although I wouldn't eat myself given the choice.

It's kind of fitting that this has happened now. I came to Dubai for a new beginning, a new life, and all that guff. I was worried about my health, naturally, but carried on as normal, eating and drinking crap and living the luxury, lazy, expat lifestyle. My weight got to its highest ever, and my stress levels also got higher. I now realise that this has been a factor all along, and along with the obesity, it is a potent combination. I had a really bad stress-out session the day before my latest episode. That probably sent my BP through the roof and kicked the AF off. But every cloud has a silver lining. The thoroughness of the medical care here has impressed me, especially my cardiologist, who has been encouraging and reassuring and also frank with me about where I am. I now have a positive outlook, and feel ready to put right the years of abuse my body has suffered. I have gone right off fatty and sugary foods. I'm not a puddingy person any more, as my dear Mother says.

Oh yeah, and the insurance wasn't a problem. I showed my company insurance card, signed a couple of forms and didn't have to pay a penny. Suh-WEET.

You know what? I AM SICK, SICK AND THRICE SICK!!!!

WARNING: THIS BLOG ENTRY IS FULL OF SELF-PITY AND OTHER SUCH NONSENSE. IT MAY DAMAGE THE READERS PERCEPTION OF THE AUTHOR. THEN AGAIN, IT MIGHT ENHANCE IT. WHO KNOWS?

Sick of the situation.

I have HAD ENOUGH!

It's time for ACTION!

I am sick and fecking tired of feeling and being and looking fecking SICK and TIRED!

It has finally hit home.

Please tell me it's true...

Oh, it has. Big style.

Well, thank God for that...

Well, let's be honest. It can't go on like this for much longer. The start of this epiphany, this particular wake-up call was on Saturday after I had the free health check at Ibn Battuta. A blood pressure of 170/110 was recorded, and the nurse said, quite casually, that it was high. I put it down to the stresses of shopping (which the WIFE and kids will testify is my least favourite weekend activity, closely followed by sticking pins in my eyes whilst listening to Toploader). Having done some research (Oh no, not the cyberchondria again...) and talked to a couple of people, it seems that such a reading is really quite high. I should really get a couple more readings to be sure, but I think it's obvious what I am doing to myself. So enough is enough.

I've spent the last decade blaming everyone but myself. I've got a knackered hip, following a bout of Perthes Disease as a kid. I used that as an excuse to do no exercise, especially when the Orthopeadic Surgeon at a now-closed Military hospital in North Yorkshire told me that I shouldn't be playing football on a hip like mine back in 1993 or so. Oh, OK. I will continue to eat fast food, confectionary and drink alcohol, but I won't do anything in place of the football. Come on, everyone knows that swimming and cycling and the like are incredibly boring. Team sport (even when you're completely shite) is where it's at. There's camaraderie, banter, unexpected hat-tricks and a chance to injure people you dislike under the guise of hard tackles (sorry about the knee-cap, Yamamoto). These solo sports are utter bobbins. Isn't there a song about the loneliness of the Long Distance Runner? I always thought of these marathon-runner types as a bit strange. You must be mental to want to run a marathon in the first place, and then all that solitude...26 miles of it. I'd go mad. der.

So, I put on a lot of weight over the next few years. By 1999 I was knocking on for 20 stone. That's 280lbs for our American audience, or 127kgs for the metric-minded. Somehow, I managed to get the WIFE pregnant. No, really, the BOY is mine. Anyway, in the year 2000, about 4 months before he was born I had another moment of awakening and decided to go to Weight Watchers, and promptly lost nearly 5 stone on the Points system. Quite an acheivement, and by the time the BOY was in the big, wide world, he clapped eyes on a relatively slim father.

About a month after the BOY came into the world, I had my first episode of Atrial Fibrillation. This was brought on by excessive caffeine consumption in the form of Red Bull and Pro Plus and coffee by the gallon, all taken to keep me awake due to chronic sleep deprevation caused by a cholicky baby. The AF had probably been there all the time, and the combination of caffeine-abuse and extreme, short-term weight-loss probably contributed to the onset of the arrhythmia. The first time only lasted half an hour. Then I had an episode once every six months for a couple of years, usually after a drinking binge. One was brought on by a rather boozy night in a Chinese restaurant just before Christmas. MSG, alcohol and caffeine are all triggers for it. Not too wise, as Confuscious might have said. Then I went for a 9-month stint in Taiwan, and even with all the decauchery that involved, I only had 2 episodes. With most of these episodes I just stayed in bed for the day and they always stopped by the evening or the next day. I would wake up in AF after a blow-out, then lie in bed all day, then wake up the next day in Normal Sinus Rhythm again. Cool. Just like a hangover with knobs on, really.

Hey, is this going anywhere? It's turning into a life story...

Yeah, yeah. I'm going somewhere with this. It's all important, the background to where I am now. Anyway, after Taiwan I managed to go over a year without having an episode. I forgot about it. I became complacent. The weight I had lost was coming back, pound by pound. It ALWAYS does with these kind of diets. I had a couple of goes at Slimming World, but didn't have the will-power this time. Then the GIRL came along in mid-2004. About a month or two later we drove to the Channel Tunnel, making our way to a holiday on the Continent. It was Friday 13th. The traffic was absolutely atrocious, making our journey 3 hours longer than it should have been and leaving us tired and stressed when we got to the hotel just before the tunnel. I had a bar of chocolate before retiring. Snickers or something. Not a Marathon. Big mistake. The beast (as AF sufferers ALL call it) knocked on the door, and despite my protestations, I couldn't keep it out, and I went into an episode. Bugger. Fear gripped me. I was in a strange place and it happened at a strange time, for me. So we rang 999 and I got taken to a hospital in Ashford where they poked and prodded and stuck me full of needles before deciding to give me a drug to help the heart get back to normal. It worked like a dream.

It turns out I was also suffering from a virus, so the combination of the stress of the journey and the virus had caused the AF to rear its ugly head again. The hospital let me go the next day, giving me a prescription for an anti-arrhythmic drug that I've been on pretty much ever since. Attempts to come off it have failed. It does control it in the main, but I have ectopic (missed) heart beats on a regular basis. Some days are worse than others, depending on how I feel. And at the moment, I'm feeling pretty crappy, if truth be told.

I know why this is: I'm back up to 20 stone again. I've been creeping up and up to that dreaded milestone again, and the last 3 months of over-eating here in Dubai have just made matters worse. I've brought this on myself. And now my blood-pressure is high as well.

Oh, woe is me!

See this? It's the smallest violin in the world...

Aye. Very good. So over the last few days I've been looking into things again, and through Hans Larsen's fantastic website about AF, I've formulated a plan. On the message boards and forums and conference sessions there have been a lot of discussions about The Paleo Diet, or Caveman diet. There are a few books about it knocking around. I've had an inkling for some time that this was the way to go. I even bought the Loren Cordain book back in the UK but never got round to starting it. It's like it's been staring me in the face: I'm making myself ill by eating CRAP. Not brain science, or even rocket surgery, I know, but all my many ailments - the feeling crappy, the obesity, the insomnia, the fibromyalgia, maybe even the AF itself - are down to what I've been putting in my mouth.

The theory behind the Paleo diet is that we aren't designed to eat what we now eat, and our bodies are reacting to this by treating these "foodstuffs" as foreign invaders, and essentially producing an extreme allergic reaction, but at the same time, we crave what makes us ill, because we get a rush from eating high glycemic index foods that give us quick fixes of energy. Agriculture, a relatively recent innovation for mankind, has been a curse (in more ways than one, and I don't mean grumpy farmers), because for the first million or two years as human beings we ate as hunter-gatherers. We ate what we could hunt and gather, not what we farmed and mass-produced. All these grains and starchy vegetables that we have to process are poison to our systems. Millions of people are waking up to it, and realising that the modern carb-rich, processed diet is slowly eating away at us and making us ill. Diabetes, heart disease, obesity - these are modern conditions caused by the way we eat. I know some will say it's another version of Atkins, but there are essential differences - namely eating lean meat and avoiding dairy as well as being able to eat fruit for the carbs we do need.

Bloody hell, I've convinced myself. I'll be getting called a shill if I'm not careful. Anyway, I'm going to give it a go. A real go. I've tried so many things, and have chased my tail hither and thither looking for the Holy Grail. It seems to make more sense the more I look into it. I don't want to carry on the way I am and end up dying early and missing out on what could be a great life with a great family.

It's time to get a life. My life.

Hurrah!

Off with the horns, on with the show. This is about Dubai. And bloating. And beer, which I'll have to knock on the head now....

Rain, Rain......COME BACK!!!

We nearly, NEARLY saw rain on Friday. It's strange how you start to miss these kind of things. I'll be missing cheeky-chappy chavs standing outside the shops asking politely for a cigarette next. OK, maybe not. The point being, we haven't seen any since we arrived here. For me, that is 3 months without a hint of precipitation, which is something totally alien to someone hailing from the United Kingdom's verdant, lush, frequently-irrigated-from-the-sky pastures.

Anyway, to make a short story long, we headed to the border with Oman on Friday with the express purpose of getting our visit visas renewed. They run out after 60 days, which meant we had to leave the UAE and come back again, so we drove out through the desert and past loads of camels towards Hatta, carrying straight on over the fort roundabout and between the mountains towards the border, which is about another 10km along the road.

As we approached the mountains, we noticed that there were big cloud formations just beyond. They looked like rain clouds - big, bright and bulbous with a menacing grey under-belly. Excitement grew in the family unit. We were actually looking forward to seeing some rain, maybe even going outside in it and dancing like madmen. As it was, we missed the rain. We arrived at the Omani passport checkpoint facility about 20 minutes late, I reckon. The ground was wet all around from a recent downpour, and the clouds were busy making their way into Oman. Ho-hum.

The border crossing and visa renewal process was, well...frustrating. We passed through three seperate border control points on the way to Oman, and the same three on the way back. There was a UAE passport point, followed by an Omani customs point and then the Omani passport checkpoint, about 5 kilometres after the customs point. We weren't actually sure if we could drive into Oman, because our car hire company had completely bamboozled us by trying to sell us insurance to drive there then telling us we couldn't drive in Oman with UK licences. The border points themselves had very little in the way of visible information about what to do and where to go, so there was a lot of guesswork, stupid-question-asking, and gesticulation from heavily-armed border guards, whose presence is a blessing to parents with fidgety, whiny kids. "See the man with the gun? If you don't shut up...."

After getting stamped out of the UAE, which involved getting out of the car and queueing at the window of a little white hut, we just sort of muddled our way past customs, buying insurance at the little office over on the wrong side of the road, then driving onwards not knowing what to do next. We finally came across the passport control checkpoint, which is a large, brand-new building in the middle of nowhere. Again, there were no signs telling us what to do, so we parked the car in the puddles created by the recent rain and entered the building to find a large gaggle of confused-looking people queueing at various windows. Most of these people were expats doing the same thing as us. There were more border guards, with even bigger guns, milling around, keeping an eye out for naughty children.

After standing in one queue for a couple of minutes I struck up a conversation with the British chap in front of me, and learned that I had to queue at a different window to get some forms and pay the visa fees, then fill in the forms and queue at another window for the stamps, then get in the car and queue up to get into Oman. This is a common feature of this part of the world; nothing can be done in one place or in one go.You invariably end up queueing at three seperate locations to get anything official done. It was the same when I had to go and open an account with DEWA for the electricity and water, and it's the same for a driving licence, or so I've been told. I'm surprised I haven't had to queue at four different windows and fill in a dozen forms in triplicate just to get some baked beans with pork sausages.

Eventually we got our forms, paying 240 dirhams for the pleasure (the man did say 120 to begin with, then sort of changed his mind), filled them in, queued for the stamps, got back in the car and then drove to the wrong window. They let us through anyway, and we did a quick u-turn through the car park on the Oman side and queued again to get the exit stamps. That was the easy bit, and we were back in no-man's land after our shortest visit ever to any country - all of 2 minutes.

There was more standing and queueing at the UAE border, but the actual process was fairly painless. The man behind the window at the very basic checkpoint stamped us back in without any searching questions, and we finally re-entered the United Arab Emirates nearly 2 hours after leaving. We were ready to drop, so I'm glad that we had had the foresight to book ourselves in for the night at the Hatta Fort Hotel, which I've mentioned before. 5 minutes back into the UAE we pulled into the Hotel grounds. A smiling, short man called Maxwell brought us delicious and refreshing fruit punch drinks while we checked in, before showing us to our chalet-style room with a great view of the mountains. The WIFE and the kids took the opportunity to go for a ride on a huge camel that happened to be at the hotel, and we spent the rest of the day at the swimming pool, splashing each other and enjoying the cooling of the day with sunset approaching before eating a pleasant meal and retiring to bed for an early night. The kids went out like lights, even in strange beds in a strange room. They have their moments.

The next day, we ate a hearty breakfast (missing the real pork bacon that was hidden around the corner at the hot buffet), played a game of mini-golf in remarkably hot morning conditions, then headed back to Dubai city. Of course, we still had to do the weekly food shop, so we headed to Geant at Ibn Battuta and on the way out I spotted a stand for a local hospital offering free health checks. The inner hypocondriac couldn't resist, so I went and asked for a check, which was basically just a blood-pressure test. Surprise of surprises - it was high. Shopping with kids? Well, duh.