Chronicles of a Trailing Spouse...

I walked out of a shop the other day leaving the baby asleep in his buggy behind me.  As I strolled through the mall with four year old boy running ahead, a distressed shop assistant yelled from behind ‘but ma’am, you left your baby!’ Blushing, I retraced my steps to the store and retrieved the abandoned buggy before leaving, head held high, as if I knew exactly what I was doing.  The next time I went into the same shop the assistant amusingly reminded me ‘ Ha-ha! Remember ma’am, when you forgot your baby!  Ha-ha, very funny!’ Quite. But if that's bad, my sister is worse: she left her baby son asleep in the car in the car park of a shopping centre and it wasn’t until she was in a shoe shop trying shoes on her eldest son that she remembered him.   Dashing out, leaving her son behind in the shop, she retrieved the baby from the car, explaining on her return that somebody else had been looking after him. W...

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...