37

As anyone who has visited Salut! Sunderland in the past 24 hours will know, the United Arab Emirates - Salut!'s home for 14 months or so - was 37 yesterday.

The country was born two weeks after M and Mme Salut! had the second part of their wedding; that event took place at l'église Sainte Jeanne d'Arc in Le Mans, a church honouring poor Joan of Arc and said by Mme Salut! and others to have been built by Henry II as a sort of "I'm sorry" after the murder of Thomas à Becket. (The legal knot had been tied in the more prosaic setting of Bishop Auckland Register Office a fortnight earlier).

So before I get down to news of recent travels to Egypt, here are a few of the pictures I took last night as Abu Dhabi poured on to the streets to celebrate its 37th anniversary.



Thousands were out on and around the Corniche. My drive home normally takes seven or eight minutes, but last night I abandoned my car several streets from home after getting nowhere in half an hour.




Everything was good-natured and colourful, with people hanging precariously from cars, klaxons hooting and families picnicking on available bits of grass along the promenade.



And people from all over the world joined in; with some estimates suggesting that 160 or so languages or dialects are spoken here, a street party with only Emiratis as guests would be a necessarily quieter affair.

But what of Egypt, from which I returned in yesterday's early hours?

Salut! thoroughly enjoyed being nowhere near a computer screen for eight days. We knew nothing of the grotesque events in Mumbai until the siege was virtually over.

Sailing slowly down the Nile turned out to be one of the most relaxing holidays I have taken - all the more so because the persistent street vendors and beggars of Luxor and Aswan could not reach us on our cruiser.

I will bring words and pictures very soon. For now, let me just see whether anyone knows what happened in the room arrowed above? No competition on this occasion - I'd hate Louise and Bill to think I was trying to attract readers to Salut! - unless I change my mind...

What is Salut! Salam?

Good question.

I am Colin Randall. I came to Abu Dhabi to help launch The National, a serious daily newspaper for the UAE and beyond.

My blog Salut! is reasonably well known. Its offshoots - Salut! Sunderland on the ups and downs of supporting Sunderland AFC, Salut! Live on folk and folk-rock music and Salut! North on North-eastern (England) nostalgia - have more specialised readerships.

What they share in common, beyond being mine, is that they are inaccessible to many, perhaps most, people in the country I have made my home, the United Arab Emirates.

I thought at first that I was being censored, either because I occasionally used pictures from Flickr (which has been banned, though it isn't just now) or because my host, Typepad, had somehow caused offence here. Typepad itself told me some of its sites were blocked.

But I am assured by the regulatory body that there is no such ban. Any formal ban, my highly place informant tells me, is demonstrated by the appearance of an on-screen messagee. Typepad blogs - or all those I have tried - just fail to open.

And that, I am told, means it is a technical issue, nothing to do with censorship. Boosters is the buzz word here.

So why am I able to get into my Salut! sites from work? This is where technological ignorance gets the better of me. My man at the regulatory body says it is all to do with the "boosters" a big media company is likely to use, and this is beyond my grasp.

But the upshot is that I have duplicated all items concerning the UAE and the Middle East and posted them here.

I just want people to see what I make of life in Abu Dhabi. Images, and the usual decoration you expect of a decent blog, will be added gradually, as time permits.

Blogging, which I began while working for The Daily Telegraph in Paris, has never threatened to make me rich. I enjoy doing it, but it is time consuming and costs money, not a lot but enough to notice.

The Google Ads and Amazon book and record shelves you'll find on my sites produce negligible amounts that do little to offset the effort and outlay.

Not without reluctance, I have installed a Donate button and if you like what you find at Salut! Salam, you may use it. Think of it as a variation of choosing whether to leave a tip at the restaurant - but rest assured that there'll be no scowl if you do not.

Making a point

Driving around Abu Dhabi, it is relatively unusual for the car driver to feel any great empathy with the people sitting behind tinted glass at the wheels of 4x4 monsters.

If I didn't like them as Kensington Tractors or 16th Arrondissement Juggernauts, I am not about to develop a grudging fondness for them here.

Maybe I am stuck with the view expressed in a piece some months ago, when I wrote that drivers were probably no worse in Abu Dhabi than in many other places I have been as resident or visitor.

But rather a lot of expats do bring the worst-case road practices of their own countries and apply them to the bigger vehicles they can afford to run with fuel so cheap and no income tax to pay.

Is it just me? Or are 4x4 drivers in the UAE really the ones least likely to signal, unless the wrong way or after completing the manoeuvre, most likely to cut across three lanes at the last second to turn left at traffic lights and racing certs to zig-zag with criminal recklessness on the Dubai-Abu Dhabi highway?

And yet, Salut! favours fair play, so let me declare myself 100 per cent on the side of the man or woman who reacted to someone nicking his/her parking space by plonking his/her lorry-shaped specimen so close behind that the offending saloon driver has no escape, only the need to make humiliating entreaties to the wounded colleague.

Caught in a Blue Peter moment

This is one I made earlier. Pressure of work is inevitably creating gaps between postings but I thought it would be interesting to run this piece, written during our pre-launch trial runs but now past its shelf life for an Abu Dhabi audience. Are there cultural/pop culture events you left it late to see, or never got round to experiencing?......


There really was little excuse for taking so long to see The Mousetrap, and equally little reason to suppose that unpaid thespians in Abu Dhabi, performing at a social club built on land donated by the UAE's founding president, Sheikh Zayed, would end up filling my cultural gap.

It is hardly as if the long history of Agatha Christie’s whodunit, and the slightly shorter history of me, failed to offer an opportunity sooner.

First sprung on the public as a radio play, The Mousetrap made its debut on the London stage 55 years ago.

For 23 of those years, I lived in London and for a time nurtured a voracious appetite for all things Christie. I devoured her novels, studied the mysteries of her life and felt honoured to be sent as a young reporter to cover her memorial service in 1976.

And when I think of woeful shows I have paid good money to see, it is strange that I should never have got round to attending one of the 23,000 performances of that extraordinary run. But The Mousetrap remained, to me, a closed area. So now that I have rectified the omission, catching the Abu Dhabi Dramatic Society’s presentation of the play at the Club, I must surely be a satisfied man.

On the contrary. I feel only relief that the seat cost 50 dirhams (about £7), not extravagant West End prices.

This has nothing to do with the quality of the production. Alan Daft, the director, may have been a little, well, daft to suggest in his end-of-run speech that the cast reached standards indistinguishable from those of professionals. But it was a highy commendable effort all the same.

From the splendid set to impressive acting, this was a work of which the company, despite a vast range of experience (including, in the case of Graham Clews as Detective Sergeant Trotter, none at all), can be proud.
Just over 700 people attended the three performances, a hearty endorsement of the society’s reputation for excellence. The source of my disappointment, however, was beyond its power to remedy.

The Mousetrap is not, in truth, a particularly good play. Assuming that the cast stuck closely to the original script, it is a rare damp squib in the sparkling Christie archive. The plot is weak, a few characters are unbelievable and some of the twists and turns lack finesse.

Amid the mutual backslapping and banter of the closing night party, I learned one or two things. For instance, Agatha Christie would not have resented my unflattering verdict too strongly since she never placed the play among her finest work.

And if the Abu Dhabi society suddenly uprooted to Aberdovey or Derby, I discovered, it could not legally present The Mousetrap at all. As long as the play is running in London, copyright law prevents any impresario, rep company or amateur society putting it on elsewhere in Britain; indeed, there are even restrictions on it being published in book form in the UK.

This will doubtless encourage people to flock to St Martin’s Theatre, and the world’s longest running show, for years to come.

Each will want to know, and try to guess, Who Did It. I now know, of course.

But I feel dutybound to observe a noble Mousetrap tradition, also mentioned by Alan Daft to his Abu Dhabi audience.

My lips, accordingly, are sealed.

Out of the frying fan, into the fridge

So this, chez Salut!, is the pièce de résistance.

Looks and is great, with plenty of space to relax, entertain and take in the striking city view. But we are about to discover how resistant our pièce is to the Abu Dhabi summer.

For weeks, people have been warning that the balcony, the feature that makes a tiny flat seem spacious (it was marketed as two-bedroomed, but is actually nothing of the sort), will soon be out of bounds.

Beneath the heat of the day, with temperatures edging upwards of 40 degrees, it is already difficult to stay out much longer than it takes to water Mme Salut's attempts to relocate the Royal Botanic Gardens somewhere east of Kew.

But at night, and especially during the early evening, it remains usable. And I suspect it will continue to be pleasant enough to sit out and eat an evening meal for a few more weeks to come, before it gets really hot and humid.

The last time I bought fans was during a heatwave in London in, I think, 2003. After a fortnight of sticky, oppressive nights - one colleague whose flat had access to the roof was using it to sleep on - I paid good money for the last two fans available in the nearest departmental store. I had just enough time to get them home before the weather changed completely, and they were barely used until they were exported to the south of France.

Here, I have drawn the line at those monsters you see in one or two shops, enormous fans that blast out a gale and blow a huge hole in the bank balance. But I have bought a couple of smaller ones again, confident this time that the only change in temperature and air quality will make them more, not less useful (provided I don't leave them out in the sun, where they will surely fry).

Seasoned expats around the world will know better, but my own guess is that the balcony will seem a welcome haven for another month or so, and may still be OK most evenings for a little while after that. And then we need only wait patiently for October, from when it should be bliss.

And in the meantime, there's that forthcoming sojourn in chillier climes. Even the Var may seem on the fresh side after here, but there are cooler places to visit first:

* London, where one friend says the weather has been splendid ever since Boris was elected (by way of balance, another friend threatened not to set foot in the capital again until he was thrown out of office)

* Middlesbrough, which I am sure will be Middlesbrough

* Gothenburg, where I will be too busy representing Abu Dhabi's new daily at an international newspaper conference to worry about how cold Scandinavia is in June.