we're all making our own sense of things
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.
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.
On the days that the person I think I am aligns with the person I really am, I find myself more exhausted than you’d expect.
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.
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.
Though having said that, a fruit salad is never diminished by the grape.
I’m a big fan of the grape. But not in a salad.
That the mister walked and talked straight through the afternoon, the black of the night and into today, is proof enough that those mojitos were not of pure Cuban descent.
The mister was even less impressed by my decision to pay for a horoscope chart than I thought he would be.
One bad thing: in typical Abu Dhabi style, the gym of which I am a member has just implemented some enormous changes without really thinking through the impact of those changes. They seem, for example, to have given reciprocal rights to members of the Ladies’ Club which means that now all of those women come over for classes. The result is that the numbers of people at the morning classes have increased to completely unsustainable levels. I think it would have been more sensible to run more classes over at the Ladies’ Club because there just isn’t room in the studio anymore and it’s getting very rough and tumble as people jostle for position. I’m enjoying the classes less and less, and every day I find myself less inclined to return. I’m not entirely sure what to do about this, as my mental wellbeing rests absolutely on my attendance at those classes, and I am not at all sporty or athletic, so don’t know what I could do in their place.
One good thing: flickr has just been unblocked. Can anyone send me the user name of my account? It’s been so long since I used it, I can’t remember who I am!