Blowing in the wind

A Shamal wind was blowing though town late last week which, though not a full blown dust storm, coated everything with a fine layer of dust. There were some spectacular sky effects towards sunset, but otherwise it wasn’t a great weekend for being out and about.

After a bit of looking around I have finally found a decent cafe with a decent wireless internet connection, where they are quite happy for you to sit and surf provided you buy a couple of coffees. And they have a fairly spectacular cake range too. So, until I get a home connection sorted, I think it will become a regular haunt, provided I don’t let the cakes undo the good work on my waistline achieved since last autumn. That isn’t to say that it was an easy network to connect to, taking both the waitress and the manageress to sort it out, but now it’s stored in my laptop it will be much easier next time.

After my adventures with local electricity last week I thought I’d better try to get a surge-protected extension cable for my lap-top. I’ve already lost one PC to a power surge in the UK, so I’m a bit wary. For whatever reason, the only shop where I’ve seen surge-protected ones has been Ikea. Now, Ikea in Abu Dhabi bears a close approximation to my own personal hell: you are required to walk through the entire shop, via a labyrinth of room settings, before arriving anywhere even remotely resembling a shop where you can actually buy anything. Add into this mix hordes of happy weekenders ambling through en famille and you’ve arrived in a place not that dissimilar to Oxford Street in the week before Christmas. I wonder if shop-rage is a recognised phenomenon?

And on the subject of shopping, what does the ethical shopper buy in the Middle East? Locally produced almost certainly means irrigated with de-salinated water which, in carbon miles terms, is probably roughly equal to a round trip to the moon. Is meat from the Indian subcontinent likelier to have had a more traumatic life than the equivalent from Brazil? Or is it all much of a muchness? It always seems, though it almost certainly isn’t, so much more clear-cut in Europe. I do, of course, fully realise that living here is one of the least sustainable things it’s possible to do and that my carbon footprint must be the size of a woolly mammoth these days, but that doesn’t mean one should give up entirely.

This week’s novelty buy in LuLu are banana flowers. Any suggestions as to how one goes about cooking them? All my cookery books that might be remotely useful in providing tasty suggestions are in storage in London. There are also loads of really unusual looking Indian vegetables, though I suspect some of them might look an awful lot more interesting than they taste.

The flat doesn’t have a washing machine, so I’ve been taking my clothes to a local laundry: a week’s clothes washed and ironed costs the equivalent of about £6, which is worth it for the ironing alone. The last person to iron my boxer shorts was my Mother, and that was an awfully long time ago.