Jaunting Along

Persian carpet, Saudi Arabia It is always the personalities that are the most interesting in any place, but the most treacherous to write about. Both in terms of getting it wrong, and, in the event that they may one day discover your perhaps less-than-flattering description of them, also in terms of getting it right. Fem often shakes his head in bewilderment when I describe people to him; I ask him why, and he says, “But she is your friend ,” as if that meant I must cut off my sense of discernment at the root. Of course, at this stage I could quote Jane Austen's Mr Bennett, “For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours and laugh at them in our turn?” except that, of course, I am entirely without foible myself. But, truth to be told, I like my friends most because of their foibles rather than otherwise, they are more interesting, if necessarily more complex and complicated.  But before we can even get to characters, there is the context. The first few times I...

One of the cars I drove as a woman in Saudi Aramco, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia It’s sweltering here, 47 C the day that I took the car in to be re-gassed as the air-conditioning unit wasn’t working adequately. Fem (my husband) had been asked to undertake that task before my arrival but said he didn’t want it standing around for a few weeks, leaking gas. Leaking? That was the first I heard of it. So, with five kids in the house (two visitors) and a beleaguered Doris  (our South African house-keeper) trying to maintain order and wash all our clothes and clean the house of two months of Fem and abandonment, with the fine Saudi dust having settled over everything thanks in part to a 17 day dust storm in June, and with dust bunnies under the beds which the elder visiting child would point out to Doris leaving her greatly disgruntled (as if she had anything to do with the accumulation of dust in her absence),  I took myself off to the Triple A (Arabian Automobile Association) ...