What I really want to write is a raging post on gun control in a country I love – but although my husband and kids are American, I’m not, and perhaps I just don’t understand.
Yesterday, after hugging my children, I yelled at the iPad, my blood boiling – incensed by some of the comments left by absolute morons (who can’t even spell) on British journalist Piers Morgan’s blog. I’ve no doubt my outburst was futile.
So, I’ll spare you the rant about what to me is intuitive – and by way of distraction from a tragic topic that’s left me shocked, horrified and saddened to the core, I’ll be very British, and talk about the weather instead.
Here in Dubai, we don’t get much adverse weather. Some people would say it goes from boiling hot to hot, but this isn’t actually true: at 9am this morning, the outside temperature reading on the car told me it was a chilly, jumper-worthy 16 degrees.
The cars were making waves just outside my work
But it wasn’t the ‘cold spell’ that was the talk of the town today: it was the rain. Lashings of it, pouring down from low-hanging granite clouds and forming small, muddy lakes on the city’s drenched roads.
Puddle-loving children always get excited due to the novelty factor (the lack of variety has led one school that actually has weather on the curriculum to lay on a field trip to Ski Dubai – the lucky kids).
And for the grown-ups – who hail from the UK at least – the dull, wet, languid weather transports us on a metaphorical journey across oceans, back to Blighty, easing a little of the homesickness that can set in as Christmas approaches.
But what starts out as a rare treat can quickly become a proverbial pain in the arse as you start worrying about flooding on water-logged highways, remember that the wipers on the SUV don’t work (they disintegrated, through lack of use), and realise you have no rain clothes. Not even a brolly.
“Look Mummy, those people have an umbrella,” squealed LB in delight, as I dragged him in the pelting rain across a soggy football field to his classroom this morning. “Why don’t we have one?”
The wettest ever Dubai school drop-off completed, I got back in the car to go to work, fully expecting the roads to be chaos and for it to take twice as long, when I realised something. The usual 10-15-minute bottleneck – leaving the community that hosts my youngest son’s school – was, to my surprise, only six or seven cars long.
Half of Dubai must be taking a rain day, I smiled to myself, imagining my fellow commuters curled up at home with hot cocoa and watching Jaws on telly. What a good and sensible idea.
The next time the heavens open over Dubai, I’m having a duvet day too
