Chronicles of a Trailing Spouse...

There is an article in this months ‘She’ magazine describing the expat lifestyle in Dubai.  It serves up the usual profusion of adjectives such as ‘luxurious’, ‘opulent’ and ‘lavish’ to describe the lives of those of us living in the UAE.   Gold vending machine Abu Dhabi As I type, I’m sitting in my lavish, diamond-encrusted study, on a platinum chair imported from Brunei, typing on my gold-plated keyboard.  And while we’re in the realm of fantasy, the plumbing in my luxurious villa on the beach actually works, the kitchen sink in my designer kitchen doesn’t leak onto all the products underneath it and it’s possible to lock my back door.    While undoubtedly Dubai is the poster-child for all that is glitzy, expensive and just plain gauche; the champagne brunches, glittering malls and luxurious villas certainly do exist here-  this is not the lifestyle that I or any of my friends experience. In fact, Christmas day was the first time w...

Christmas is coming and I am still fat.  In spite of my best efforts, there is still too much of me and those slinky numbers which hang, corpse-like, in my wardrobe remain as strangers. Of course there’s not much hope of anything changing until January at this stage as the season of overindulgence beckons. I do love Christmas, or the feelings and memories the season evokes. A time when, even in the desert, we can pretend we live in Dickensian London -of course sidestepping the fact that life at that time was actually nasty, brutish and short- instead believing that tartan is a good choice for the living room and fake garlands are a tasteful addition to the staircase banister. It’s also a time of shameless over-spending in a manner which would make even Paris Hilton blush; of throwing things into our trolley’s, virtual or otherwise, without stopping to analyse the long term benefits of such items as a set of bath towels with snowmen on them or a family set of matching rein...