Driving Me Crazy

My daughter is about to start driving lessons, and while that fact is going a long way to making me feel very old, it is also filling me with a peculiar sense of chest-tightening anxiety more akin to panic than pride. It doesn’t seem that long ago that I strapped her into a car seat for the first time, and here she is, 17 years later, about to strap herself in and drive off into the unknown.

 I certainly won’t be strapping on the L-plates with enthusiasm and offering to accompany her on the open road, as patience is not a virtue I am blessed with, unfortunately. I will use this excuse to her whilst simultaneously handing over a humungous cheque for lessons, so as to hide the real truth. The truth is, I don’t want to pass on my freshly fostered neurosis to my motoring green offspring. I used to be perfectly confident behind the wheel of a car, you see, and then I went to live in the Middle East.

Years of living in Dubai have transformed me into a nervous driver, and I realise this now that I am back in the land of the Highway Code. Car parking spaces have definitely got smaller while I was away in the desert, and car parks have shrunk to Tonka toy proportions. What sort of sick mind designs and builds a multi-story where cars have to do a three-point turn to get up to the next level? Is space that much of a premium that they couldn’t allow a few more inches for manageable manoeuvring? How does anyone drive a 4x4 in a UK city?

 I can’t get away with parking in the ‘mother and baby’ spaces at a supermarket anymore as my kids now tower above me. It’s not fair on either count.  Don’t get me started on these ridiculously narrow streets where two cars can’t even pass each other let alone squeeze into a parking space. I’m much more likely to drive round for half an hour looking for a slot I can easily glide into, rather than risk the ridicule of public parallel parking.

The Highway Code obeying residents of the UK see a car at a junction and they don’t see what I see. They see a law-abiding citizen waiting their turn to pull out of the junction in a controlled, orderly fashion, slotting safely behind the driver owning right of way. I drive past junctions these days and I turn into a gibbering wreck. What I see is not an upstanding member of the driving community, but a potential junction junky. A crazy, death-defying motorist who, in the seconds before I pootle past them, hurtles out of the junction into the path of my oncoming vehicle, causing me to brake furiously, missing my car by centimetres, just to get ahead.

My nervousness isn’t greeted with the patience and recognition I deserve as “Nervous Ex-Expat Driver”. It produces a variety of responses from drivers here: confusion, annoyance and blatant aggression. Maybe I should get a bumper sticker.

To counter all three responses I have perfected ‘The Stare’. Well, to be honest with you I actually perfected ‘The Stare’ whilst I was still an expat. It comes in very handy. My hands remain furiously clamped to the steering wheel as I penetrate their evil force field with just one flashing glance. “Take that you angry motorist”. For really annoyed, red-faced, fist shaking insults, I unleash ‘The Stare’ along with ‘The Mind Swear’. This basically means that I hurl inaudible profanities at them from the safety of my locked vehicle. That’s the other habit picked up from the Middle East: silent road rage.

We all heard the stories in Dubai of the poor expat motorist, a victim of one junction junky encounter too far, who flipped the bird at a blacked out window, only for the occupant to be the police chief’s brother-in-law-twice-removed. The next thing, the middle fingered fool finds themselves on the wrong end of the law, banged up in Bur Dubai nick for months on end, while the rest of the family members are deported in shame.

Urban myth or absolute truth, motorists in Dubai learn the art of silent road rage or face the consequences. It’s quite a shock to see blatant displays of motoring anger directed at me, “Nervous Ex-Expat Driver”. One more reason to invest in that bumper sticker.  

The thing I’m not used to, however, is a driver being courteous. There are some lovely people in this country who actually allow you to change lanes when you indicate, rather than speeding up dangerously to make sure you cannot, under any circumstances, execute the manoeuvre you are trying to undertake. They flash their lights kindly, which doesn’t mean, “Stop what you are doing- I’m coming through regardless”. It means “after you”. That’s nice.

Hopefully my daughter will get on very well with her confident driving instructor and become a confident driver herself. I’m just glad she’s not learning to drive in the UAE. Bumper sticker anyone?

Stand By Me

I’ve just got back from a Mum’s On Tour weekend in Copenhagen and, yes, it was wonderful.  Wonderful to stroll round the streets of a strange city with no husbands or kids in tow, although there was the slight whiff of mother guilt and the occasional panicked look as if one of us had forgotten something, we didn’t let it spoil our enjoyment.

The group of mums who attend these sneaky city breaks are the same ones who have been going since our little angels were in junior school together, and will be celebrating their Tenth Anniversary Tour next year with a totally indulgent and slightly more ambitious New York jaunt.

I was on the inaugural tour to Barcelona, which took two weeks and a shed full of Milk Thistle to recover from. Oh yes, we do all the cultural stuff but we do let our hair down as only mums on the loose can do.

I’ve got a good excuse for missing the rest of the tours, as an Easy Jet hop to Europe becomes a whole different matter when one is travelling from the U.A.E. Undeterred they forged on to numerous cities without me, although I was always kindly included in the emails, just in case.

These are the same friends that have welcomed me back into their fold after my years of exile in Dubai and I was finally able to respond to the last email with a resounding “Yes!” Which is how I ended up with them all in Copenhagen.  

Reminding them of my existence every year I spent away became my cunning plan to make sure I was not forgotten. I managed to catch up with most of them during summer visits to the U.K while on a mission to escape the oppressive heat of the season in Dubai. And yes- we used to moan about the heat over there the way we moan about the lack of it over here, which just goes to show how we like to moan about the weather whatever it’s doing.

Is it possible to use this cunning plan in reverse with the friends I made over there? How easy is it to keep those friendships going from seven thousand miles away? Every year as an expat means another friend lost and in that transient expat society friendship risks being a commodity that can be traded on a whim. Gathering 300 plus ‘friends’ on social networking sights renders the term almost ineffectual, especially when those friends are lost almost as quickly as they are gained. Shedding old pals past their sell by date is as easy as hover, click, delete. Gone.

The flip side of this two faced coin is the incredible friendships that are made in the strangely superficial expat society. Without family around, the alliances formed are fiercely intense. Bypassing the organic methods of friendship development, expats grab onto each other very quickly as crewmembers of the same boat they’ve been thrown into.

However, without history to back these relationships up, they can be dumped sometimes quicker than they are made. It takes a lot of effort to keep in touch, and there’s a whole heap of truth in that old saying “Out of sight, out of mind”. Promises made in the heat of the sun can get easily forgotten in the cold light of a grey UK day, so I hope I can keep up the effort too, as I couldn’t have got through the last six years without those precious pals. 

Cunning plans aside, some friendships run out of steam of their own accord, where as others appear to be forcibly ejected, sometimes without obvious reason. Emails go unanswered as your usefulness runs out. You’re on the old friend shelf, as the light shines on someone else.

It’s hard to explain to our kids about the shifting dynamics of the bonds that draw us to another, especially when they see that adults still have to deal with playground politics even at our ripe old ages. I’ve seen fickle friendships end on the base of one misplaced comment. One minute you’re having coffee and the next you’re a victim of hover, click, delete. Gone.

Next year it’s New York, so I’m stocking up on Milk Thistle and looking forward to another Mums On Tour. With no plans to return to Dubai, I hope I can use my cunning methods of keeping those expat friendships going during their summer visits to the UK. (I just hope they don’t go on about the weather).

After all, as my Copenhagen comrades have demonstrated, a good friend is for life. Not just for Dubai.

Not Such An Average Girl

Wandering through the bustling streets of the cosmopolitan city I call my home, there is nothing that really stands out about me. Nothing to distinguish me from the hordes of mackintosh clad commuters, bargain seeking consumers and day tripping tourists going about their daily business of living, working, shopping and sightseeing. 

As my hometown happens to be Brighton (well, Hove actually) there is also a liberal smattering of mumbling crazies, dreadlocked hippies and pierced, tattooed, stretchy-eared tribal types too. OK, maybe I stand out a bit from them, as I try to keep my mumbling under control and all my tribal marks are hidden, but looking at me, what would the average person see? The answer is just another average person. 

How wrong would those average people be? I am not just another average person. Not any more. I belong to a covert, highly select group of individuals who do all we can to conceal our secret identities to the masses under our mackintoshes.  If our identities were to be revealed to the wider community we would risk being shunned, persecuted, ridiculed, and at the very worst-totally ignored. No, I am not a spy. I am an ‘Ex Expat’. 

I’m not talking about being an expat individual from Wales who has lived most of her life in England, as that detail only gains me entry into the lower echelons of the aforementioned club. Only when one chooses extreme displacement from ones native land to travel across land and sea (and not just a quick jaunt down the M4 motorway) can one gain entry into the secret society of elite exiles.

The reason we don’t reveal our identities is that on the whole, people don’t really care. Most folks aren’t interested in hearing about lives lived in far-flung, sun soaked, culture submersing corners of this wide and wonderful world, unless they fancy going there on holiday at some point. The ones that do ask questions, therefore, risk being bombarded with dazzling experiences that burst forth in a frenzy of enthusiasm, having long been kept supressed and buried deep inside.   

Among friends and colleagues in the UK who know my expat secret, there is the tacit understanding that these facts remain unspoken about, as they bear little significance to their lives anyway. Unless:

1.) They have been, or are planning on going there on their holidays, 

or:

2.) Have a strong opinion on the country having never even been there. In this case they have free reign to talk about it in whatever terms they want.

In the case of being an expat from Dubai, I have found there is a wealth of opinion out there, which people are more than willing to share with me once my secret has been revealed. Maybe in the years that I have been enjoying all year round sunshine, desert landscapes, five star hotel restaurants, beautiful beaches, warm seas and of course, tax free living, Dubai has been getting some bad press. A valuable lesson not to believe all you read in the newspapers, I say. Yes, there were some negative aspects of life in the UAE, but I for one was quite happy to put up with them as long as that sun was shining. And it was, most of the time. So don’t knock it unless you’ve tried it, even if it was only for a fortnight. 

But as Dorothy says, “There’s no place like home”, and rather than risk becoming completely displaced, Hove beckoned (in a kind of seagull squawking siren call). Now I can scream down the M4 whenever I want, to get as close to my roots as I like and return to the city of mumbling, crazy, tribal types where nobody judges you if you don’t fit in. Not being able to fit in anywhere is why most people feel at home here like nowhere else. 

There’s been a bit of adjustment, a lot of shopping for woollies and wellies, and apart from missing the sun, sand and expat friends, life in Hove is great. Walking along the prom I hear a huge variety of accents from all over the world, as the 'average' people of this city pass by. This town is full of expats.   Maybe that’s why it feels so familiar. Don’t tell anyone though, it’s a secret.