Mike's Just different

When I first went to Saudi Arabia I smoked like pretty much everyone else at the time (1974). When I first met the Saudis I was to work with I found them polite but a little arrogant one of the first shocks I experience was when one of my trainees said “Give me a cigarette” just like that. I know it annoyed many of the expatriates as it was not an uncommon way of addressing us but I soon realised they spoke to each other in the same way. After that I accepted it as their manner but many of my fellow expatriates insisted on them saying please and thank you. A mental hark back to the empire maybe but then later I found that the American expatriate reacted in the same way. It seems that we must alter even ancient cultures to our way instead of learning from them not of course in the way of asking for a cigarette but look at any of the countries we have been too we have left our mark not always for the good but to create a new market or to exploit their resources. Sad that we have learned so little from them as civilisations when we could have started with individual relationships, no we are not better just different.

Mike's memories - The tale of two bombs

I don’t know what made me start thinking of my young life in the Second World War.  I was six at the time when we lived in a little house on an avenue in Manchester. My parents had strengthened the cellar to act as an air raid shelter and each night my mother and her family and her sister’s family used to troop down into the shelter to sleep. One night during the blitz a bomb landed at the end of our road, it broke every window in our house shook it badly so the dust caused a thick fog in our little bolthole. As the fog cleared my little cousin was stood at the end of his cot with one finger raise and said “Hark” I can’t remember what the parental reaction was but I imagine it was something that released the tension.

Because of this near miss we moved to the country, we had no time to build a shelter there when a lone German bomber dropped a bomb on us. I believe it was a lost aircraft dumping it’s cargo, I sat with my mother in her bed while we heard the whistling of the falling bomb. I was convinced it was about to fall on us and I must admit to being frightened into a blind panic when there was a loud explosion and once again we lost all our windows. The next morning I had recovered enough to go looking for the crater which was about half a mile away, naturally there were several people about looking at the hole but much to my joy I found a piece of metal which I believed came from the bomb. This treasure stayed with me for the rest of the war and beyond. 

Mike's Memories - How things change

I loved my time in Saudi I was living there for ten years coming home in late 1983. I had many friends amongst the locals and so did Syb but over the period we were there things changed in a slight but noticeable way. The Quran encourages Muslims to venerate teachers and as I was responsible for teaching them so it was easy to gain their respect if you tried. This made it simple to be friends with them and in turn they were proud to be friends with their teacher, this of course was when I first went out in the mid 70s.

By the time I left the younger Saudis had become more self confident without much to support it and somewhere along the line they seemed to have been warned that friendship with expatriates was not to be encouraged. This showed itself in less socialising amongst the men outside work and a more formal atmosphere at work. When we left things had just started to cool down.

I hate to think what it’s like for the expatriate community now when anti lobby in this country is trying to stop the sale of arms to the Saudis. Do they really think that the Saudis will stop buying arms if they don’t get them from us there are very many countries where they can get them. What is more we would lose what little influence we have. Check how many jobs will be lost in this country and over there. Also these lobbies never seem to consider the effect they have on the relationship between  the people of the countries they criticise and the treatment of expatriate working there. I much prefer the Saudi Arabia I knew as described in Syb’s book Inshallah.

Mike's view - Only confusion

I am so worried about this referendum coming up in June. I am not particularly keen on the way Europe is going nor am I too enthusiastic about the way this countries going. I have two main worries I can’t believe politicians and if we leave I can’t see anyone capable of running the country for the good of the population. In my view Margret Thatcher was a leader not that she did this country much good but at least you knew where you and the country stood like it or not. But since her demise there has not been a leader amongst any of the past prime ministers, Tony Blair seemed okay at the start but when he ignored his country in favour of George Bush and cocked up the Middle East for an unknown period of trouble he lost totally my belief in him. So if we vote to stay we continue to kowtow to that ever closer band partners all following their own agenda or leave them behind and become like a rudderless ship. Not much of a choice is it?

Coming soon 'Tee for two'

Well the new book is nearing completion and will be going out to my beta reader for their opinions in a couple of weeks. It actually started as a short story and like Topsy just grew. It now runs to about 70,000 words and tells the tale of the private life of a professional lady golfer. No it’s not a golfing book Gemma just happens to play golf for a living and like many ladies has an interesting and challenging life on and mainly off the golf course. Caddies can be both a hindrance and a help, demanding and long suffering especially if they’re male which Gemma’s are. It’s funny how they can affect a girls game no matter where it happens but you do need to be close to them.

Mike's They're dead so what

There are times when I look at a blank page and think I’ve got to write a blog, as I like to write one once a week, and nothing comes to mind. Then you look around for a hook to start you off, I’ve just been reading a most interesting book, no it’s not one of Syb’s excellent publications, it’s a biography of Lawrence of Arabia but more precisely it’s a history of the first world war in the Middle East. It left me thinking nothing’s changed our leaders are still keen to follow their own agendas seemingly without thought to the common man, in WW1 the leaders of both sides threw men into battle saying we didn’t do badly we only lost 10,00 men to day still we’ll do the same tomorrow. During one advance the British army lost a man for every 2 inches of ground gained and now each year we remember dead. It seems that society is becoming immune to other peoples suffering. To bring it up to date how many digital games employ the murder/killing of others to gain ground and win. I saw my grandson playing a game involving a swimmer, he was called for a meal and instead of just ending the game he drowned the swimmer, a shock to me as the drowning was realistic, a way of ending the game to him. What does it do to their minds? What if they become the leaders in future and some of them will.

Mike's Infinity

You may have guessed that I am fascinated by such imponderable things as nothing, infinity, eternity, timeless and the like. They are things we never come across in our daily lives and exist only in theory. There is we are told by people of a far greater mental facility than I have, that the implosion of a star collapses into an infinitely small point of infinite power. If the point is infinitely small then it can only have position and no body, it is so difficult  to imagine; and what of nothing it can have no boarders and its totally empty, is it only a theory but did it ever exist? Eternity can have no time as it has no beginning or end and tomorrow and today are the same, a circumstance that is beyond our experience and understanding. These are really words we use without thought and most probably inappropriately, to think about them deeply I have found is an interesting mental exercise.

I often wonder why we as humans accept things we cannot visualise and yet understand their meaning, I find it just as mystifying that atheists cannot accept the existence of God. Are our expectations too high and our ability to belief too little?