In the Middle East, it’s possible to outsource every task you could conceivably think of – from the ironing to banging a nail into a wall to assembling Ikea furniture and changing a lightbulb. When grocery shopping, you’ll find a team of men lying in wait for you in the car park with mobile car washing units. There’s usually so many of them that at least one or two will helpfully direct you to a car parking spot and watch as you attempt to park. Then when you’re done shopping, it’s not unusual to be asked if you need help carrying the bags to the car. Bags, incidentally, that have been packed by a nice man whose responsibility it is to ensure that each bag is not filled to capacity – so if you buy three avocados, some mincemeat and a tube of toothpaste, you’ll walk out with the avocados in one bag, the meat in another and the toothpaste in a third if you don’t intervene. At malls that charge for parking, there’s a person standing at the exit barrier whose job it is to take your parking ticket from you and put it in the machine for you. No matter if you’ve pulled up just slightly too far from the machine and have a short arm – all you have to do is open your window. I’m not sure where we’d be without this man – probably still stuck in a queue trying to get out of the mall. Then, when you get home, if you discover you’ve forgotten something, it’s really no problem. You can just whip your phone out, tap the InstaShop app, and an hour later a man turns up on a motorbike to deliver your groceries. You might also choose to have your petrol delivered straight to your car by a fantastic new app-based service called Cafu. After ordering and unlocking your petrol cap, a gentleman arrives outside your garage in a small, grey tanker lorry and fills your car up.  It’s a genius idea, especially as the queues at UAE gas stations can be long. It’s really only when you get back to the UK that you realise how utterly useless you’ve become at things Brits do on a daily basis. A case in point – self-checkouts, which since I was last in the UK seem to have taken over at every single store I shop at. I approach self-checkouts feeling decidedly wary, and also a little bit cross that stores expect customers to do all their own scanning, rescanning and scanning a third time with gritted teeth when it STILL doesn’t work. I’m not a store employee, nor do I want to be one for free. (And how on earth are they stopping shoplifting by self-scanning thieves? I wonder.) What’s to stop me ringing my large lemons up as medium-sized? I rebelliously think. But my first thought on seeing a bank of self checkouts is, “Where’s the man/woman?” (Please don’t judge! I’ve lived in Dubai for eleven years!). Then I realise that the attendant is either:

• Not there
• Staring at me the whole time
• Rolling his/her eyes that I’m such a hapless customer who hasn’t got a clue.

Anyway, I’ve just about got it now – helped by a nice member of staff who took pity on me after I told her I lived overseas. But it’s certainly not seamless. My ‘foreign’ credit card requires a signature if I don’t ‘tap’, and so a message flashes up: ‘Attendant has been notified to assist you.’ I’m so glad they haven’t all been fired.