Late?? Yikes!!

I had a very un-Dubai experience today.  I was chairing an arbitration that I had set for 9:30 AM, an early time for the Middle East.  I ensured I didn’t arrive too early, so I would not have to cool my heels for long.  So I ease my way to the hearing room at 9:15, expecting no one …  thinking about the usual calls to late, recalcitrant participants.  I step in the door to … two entire, complete sets of parties, witnesses, lawyers, binders laid out, pencils sharp, hair combed, faces shiny, all ready, waiting!! At 9:15!!  Yikes!  Am I late?

However, I quickly remember the reassuring words of the philosopher-de-jour, Ke$ha, she, a latter-day exponent of the Sheryl Crow,  ”All I Wanna Do” school, who tells us in her treatise on life, “Tik Tok”, that:

“Now, the party don’t start ’til I walk in …”

Which is true.  So although I can never actually be late, I can be rude.  So I wouldn’t.

I was early back from lunch.

Ashjournment

A two-day arbitration I am chairing had to be adjourned because a claimant is stuck in Europe due to ash clouds.  Gives me time to think about ash-related things.  Like a song they still play on the radio here where one Mr. Hudson plaintively asks the question, “You gonna drop the bomb or not?”.  This is a key question asked here by the Very Big Brains who opine on security matters.  At a recent forum I attended, the VBBs in attendance see as a possibility a certain Zionist nation lobbing something explosive at Iran, which is 100 miles from here.  As Mr. Hudson says, “Sitting in a sand pit, life is a short trip”.  Well, it can be anyway.  Then we’d have an ash cloud of a different colour to worry about.

Around Dubai

There is an art push on in my DIFC neighbourhood.  So many art galleries around.  Here is a picture seen in the window of one of them, I think the Opera Gallery.  Please click on it to see it.

 

And it has been a sad week because one of the Abu Dhabi Sheikhs was killed in a glider accident in Morocco.    Here is the big Itihad flag at half mast.

R I P Ahmed bin Zayed Al Nahyan

All the radio stations play nothing but funereal music for 3 days.  Worthy in this case.  He was a good person.  It is a loss.

Saturday – Rentering the Workweek

It is Saturday in Dubai.  A day to have all things.  It can be weekend; it can be a workday.  Went to the Desert Rhythm Festival last night.  Saw the Walilers, Kassav and Paul Weller.  What a great line up!  It felt like what we have heard the old expat Dubai was like – happy, laid-back, tolerant, everyone having a great time.  That feeling will get me through the week!

I refreshed myself on Paul Weller today.  In Canada, we didn’t seem to follow his career as my British friends did.  Pity.  Certainly followed Elvis Costello, though.  He is an honourary British Columbian now, having married our Diana Krall.