Mike Scared to death

The other night I watched a program on Donald Trump and it frightened me to death, it seems to me that if he succeeds in becoming president America will become as unstable as the Middle East is at present. Whilst he appeals to the wilder side of his followers, he lowers the regard for the USA in the rest of the world. How can a man who is aggressive as he is negotiate with Iran, or any of the Muslim world or anybody? He may have a lot of money and no doubt he is clever in certain fields but if what we see on our television screens is anything to go by he doesn’t have a hope in hell internationally. 

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.