Growing up

They struggle a bit to find their own spaces, the lads do. They have to share their books, and the games are all communal. We don’t even really know who owns this T shirt, these shorts, those underpants. Given the logistical difficulties with getting around Abu Dhabi (and plus, did I mention I hate driving) I don’t do any after school stuff that they can’t both do. They do all of the same things all of the time. They always have which has always partly been because I’ve been so very tired ever since they were born really, and the fact that we get anywhere at all sometimes surprises me. They have a pretty intense relationship which makes our jobs as the adults in their lives sometimes simple, sometimes complex.

Until last night, they were even sharing a bed. When they were little, they would start off in separate beds, but we would always find them snuggled in together when we went off to bed, then, when we moved here, we inherited a double and a queen and we just never got around to getting them another bed. And anyway, we do the usual bed hopping that lots of families with young children do me here, him there, that boy here, that boy there. We don’t co-sleep, but the arrangements have always been fairly fluid, especially because I’ve spent a lot of time alone with them and often we’ve gone to bed at the same time.

But that’s changing. Last night, they slept not just in separate beds, but separate rooms. It was all planned and arranged by youngest lad. And while he, youngest lad, was busy organising his new space and his books and his lego and his pokemon cards, eldest was saying, ‘Mum, will you snuggle me before I go to sleep?’

Image: leaving Istanbul train station on their first ever overnight train journey.
train station, istanbul

Covered in sand

So it’s not true that hundreds and thousands of cars are being abandoned as people flee their financial over-commitments in the UAE, but it is true that people get into financial difficulties here, leave and abandon their cars, and thus their car loan, in the process. This is on the street where I used to work. I don’t know whether it’s been abandoned, but apparently it’s been sitting there for quite some time.

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Nobel prizes (something I never usually write about)

Usually, the announcement of the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature is another opportunity for me to think, ‘I’m something of a pretender really when it comes to the world of literature’. But because of that whole Central and South American thing the mister and I had in the nineties, I know a lot about this year’s winner.

Now, if you’re like me, and the announcement of the Nobel Prize winner makes you think, ‘Maybe I should read at least something by such and such’ and then you go to the bookstore and just pull something off the shelf, trusting that they’ve got what you need to read in stock, let me give you a piece of advice. Do not let the one thing you read be The Feast of the Goat. It contains what must be the singularly most disturbing piece of writing I have ever, ever read. It must be at least five years since I read it and more than any case study I have ever read for Amnesty, passages of The Feast of the Goat have haunted me, frightened me and made me despair for the state of the world. I’ve only read it once, but I still remember it vividly to the point that I can still pretty much see the pages in my mind and remember the chair I was sitting in when I read it. Maybe that means you should read it. I guess it made me even more grateful that my knowledge of human rights abuses has come from reading and hearing and not from lived experience.

On a lighter note, I would highly recommend Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter which is one of my Go To Books. It is great fun, and I never get bored of it. I think it was the first novel I read in Spanish. Which sort of depresses me, because there’s no way I could read it in Spanish now.

the kitchen this afternoon

The fridge beeps if the door is left open for longer than one minute.

The beeps are the kind that burrow into my brain.

Getting the celery to fit back in the vegetable drawer after taking out the capsicum and beans takes one minute and thirty seconds.

By the end of the week, I get an unhealthy pleasure out of chopping then boiling that celery.

Resolve

On my way to book group a few weeks ago, I walked through a gate and found myself in front of a villa which housed two canary yellow sports cars. I beat a hasty retreat, realising that this was not the villa of my friend and walked in the gate next door.

‘You’ll never believe,’ I said to my friend. ‘They’ve got matching Ferraris!’

She laughed and said, as if this were some kind of failing, ‘You really don’t know your cars, do you? One’s a Ferrari and one’s a Porsche.’

I know a sports car from a four wheel drive, but just as I left New Zealand not knowing my league from my union, so shall I leave the Middle East unable to distinguish between a Ferrari and a Porsche.