CENSOR ME THIS

“I can say what I like, it’s a free country” is the refrain of children and idiots.  We’re right to pride ourselves on our freedom where it exists, but we’re also sage enough to recognize that there need to be qualifications on that freedom.

Limits on liberty is that? Caveats to our freedom of speech you say? Yes, look before you gather your placards and start picketing my desktop publishing software – hear me out. ‘Absolutes’ are a dangerous thing, the jaeger bomb you know you probably don’t need at the end of a long night of universal truth. Anarchy, for example, is a beautiful idea, but like many beautiful ideas: it remains beautiful only as long as we don’t have to watch the messy breeched delivery into reality, only to then have those infuriating cack-handed agenda-mongering humans spoiling it all yet again by poorly acting out their interpretations of it’s whim. Hang on a second Barry, was it anarchy we were supposed to be doing or kill all the poor people?

One of the main problems with unbridled freedom is that Individual freedoms can inhibit the freedoms of other individuals – to put it in more visual terms – my freedom to fire off mortar shells in to unsuspecting crowds of people may eventually come in to conflict your freedom not to be horrifically slain by mortar shrapnel or falling debris.  Whose freedom is more important? Well I think most of us would agree that your freedom to live without the tyranny of my fiery death rain supersedes my freedom to thump giant explosive shells in to your immediate vicinity. But then again, I have a mortar cannon, so, you know. You could complain to an independent arbiter but it’s anarchy out there so a) they’re probably far too busy looting equipment from looting equipment stores b) they don’t exist.

14 countries have written laws on people denying that the holocaust happened, I guess the temptation would be to round these people up and put them on a train in East Germany and… well if you start on that course –the whole world goes blind doesn’t it? We can’t incite racial or gender hatred with our words, defame or libel one another, say naughty words before the watershed or mention Lord Voldemort’s name, lest he rise from the grave once more and go through an entertaining but predictable campaign of nuisance against bespectacled adolescents via the medium of defence against the dark arts teachers. S#!t. I said it. Sorry Daniel. Which neatly directs us towards self-censorship. I mean you could go round telling people what you think uninhibited by a nagging sense of decency, but in the long run – life is so much easier and a lot less stabby if you hold back just a bit and filter your patter.  Can we all agree that for a happy and longer life, there needs to be some measure of censorship?

For us ex-pats living in Dubai, we often experience different types of censorship to the ones we are familiar with back home.  I fundamentally believe that if you migrate to a country, then it is categorically and unquestionably your obligation to obey the laws whether you see the reasoning behind them or not. There are some things I’m sure we’d like to see changed, but as guests here – it’s really not our place to start telling people how to run things. We learned these lessons during the tenure of the British Empire when we turned up on various countries doorsteps, audibly tutting disapprovingly at methods of production or religious practises and saying “well I see what you’re doing with your natural resources, but look just give it here a second you’re making a mess” – as if wrestling control of a computer mouse off a child that’s been trying to close a browser window, and you’re worried they’re about to email your banking passwords to North Korea, accidentally delete the original copy of the universal declaration of human rights and reformat the hard drive with a picture of a kitten in a Martini glass under a caption reading ‘shaken not purred’. They’re almost certainly not going to cause any irreparable damage, and who knows – maybe they’ll find a better way of closing internet explorer, like banishing it to cyber oblivion where it can live out eternity with the Microsoft Word animated paperclip assistant, just like it deserves. The point is what works for some, doesn’t necessarily work for others.

That being said. Yep, keep heading up Hypocrisy Avenue, there’s a complete U-Turn ahead. That being said, where’s the fun in censorship if it doesn’t spark a bit of controversial debate eh? eh? There are common areas of censorship between the UAE and… ughhh let’s just call them the West shall we? Europe, The Americas, Australia etc… those lot (who of course have varying censorship areas in and between themselves) – just with different emphases. The humour is in observing the differences between what is deemed acceptable, revelling in individuality as nations.  

Having the privilege of being an observer in Dubai, I’ve noticed that one of the TV channels shows Australian Masterchef. The censors have blocked out certain words using the pincer tactic of nulling the audio feed and using the crime watch face pixelator on the thing the audio feed is describing. The certain words I’m referring to are porcine products. What I find bizarre about this, is not the continuity wrecking ball of awkward silence,  I’m on board – protect the sensibilities of your nation’s people – I just find it strange that they show the segment at all, because if this recipe is haram, you don’t particularly want people cooking it anyway. But it is pretty funny to watch.

“So Gary what are you going to do with the *awkward silence*?”

“Well Paul, I’ve marinated the *awkward silence* in mango for about 12 hours, the great thing about *awkward silence* is that it’s a really fatty meat so it soaks up the juices really well”

We can pretty much follow what’s going on here, the curve ball occurs when until products of the same origin get involved, as so often do in cooking

“and what are you doing now Gary?”

“well I’m just dicing the cured Spanish *awkward silence*, whilst I’ve got a few rashers of *awkward silence* simmering away in the pan, as soon as the *awkward silence* is done, I’m gonna add the *awkward silence* to the *awkward silence* and gently dribble the *awkward silence* over the rest of the *awkward silence* - then  voila, one of the best  mango *awkward silence* *awkward silence* *awkward silence* you’ve ever tasted

You could take the *awkward silence* as a wildcard – substitute ingredients for whatever you desire  - accidentally create a unique and original masterpiece, but I’m guessing if that were the case – you’d probably be on the show and then you wouldn’t have to worry about filling in the blanks.  I guess one of the reason these sections are still shown, is a concession, an appreciation that people from other cultures might want to watch them. Or perhaps to protect continuity. Either way, it leads me to my next point – what is equally interesting, is what is let through the censorship filters.  I’ve switched on the television at 3 PM on a casual Tuesday afternoon here, and they’re showing a relatively intact horror movie. Maybe it’s one that I’ve seen, maybe I’m thinking “yeah they showed that bit with the shovel but they can’t possibly, oh no, wait they are, he’s going to, with the rusty cork-screw”. Say what you like, I think it’s one of the better episodes of ‘keeping up appearances’.

I lived in France in my early twenties, they had a satellite TV package through the provider Canal+, which gave you access, on one of the 4 main channels, to explicit hardcore pornography. Yep, 3 PM on a Tuesday – quick bit of channel hopping and there it is “yeah they showed that bit with the shovel, but surely they can’t do the rusty cork-screw?”. But they did, and I watched it several times just to make sure it wasn’t a glitch. We can use this duality of what is deemed acceptable for public consumption and what is not to gain a very general broad snapshot of that country. Draw stereotypes about the way it’s differences manifest in society. How much does a snowflake’s uniquity enhance it’s beauty? We can come up with a list of many reasons of why we are here, and not back home – but surely one feature that us ex-pats in Dubai share – is the attraction to exoticism.  Just as the draw of the forbidden tempts us to circumvent censorship. And you can’t spell ‘very passionate nationalists’ with the letters V, P and N.

TYPE-2 CLEOPATRA SYNDROME

Since moving to Dubai I’ve observed a curious phenomenon within the (admittedly middle class) expatriate community I have become a part of. In the process of coming up with a name for it, I was railroaded in to calling it Type-2 Cleopatra Syndrome because a quick google search revealed that some tweed-bearded psych grad had already nabbed ‘Cleopatra Syndrome’ for something completely different. I didn’t spend the extra 5 minutes it would have taken to find out what the symptoms involve because unless it was about having a fringe and doing the flat palmed ‘walk like an Egyptian’ dance, I would have been devastated. Cleopatra’s claim to fame in the pop psyche is as the lady who bathed in asses milk. Why would anybody want to do that? A couple of reasons; maybe she thought it would provide any number of the miraculous benefits modern cosmetic companies say are unleashed by their own new formulas derived from the humble cumquat or maybe because, like damn it, I can afford it and I’m the freaking queen.

The syndrome manifests in divacine tendencies: a narrowing of the awareness of others, profound sense of self-importance or marching down the street wearing nothing but stilettos and proclaiming to all within earshot that you are wearing the finest silk robes the world has ever seen. But what is it in this new society that creates these Cleopatra like tendencies?

Service providers, through the huge pool of cheap labour, have created an economy that prioritises convenience for the sizeable middle class. Restaurants will deliver to your door, they will even deliver through your door if you can’t be bothered to get up and you’ve left it open, if you give the delivery driver a tip I’m sure they would even lovingly spoon each mouthful of food in to your mouth and wipe your chin after you’re done. Nannies, drivers, maids, dog walkers, chefs – home help is in abundant supply in Dubai, there’s a couple of niches left to occupy but as soon as the first Candy Crush level beater butler turns up with a chauffeur companion that will flip off drivers that cut you up on the Sheikh Syed Road and listen attentively to the stories about your other half’s day at work, that’s it, all non-employment tasks of the daily routine covered by outsourced personnel. You can’t even pack your own groceries in a super market, even if you want to, try wrestling a sheet of plastic out of the hands of a till clerk in a convenience store – it’s impossible, it’s like trying to take a Jack Russell out of the mouth of another Jack Russell.

If you tell somebody enough times that they don’t have to do a particular task, because it is in some way below them – they will start to believe it. And it is scientific fact, that that will make them a douchebag.

Look it’s absolutely human nature to want a better standard of living. It’s an evolutionary imperative, a fundamental driver of human behavior, perhaps the strongest one after the need to pop out mini-we. Altruism is actually an aberrant behavior if you think about it – poor Dave over there looks hungry, I have some beans, but I quite like the taste of beans and I’m also quite hungry. For me to walk over and give at least some of my beans to Dave is in a nutritional sense, and for the furtherment of me and my clan, absolutely the wrong thing to do. So I stay seated eat my beans all the while telling myself that Dave doesn’t look much like a bean eater anyway. What lifts us out of this mentality, is compassion,  it’s putting yourself in Dave’s shoes and thinking about duties, about the ‘oughts’ of a community; what is fair: whether this is an innately human quality or prerequisite for the contract of society is not for me to decide. Or you, so stop it. Stop deciding.

What dulls these humanising inclinations is not detachment from society, but rather an insidious yet attractive regression to a primal state, a state where a false perception of self-entitlement prevails – made possible by people doing stuff for you, that you previously had to do yourself. In more plain terms – you start off by thinking “that Kanye West is a real piece of work, walking around getting his entourage of fluffers to pick the pulp out of his juice” and then after a period of months and years you end up agreeing with him on almost every single point of his manifesto of all consuming ego.

The reason that I’m sharing this is not to provide a wholesale condemnation of my fellow expatriates, it’s so that we can recognise the warning signs in ourselves and each other and therefore help steer our ship of conscientious objectors to less rancorous waters. To aid our awareness, I have compiled a quick reference guide of some of the possible early onset flags:

1. Looking at your steam iron and contemplating putting mineral water in it.

2. Deliberating about whether it’s proper that a maid might dress you.

3. Expecting people in the service industry to turn their back on thousands of years of capitalist economics and give you something just “because you want it”.

4. Having Victorian era job titles in your employ (please see: scullery maid, chimney sweep, powder monkey).

5. Expecting people in the service industry to hand over their private mobile numbers, so that you can contact them at 04:00 in the morning and assuming they will gleefully answer and sort out your problem using the special abilities of remote server mind control that only people on modest salaries have.

6. Ordering single items from mini-marts based in your apartment building. When you’re not hungover. More than twice. In an hour.

7. Owning ‘house shoes’.

8. If your Chihuahua went to finishing school, has done a Thai cookery course, has a ballet teacher, Latin tutor or term report card.

9. You stubbornly refuse to recycle because the recycling bins are all the way down, RIGHT IN FRONT OF THE RECEPTION AREA OF YOUR APARTMENT BUILDING.

10. Collecting stories of any of the points above.

We can overcome. We can turn the tide. We can become the model citizens this country deserves us to be. But we have to actively try to be less Veruca Salt and little bit more like a guilty feeling Peppa Pig.  

Is that A Mexican Wrap In Your Pocket Or Do You Have Dysentery ?

One of the most satisfying complaint letters I've ever written, it was to a restaurant specialisng in chicken, that to avoid a lawsuit and deportation, will remain nameless. Menu items have also had their names changed to prevent identification.

Dear Sirs

I am writing this correspondence partly as a letter of complaint but also as public record of my last will and testament. I made an order from your restaurant through the popular takeaway comparison site (namewitheld.com) - seduced by the user reviews which bolstered your claim to be "xxxxxxx" (name witheld). The delivery was timely and the gentleman transporting the goods was an excellent ambassador for your company. He politely completed the transaction as we went through the ritualistic dance of swapping money for merchandise. A transaction that I now regret with the same fervor as somebody that selects shaving equipment based on the relative degree of rustiness on the blunt jagged edges.

I opened the bag that he delivered and stared down at the food - 1 portion of chips, 1 can of fizzy drink, 1 box of spicy chick cack (edit) and a Mexican wrap. 

To be absolutely fair - the can of coke was OK, it met my expectations head on with a firm handshake and a familiar nod. 

The chips however were cold, damp and hewn from the same material as Hugh Grant's hair. If they were a top trump card, their Taste Factor would be 17 - meaning they would lose in a head to head with grouting putty (which incidentally has a taste factor of 19 (in case you were wondering)). But that being said - the chips were by far and away the highlight of the food offerings. 

Let me get on to the The Mexican Wrap, before the stomach cramps, diarrhea and the tunnel of light take away my ability to moan. Mexico, ahhh Mexico - spiritual home of the half-arsed job and the burrito - I can perfectly understand why you decided to call the wrap that - some may say that it's misleading, that calling a food item Mexican - means that you should probably make some effort to simulate the taste inspired by that area. You know what I say to those people - those dream tramplers? Well by and large I agree with them, but I'd stick up for you in as much as the taste of the wrap did effectively encapsulate certain parts of Mexico - very specifically: anywhere you might find the slowly decaying carcass of a stray dog on a heavily polluted river estuary. 

The sauce: I imagine that at some point in your efforts to synthesize your own version of the Colonel's 11 secret herbs and spices - you gave up, and focused your time and attention on a much more fruitful activity like bending space time or harvesting cosmic rays as a cheap and limitless solution to the world's energy crisis. I assume that during these great works you happened upon a way to titrate dark matter and were pleasantly surprised that when added to a squeeze of lime juice and a foaming broth of poultry offal - gave the Mexican wrap just the right level of gut wrenching billious humor the haggered pension-aged chicken it's paired with deserved. 

Spicy Chick cack (edit). My own fault really - I've always been a sucker for creative marketing. Chick cack (edit) is I presume the latin name for the species used as the meat for the dish - is it a predecessor of the chicken or the next evolutionary leap? It's funny because - people often say when introduced to a new meat - that it tastes like chicken, ironically - your chicken doesn't actually taste like chicken. It tastes like the colour brown. An achievement that shouldn't go unrewarded by the Nobel committee. 

I calculate - based on the reproductive cycles of amoebic dysentery and aggressive crypto-bacteria - I have only a few hours left before the coma kicks in and I complete the rest of my life's dining through a tube. In that time I would be much obliged if you could confirm to me that you don't provide any of the catering to the intensive care wards of hospitals local to this area. My next of kin however would happily accept any money off vouchers you may deem fit to offer for cans of coke.

Many Thanks

The Fear Of Change

When I first got to Dubai, I heard a story about a man that walked in to Zoom store and paid for a packet of cigarettes with a 500 AED note, and was neither asked if he had 'anything smaller sir?' Or 'do you have 1 Dihrum change sir?'. Of course we can conclude this is pure fantasy, an urban legend that stemmed from a desperate need to believe that somewhere - there is a cash business that is stocked with an appropriate supply of change for a days trading. 

How often have you given a taxi driver a 100 AED note for a fare of less than 30 dihrums and not received a look which should be more accurately paired with handing over a 12 sided Rubick's cube and a blindfold? Only for him to grudgingly whip out a wad of notes that would feed all the slot machines in Las Vegas for a calendar month.

I simply cannot fathom why businesses - whose sole method of transaction is cash - can regard you with contempt for wanting to pay with the smallest denomination of note the cash machine plugged into the front of their shop will give you. £20 ? £20 ? Who are you, the sultan of Microsoft? I can't possibly change that, why don't you pop over the road to the Ferrari garage and see if you can change it up in to some gold billion.

Either someone needs to change the lowest note value in the cash machines, get all retailers (and taxis) into the 21st Eftpos century, use common sense to make sure your cash float is ample for a days trading (most places have been open for more than one day so using yesterday's accounting should provide a reasonable template), or we just do away with the system of financial exchange altogether and buy peanuts with whimsical tales of our homeland, and soft drinks with interpretive dance. Let Buzzfeed decide.

The Wheel Of Disproportionate Hangovers

I'm a strict atheist, and as such never drink. But when I do drink, which is all the time, I'm drunk now in fact, I get drunk on good old booze, moonshine, grandpa's old whooping cough syrup, not on life. What do people think they are saying by being ''drunk on life''? That they're giddy with delirium from the same continuum that they've been part of since birth. No, what they're saying is - 'void my driving license immediately, it would be irresponsible to leave children in my care, have you seen my other shoe? Whose shoe is this? fetch me a kebab'. It's largely irrelevant because life is condition of existence and not a hopsy beverage - which means these people are either lying, or suffering from a mental illness where they dissociate and absentmindedly sniff marker pens every 5 minutes.

Anyway, I digress, as usual. So, after a drinking session - we're left in varying degrees of fragility which should be relative to the quantity, type and mixing (enhanced or mitigated by other negligible contributory factors) of alcohol drunk. In Dubai however, it doesn't seem to follow any such observable pattern. Sometimes I have literally a few small glasses of wine and wake up with a hangover worthy of 4th movie in the film franchise of the same name - where a band of irresponsible man-children act out deeply suppressed sociopathic tendencies in either Bangkok or Vegas. 

Other times, I drink several people's skin's full - the type of drunk where you walk in gait born of a hybrid between Fagin and Captain Jack Sparrow, and wake up either still pleasantly drunk or lacking the expected all-engulfing black hole of hang. The variable that seems to have the most influence is how much you have planned for the next day, which is then amplified by physically saying out loud that you can only have a couple - because of the amount of things you have planned for the next day. 

Maybe it's the heat, maybe it's indiscriminate roofie fairies, maybe it''s solar flares or refracted sunlight through swamp gas or the illuminati, whatever the cause - it can be neatly analogised by spinning the big wheel of disproportionate hangovers.

Queue: The Abuse

Did you know if you took all the blood vessels out of the human body and stretched them end to end, you've probably just tried to walk out of a lift in Dubai, only for 17 people to push past you on the way in to the lift because, (presumably and this is the only reason I can come up with for the level of etiquette malfunction) they've misinterpreted the ping of the elevator's arrival with a klaxon signalling the start of the hunger games.

It's still the only part of the world that I've seen placement mats on the floor of metro station platforms showing, with childlike simplicity,  where to stand so as to not be a space hoovering self entitled monster of a bellend. But you may as well write the text in Aramaic and instead of using conventional lines and arrows, use a series of crying laughter face emojis, for all the efficacy of it.

The train for Jebel Ali will be arriving at the Jebel Ali platform - all 5 of our senses can detect this, and in any case if it was arriving on the other platform - the resultant fireball from the head-on collision would be tiding enough. It's an entirely superfluous announcement, how about instead: announcing that the trap door located beneath the 'stand here to allow passengers to disembark' sign has been primed and the camel spiders below have been starved of human flesh for just long enough for them to give up halfway through the job.

Or - you know how you get flash dance mobs, how about flash sniper victim mobs, just people disobeying sign rhetoric feigning a shot to the temple every now and again as a macabre but enthusiastic reminder that chivalry, although dead, is not as dead as the person flouting it.

With the exception of Argos and deli counters in supermarkets pre-1990 - the 'take a ticket and wait for your number to be called' method for human accounting has been largely replaced by standing in queues. It's renaissance in Dubai can only be explained by the fact that the concept of queuing is just too much for some people in the UAE. I applaud the sentiment, but it's not foolproof: you still get the occasional hardline nonconformist who will walk up to a counter and get turned away for either brandishing a completely incorrect number or having their elaborate forgery uncovered on the basis that "our tickets don't have numbers written in crayon sir".

Steak Guilt

Steak guilt. Like catholic guilt, but best served with sacrament on the side.

I'm a grown adult human man - but am completely incapable of walking in to a restaurant and ordering something that isn't than steak. It's not that I don't like other things, I love other food things - but when I'm reading other food things on a menu - "strewn on a bed of this" "delicately layered with that" - what I'm actually seeing is "steaky steaky steak steak, where is the f**king waiter and why is he not bringing me my f**king steak".

I quite often externally toy with idea of ordering something else, "hmmm the duck sounds nice", "I haven't had fish in a while" - my wife rolls her eyes in a perfect non verbal communication of: "this again, must we endure another cabaret of bulls**t, before you decide on the steak as if born of some moment of inspired craving". The waiter comes over and explains the specials - I might be saying "oh hand selected, really?" But he can read the look in my eyes, he's seen it a million times before. It's a scientific fact that corneas can't dribble, but you know what science? You patrol around a fancy steak board, dress it up with slutty veins of fat and talk dirty with words like 'marbling' and 'rump'... just watch my peepers drip.

I eat so much steak, I'm sure I've started hearing Hindus audibly hiss at me when I walk by. There is no internationally approved hand gesture for "I'm sorry for being a human conveyor belt of oblivion to your holy animal". I know it's not healthy, I know that variety is the spice of life, but I can't help it - and with the frequency of visits to restaurants that seems to be inexplicably mandatory in Dubai, I'm racking up the score count on the worlds least vegan friendly live action videogame.

I'd like to write an open letter to the vegetarians and apologise for my conduct during meal times, but I can't because I'm not sorry - it would be as hollow and transparent as your presumably osteodeficient bones. Cows evolved to be tasty and delicious - a brave but ultimately perilous niche to occupy in a world based on consumption. It's dog eat dog, I'm just not that comfortable eating dog.

I'm not saying I don't feel bad that something has to die so I can eat something tasty - it's just that I don't feel bad enough to not eat it. Besides, If we get too tangled up in the metaphysics of food, I'm sure there's a convincing case to be made on the ethical treatment of Haribo. So I'm left in a limbo of irresolvable insoluble guilt.

If the, by now enraged, eyeball popping, mouth foaming, though almost certainly lethargic, vegetarians want some crumb of karmic justice: I'm the only person that I know of to have suffered gout at the age of 25. So yay cows, boo me. Gout really really hurts.