Went to what is supposed to be the best coffee place in Dubai. A bit soul-deadening, like the rest of the city, and everything is breathtakingly expensive. The taxis feel especially pricy after Central Asia – my journey to the airport in Almaty was the same length as the taxi from the airport to where […]
Fury at the singer
Daily Express, 22 January 2022 Daily Star, 22 January 2022
Bad aunt
I am now a bad aunt to at least six sets of nephews and nieces. I acquired another a new nephew to be a bad aunt to today – he is not new to the world, being around two, but this was the first time I’d seen the son of one of my closest university […]
Something starting to click
In the past week or so, as part of my effort to turn my life around and reduce regrets when on a ventilator, I have allocated some time daily to study something interesting. This has been raags, despite my tin ear. I’ve been working my way through a few websites, including the one below, a […]
Actual weekend
Today is the start of the actual weekend; yesterday’s idle day was a bank holiday for the GF and a day without work for me. In the morning, the four of us went back to Serenity for another excellent meal. I must say, they have the best fried rice I’ve ever had, I would dearly […]
Weewaawaayoo
That was the title my much younger sibling, a toddler, gave to Oasis’s ‘Champagne Supernova’, it was one of her favourite songs at the time, as it was mine. I was not a toddler but a teenager, a startlingly naive and underexposed one, including to music which made me receptive to anything and everything regardless […]
The most beautiful there is
Urdu poetry is the most beautiful there is for me; strange, given that I am much more at home in English, read much more in English, yet Urdu goes to the heart like nothing else. I remember the pang of pride I felt at my Ivy League university when I was introduced to an extremely […]
Five o’clock chorus
I woke up at five in the morning to the sound of men singing sad songs in harmony, with a mournful trumpet accompanying them. It was actual people singing, not a recording: though the trumpet was well played, it was definitely not slick and professional. Very peculiar, I thought, go to sleep it’s five in […]
Head case
The second day was less pleasant than the first. The first part of the walk was very easy indeed: first a steep walk down to the floor of the narrow valley with a small yellow silted river (I would call it a stream really) running down in, and then along the stream for about four […]
Second day off
Today we decided to stroll up to the aqueduct. This is outside the Centro Historico, but through a very lovely, quiet neighbourhood crisscrossed by canals, green and full of trees. We stopped for lunch at a superb little place with an outdoor garden overlooking one of the (dry) canals and ringed by old stone arches. […]