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If nothing else, I have learned the point of Charles Dickens while here in the Gulf. For those who have found the time to read his work, Dickens is an enormously rich writer. In the Victorian era, he wrote the soap operas of the time, delivered in weekly chunks to his adoring fans. Just the […]

Thurs 10 Aug Another sickening accident on the buildings – and this time it’s at Al B*da, near this apartment, where I have been gleefully photographing the frenetic tearing down of entire streets, usually by one man and his digger (which shows just how well constructed these buildings are). In this case, five Pakistani construction […]

Need a laff?Go to the Donegal Mooathon website (don’t ask….) at www.mooathon.com. Click on ‘contact us’ and then on ‘click here’ for a hilarious Blue Oyster Cult cow bell attack on ‘Don’t Fear the Reaper…’

A beat-up truck the oil boom obviously left behind! Here, petrol stations are marked on maps and there are very few of them; no Shell, Esso, Statoil, or heaven forbid, Texaco. Petrol is ridiculously cheap and I suppose controlled by the state.Three weeks and two days to go here – but who’s counting!

Summer in the city – note abandoned bike! High mehar (dowry) demands are putting many young local men off marriage. Some even state that seeking a woman’s hand in marriage is like attending an auction, with parents willing to give their daughters away only to whoever can cough up the most money. Twenty-four-year-old Rashid Al […]

THERE is a noticeable rise in the number of sex-related crimes in this country, a report in an Arabic daily here said, with the item thne picked up by both English-language papersThe report said one can rarely find a session of the criminal court that did not deal with such a case.According to the paper, […]

This country has the highest rate of hospitalisation per head of the population than any other country in the world, I read somewhere. In S8udi, one in three suffer from diabetes and it’s nearly as bad in Gulf states. Now read on (from the local paper)…. Most birth defects in this country are the outcome […]

This country has the highest rate of hospitalisation per head of the population than any other country in the world, I read somewhere. In S8udi, one in three suffer from diabetes and it’s nearly as bad in Gulf states. Now read on (from the local paper)…. Most birth defects in this country are the outcome […]