How many men does it take to get a Nissan Pathfinder out of the mud?

Well, apparently the answer is seven. Call it karma, because I have always found other people getting their cars stuck in the mud highly amusing, but today I found out the hard way what it was like to actually do such a ruddy stupid thing (quite scary actually, if you must know. And humiliating. And bloody funny, with the benefit of hindsight).

I’d gone out to the Simaisma area to take my dog for a walk and to see if we would have any luck finding a German Shepherd dog which has been reported on the Dogs in Doha Facebook page as missing in the area. It’s a nice place to walk and it makes a change from my usual dog-walking haunts around Al Wakra.

I drove up to Al Khor, and then hit the coast and headed south along beach and desert tracks, stopping occasionally to get out and have a good walk around in places which looked like likely hiding spots for a lost dog.

I am a confident driver and I know how to handle a 4WD (supposedly) and I knew the terrain in that area was firm and rocky, rather than soft sand, so there was no need to drop the tyre pressures or load up with shovels and tow ropes….or so I thought.

While the first part of the afternoon had all been over completely unfamiliar terrain, I was actually getting into the bit of the coast which I know quite well when the incident happened.

I was following a track which I know from previous experience to be quite bumpy. Quite often, smoother and leas rutted parallel tracks are forged alongside older tracks, so I dropped down onto lower ground to follow what I thought was one of these newer tracks. Before I knew it, the terrain had become rather sticky and the steering suddenly became pretty useless.

As I attempted to turn towards the track again, in trying to maintain some speed I actually ended up accelerating away from the track and I got the car completely bogged down in some thick mud.

By changing gear ratios and gently rocking between reverse and drive, I managed to get the car moving again, but the thick mud meant that it was only possible to drive it straight ahead, which took me further away from the track. I attempted a left hand turn, but turned too hard and the car bedded in again. This time, no amount of cajoling would shift it.

It was an awful feeling. I had narrowly missed a patch of mud about an hour earlier and had had a little joke with myself about missing tonight’s Arabic class, but now this was real and there was no way the car was moving. I got out and surveyed the situation. I wasn’t too badly bedded in, so using my hands, I scraped away some of the mud which had collected behind the wheels and packed them out with some dried out saltmarsh grasses which I gathered from nearby. This still didn’t give me enough traction and in a fit of panic, knowing that the car was already stuck, I broke all the rules and gave the car some hard revs. As I got out again to survey the damage, I realised that all I had succeeded in doing was bedding the car in deeper and I had no choice now but to seek help.

The mud was almost impossible to walk on, and I was a good 50-100m from the track by this point. Thankfully, nowhere in Qatar is truly quiet and within minutes a Landcruiser passed by along the track.

I tried to wave him down, but as he slowed down for a look, he shook his head and accelerated off up the track! My heart sank and I looked at the dog forlornly. She looked back at me with a look that could only mean, “You idiot”. And you thought only cats were capable of acting like smug bastards?

As the driver went off into the distance, I noticed him slow down and converse with the driver of another Landcruiser, which we shall call Landcruiser Number 2, heading in my direction.

I gave a rather cringe-worthy, half-hearted sort of British wave at the approaching Landcruiser Number 2, not knowing whether his conversation with Landcruiser Number 1 had been about me, and all the while slipping in the mud and trying to hold my skirt down from being blown skywards by the gale-force wind.

As I got closer, the window was wound down and two rather bemused Qatari men looked inquisitively at me from the front seats. Then to my horror, the rear window also dropped and the faces of another four young boys and teenagers appeared, all of them smirking at the spectacle that was a slightly inappropriately-dressed white woman on her own, without a man, in the desert with a car that was clearly stuck in the mud.

A stilted conversation then followed (and yes, I did internally acknowledge the irony that I was going to miss my Arabic class for this), during which the man helpfully pointed out that I was stupid for having driven on the wet mud. We then went through the checklist of things you should really have in your car at all times in Qatar if you are going off-road, and shamefully I had none of them. He then muttered something about tyre covers and drove off.

I was left standing there, wondering if he had a plan and if I would ever see him again. I knew from previous experience with a dead battery that however odd the locals find you and however abrupt they seem, they do tend to come back armed with the appropriate people and tools.

I struggled back to the car and attempted to lift my 15kg of mud-clad feet into the footwell, before giving up and removing my shoes entirely. The dog caught my eye in the rear view mirror. I think she missed her calling in life as a cat, because only cats can give those sorts of looks.

Using Facebook, I looked up the phone number for John, the man who had reported losing the dog. That’s an amazing thing about Qatar; no matter how far off-road you drive, and how deep into the wilderness you go, you will always have a 3G mobile signal.

I sent him an SMS asking if he happened to be in the area and explaining my situation. He called me immediately and said that he had just finished searching the area with his friend and that he could turn the car around and find me within 10 minutes. This was a great relief, as I have always found the local men to be a bit more open and communicative with other men, and if Landcruiser Number 2 came back it would certainly make things easier if I had a male ally, and if he didn’t come back at least I would have a plan B.

As I put the phone down to John, I saw a new Landcruiser, let’s call it Number 3, pull up on the track and signal to me. He was calling me over, so I had to go through the humiliation of getting both of my mud-caked shoes back on (each of which weighed at least 5kg because of the mud), and subject the poor guy to a flash of my underwear with every frequent gust of wind, for the direction of the car meant that I was subjected to a full assault from the gale-force wind every time I opened the car door, and it was impossible to force the car-door open against the wind and successfully keep my skirt in check at the same time. With the added complication of me having to put my shoes on as well, I am sure the poor guy is going to have to stay in the mosque until the next sunrise to make up for what he witnessed in those few minutes.

As I approached him, dragging my 5kg clod-hoppers through the thick mud, every so often skidding and almost falling over whilst completely losing control of my skirt, the look on his face became increasingly clear. He wasn’t amused. In another stilted conversation, he asked me if my car had 4WD. Yes it does, thanks for asking, and yes, strangely enough, I had already thought of engaging 4WD mode.

Thankfully, my Landcruiser-Number-2-driving-hero appeared at that moment, and after a great deal of Arabic gesturing between them and much obvious hilarity at my expense, the useless knight-in-shining-Landcruiser-Number-3 departed the scene. As I walked towards Landcruiser Number 2, I fell flat on my face in the mud.

To my joy and delight, Landcruiser Number 2 was still fully laden with pretty much all of the male members of his family. At first the atmosphere was slightly tense, but then there was much hilarity as one-by-one, all of the kids slipped and fell in the mud, all of them lost their shoes and their previously white thobes took on an interesting shade of ‘desert mud’.

He had also brought his house-boy out with him, who was tasked with most of the hard work of rolling out the ropes and attaching them to my car. This should have been a 5-minute job, but the comedy mud factor meant that it was more like a scene from It’s A Knockout crossed with the Krypton Factor (and that stupid bouncy balls programme which Richard Hammond presents on Saturday nights).

To add to the surrealism of the whole scene, the entire family’s thobes were also heavily blood-stained. Thankfully, being completely unobservant, I didn’t notice this until much later on, by which time I was already aware that they had been out hunting with their falcons. Otherwise I think I would have taken the dog and made a run for it across the desert at this point.

John turned up within a couple of minutes, and by sheer coincidence, it turned out that he knew Lancruiser Number 2′s driver, who was apparently called Ali. John was obviously a hardened outdoor type and he was well kitted out, both in terms of clothing and equipment in his car. John and Ali together hatched out a plan to drag my car out backwards. It would mean dragging the car through an awkward angle, but they seemed confident they could do it, and to be honest, it was the only option. I was lucky to have them both there, because it took both of their sets of ropes to make a rope long enough to pull my car free.

For most of the next hour, I had to sit in the car as if it was the naughty step, while the men and boys all worked hard around me, caking themselves in mud, losing their shoes and having a great deal of difficulty in finding a suitable way of attaching the ropes to my awkwardly-angled car.

To make matters worse, I had only had the UV window tints applied to my car the day before, so I was under strict instructions not to open any of the car windows for another 24 hours while the film dried out. As a result, every time one of them needed to speak to me or address me, I had to open the car door against the gale force winds and subject myself to the now ritual humiliation of trying to hold my skirt down to protect my modesty. This did not always work, much to Ali’s disgust, his house-boy’s delight and his children’s amusement.

The first two attempts to pull me out failed, and John began the perilous journey back to his car to get some kind of gripping mat for the tyres. As I fiddled with something on my dash, I caught a glimpse in my nearside mirror of the tow-rope running hurriedly away from the rear of the car and realised that without warning, attempt number three was already underway. I looked up to see the house-boy gesturing wildly at me from across my bonnet, and I’d barely had time to engage the car in reverse before the rope tensed up and with little warning, the tyres suddenly found some grip and I went shooting backwards towards Ali’s car. High speed off-road reversing is not exactly my forte, especially when it happens without warning, and I steered frantically as I saw a massive rock heading towards my car in the rear view mirror, and then in the offside mirror and then the nearside mirror. And then, as quickly as it had all started, suddenly I was on dry, firm ground again and the rock was the other side of my car, and we were all completely unscathed.

I said the word shukran profusely at everyone in sight, and made up some kind of international gesture of eternal gratitude. I wish I had more Arabic skills to convey just how much I appreciated Ali and his family coming out to help me, but I didn’t have the words or gestures to say it. He pointed to his broken and ruined shoes and shouted “Money” at me, to which I replied with a hearty British chuckle, but I am not entirely convinced that he wasn’t being serious.

Thankfully, his boys seemed to be happy with me letting the dog out for a play as their reward, although unfortunately she seems to have an innate fear of thobe-clad boys and men (especially blood-stained thobes apparently) and she wasn’t having any of it.

As Ali departed in a cloud of dust, I cleared up his broken rope and ruined shoes and watched as the sun dipped below the horizon. It had been a close call and I will make sure my car is better equipped in future, and pay a bit more attention to where I’m pointing my wheels.

As you may have gathered, I’d also very slightly pushed the envelope of decency in terms of my clothing and I think from now on, it would be a good idea to keep something a little more modest in the car to throw on in such situations, such as an abaya or long skirt. The skirt I was wearing was an incredibly practical knee-length North Face hiking skirt, and it was built for comfort rather than sex appeal. In normal dog-walking situations it is absolutely fine, in terms of modesty, but sometimes it helps to have the option of covering up just a little bit more if you need to interact more directly with local people and I should really try and remember that interactions could happen anywhere at any time. I could sense the boys’ and Ali’s discomfort with the amount of leg-flesh I had on display throughout the ordeal and it didn’t help the ‘stupid, white Westerner’ impression that they clearly had of me.

Anyway, after all this, the bad news is that this poor dog is still out there somewhere. I am sure he will be finding plenty of food and water to survive on, as there are plenty of winter camps in the area, but it’s quite possible that he was picked up by a weekend camper and taken back to the city, so please keep an eye out for him if you are in Doha, Simaisma or Al Khor. His name is Gonzo.

Stand Up Comedy Qatar (SUCQ)

On Monday night, we went to our second Stand Up Comedy Qatar event. Home-grown comedy in Qatar is just a seedling at the moment, but SUCQ is nurturing and promoting new talent, through a series of workshops, open-mic events and full-scale comedy shows, such as the one which took place at Bistro 61 in West Bay on Monday evening.

I am a big fan of stand-up comedy. Good comedy can raise awareness of important social and political issues, and break down barriers between different sections of society and cultures. There was a (lengthy period of) time when my limited knowledge of current affairs was gained entirely through the BBC’s Have I Got News For You! And my hazy recollection of political issues during my 1980s childhood is heavily influenced by what I saw on Spitting Image…..

I’ve been keen to support SUCQ since I first heard about it. Qatar is at a crossroads right now, and the next generation will have to decide how the country moves forward from this point onwards. Comedy is a great tool for airing issues and opening up the debate.

As an expat, I was also interested in seeing local comedy because of the opportunity it offers to gain some rare insight into Qatari society and how local issues are perceived by other cultures in the great melting pot of Doha.

The affable compere, Halal Bilal (follow him on Twitter and Facebook), was on good form on Monday night, and seemed much more confident than he had been during a slightly nervous performance at the Sheraton in November.

The SUCQ support acts were all local residents and included Pakistani Saad Khan, Qatari Abdallah Al-Ghanim and Palestinian Issa el-Fahoum.

Issa’s confidence and stage presence is especially notable, considering that he is only fifteen years old! Much of his act reflects on his experiences as an Arab attending an Indian school here in Doha, a rich source of material, but it was a shame to see his act revert half-way through to some old material that we had heard at the last SUCQ event in November. During the first half of his act, I was seriously impressed that he had come up with some new material, as many Western comedians get months, or even a year or two, out of their acts before disappearing underground for a while to come up with new routines. Just as I was pondering this in amazement, he suddenly lost his way a little with his routine, and I don’t know if the reversion to old jokes was deliberate, or out of desperation at forgetting his new routine. Still, you have to hand it to him. At just 15 years old, he’s got many more years to polish up his already promising act. If he was to draw on his Palestinian roots a little more, I am sure that if he wanted to, he could develop into a world-class comedian who could use his skills to raise awareness about Palestinian issues on the international stage.

I was especially looking forward to hearing from another Qatari comedian. At the previous November SUCQ show, Qatari comedian Mohammad Fahal Kamal had been a real highlight for me, with his hilarious insight into Qatari girls and consideration of the disaster that would be a Qatari air hostess. He dared to walk a slightly wobbly line and sometimes crossed it and we loved him for it!

Monday night’s Qatari performer, Abdallah Al Ghanim was a smiley, happy chap, in head-to-toe national dress, and I immediately warmed to him. His slot was short and funny, but didn’t offer a great deal of insight into local culture unfortunately; it was fairly generic men vs. women stuff, but amusing all the same.

I am very naive about Qatari culture, having had little interaction with the locals since I’ve been here. I have blogged before about the false impressions about local society that can be gleaned by casual observers, so for me, the opportunity to hear a Qatari stand up is absolutely priceless, whatever their material.

Overall impressions of the SUCQ comedians.

I am a little wary of criticising the local comedians. Who am I to say what is and isn’t funny? Comedy is such a culture-dependent thing and this is a real challenge for SUCQ, which attracts very diverse audiences. There isn’t much comedy which translates from my native Britain across the Atlantic, and certainly not through Europe or beyond. And would I ever have the balls to stand up in front of a room full of people and crack jokes? Of course not!

Us Brits have a unique sense of humour which many other cultures find offensive and baffling. Our dry wit leans heavily on sarcasm and we are so emotionally retarded that for many of us, the only way we have of expressing affection for someone is to take the p*ss out of them!

We have a history, going back centuries, of comedy being used to keep politicians in check (for example, the Punch cartoons) and it has been used as a driving force for change, influencing and shaping public opinion in a way that probably doesn’t happen elsewhere in the world. Our self-deprecation extends to tearing down ‘the establishment’ at every opportunity.

This is important in a democratic society. If you choose and elect your own leaders, you have to keep them in check and make sure that they are delivering on promises.

It doesn’t work in a society like Qatar’s. The attitude to leadership is completely different. The Emir is doing a fantastic job of managing his country’s internal and external affairs, and there is no reason for this to be questioned. Society sticks together; something that is hard to grasp for someone from ‘Broken Britain’. Taking the p*ss out of your peers, or questioning the establishment, is just not the done thing here, not because people are scared to, but because they don’t really have the need or desire to.

I know from a personal exchange with Halal Bilal on Twitter that he was offended and hurt by this BBC article, which didn’t take too kindly to the SUCQ approach. The article had an air of arrogance which implied that SUCQ is backward and unfunny and the message that local comedians should take advice “from the white man” did not go down well.

I can sense that you know there is a ‘but’ coming….

BUT. The only problem I have with the SUCQ comedians is that Qatar provides so much in the way of rich material and they don’t seem to make much use of it. Most of the acts centre heavily around racial issues, taking the p*ss out of accents and mannerisms. To a Brit, this can be a little grating to watch, as it harks back to the bad old days of British comedy, in the 1970s, when racism was rife and little progress had been made to integrate immigrant cultures into British life. (Of course, there are Brits now who feel that British society has now gone too far in its multi-culturalism and too politially correct in its comedy, but that’s a whole other debate).

I think that’s where the author of the BBC article was coming from. For us Brits, it’s actually quite uncomfortable to sit through comedians taking the mick out of different races. And although the BBC article is clumsy and very insensitive to local culture, I personally think that SUCQ can learn from it, as long as they can get past the hurtful tone and try not to take it personally.

Qatar has a deeply racially divided society and you know your place in it based primarily on the colour of your skin and your passport. Halal Bilal cleverly drew attention to this with an amusing anecdote about entering Qatar as an Asian man with a South African passport. However, the other comedians’ occasional mocking of other cultures’ mannerisms and accents isn’t really doing anything constructive to try and tackle the issue and it’s only helping to reinforce cultural barriers, not break them down.

Qatar is riddled with comedy-rich material at every corner. From entire supermarket aisles devoted to tissues (why?!) to crumbling balconies on brand new villas, through to the driving (oh, the driving!), there’s a lot for a comedian to get his teeth into without causing offence or insulting the country’s political leadership.

That said, SUCQ has my absolute support and I urge everyone to try and attend at least one event. My husband was quite reluctant to come with me on Monday night, but despite my criticisms outlined above, we did have a really good laugh and he was glad he came.

And despite my concerns about racism, I must admit that the constant ribbing of the groups of Qatari ladies and men who occupy the VIP seats at SUCQ events is absolutely hilarious, and it’s good to see it taken in good humour! The Qatari audience can give as good as they get and you will see some excellent heckling. The presence of a 13 year-old Al Thani at the November event put all of the comedians on the spot and they all had to think on their feet, proving that they can hold themselves in the most challenging of conditions……

So, what DO you do all day?

This question drives me insane! I get it quite a lot, and I suppose I take it personally because it sounds slightly judgemental….

The truth is, that I do somehow manage to keep busy all day. I really enjoy not having a normal ‘job’ to go to, but then I have always been quite good at keeping myself entertained and I do enjoy being on my own (it’s an only child thing!).

The sad fact is that expat wife-life isn’t a constant round of spas, lunches and coffee mornings. I’ve never been to a coffee morning, I hardly EVER go out for lunch and the only time I set foot in a spa is either for my monthly waxing torture, or because we have visitors and I want to spoil them.

I spend most days on my own at home. My life revolves entirely around our 11-month old dog, as she requires a lot of work and creates a lot of housework! I have set up a separate blog about all things dog at doglifeqatar.com

Having a dog, I will freely admit, is more work than I ever imagined! It’s very rewarding, but there were times when she was a puppy that I thought I’d never be able to cope, and it wasn’t unusual for my husband to come home from work and find me in a weeping huddle in the corner of the kitchen. I would never take on a puppy again; a fully grown rescued adult, maybe, but never another puppy.

It was partly bad timing; we rescued her from the streets at the beginning of May, just weeks after I’d first landed in Qatar. We never intended to keep her, but didn’t succeed in finding a home for her. Now she is very much loved and part of the family, but being trapped at home by a puppy which needed constant attention was, at the time, very debilitating and difficult to cope with, because I really needed to be out there making new friends to help me settle in.

So, now my life revolves around her and keeping the house clean.

A typical day goes something like this:

7.30am: Get dragged out of bed by my husband, usually involving a cup of tea as a bribe! He has to leave for work, so he will go downstairs and let the dog out of the kitchen, where she sleeps overnight, and I will follow behind and go and sit with her. She normally climbs onto the sofa and goes back to sleep, and so do I! Neither of us are morning people……

8.30am: Dog starts to wake up. I make her and myself breakfast.

8.30am – 9.30am: Dog has a mad hour. Her morning energy needs an outlet, so I do a mixture of short bouts of training and playing with her, mixed with periods when I encourage her to entertain and settle herself with a chew toy. After about an hour, she burns out and goes back to sleep.

9.30am onwards: I might take her for a quick morning walk around the block, if I need to leave her alone later in the day (it helps if she is as tired as possible before leaving her on her own, so I have to plan in advance if I need to leave the house at all). The morning period is my window to either go to the supermarket, get some cleaning done, or spend time on the internet. Most of the time, it’s cleaning – I try and do at least one thing a day (bathrooms, kitchen, upstairs hoovering, bed-changing or downstairs floors). Some mornings are spent preparing a fortnight’s worth of raw food for the dog, or training treats – both involve a couple of hours of prep. If I have done ALL of my chores, I can relax enough to do some writing for my novel, but I very rarely allow myself time for this, which is ridiculous I know.

Lunchtime: I try to grab some lunch, but normally I forget! It’s often 2pm by the time I think about eating and by that time, I have to start thinking about organising our trip to the beach. I struggle to know what to eat for lunch as I spent the last 15 years living off ready-packed lunches bought from canteens, motorway service stations or Boots!

2.30pm: Get everything ready for the afternoon walk including making up bottles of drinks for both me and the dog and prepare a bag of treats for training her. Most of the time, we go to the beach because it’s the only place she can have a good off-lead run without me having to worry about people hassling us. It’s also a relatively distraction-free environment to work on training.

3pm: Load the car up with training treats, poo bags, water, towels and the dog and head for the beach or mangroves (25km and 40km away, respectively).

3.45pm: Arrive at the beach. Sometimes we meet up with other dog walkers, but if not I play some training games and hunt for crabs with her, and generally try and make myself as interesting as possible to keep the dog focussed on me (she is a saluki mix, and therefore prone to being quite ‘independent’ – I have to constantly work on her focus). This can be quite challenging, and often involves me running around a lot with my arms in the air and wooping. Thankfully, it’s a quiet beach….

5.15pm: Dry myself and the dog off, give her some water and leave the beach.

6pm: Arrive home, and hose the car and dog down to remove saltwater.

6.30pm: Dry the dog, feed the dog.

7pm: Jump in shower while hubby supervises the dog and cooks the dinner.

8pm: Relax with the hubby. Dog is normally asleep by now.

10.30pm: Quick walk around the block with the dog for a final wee and poo.

11pm: BED! This is quite late for Qatar as most people here seem to get up at 5am or even earlier, but my husband has an unusually late start-time at work of 8am.

About the cleaning.

People warned me about all the cleaning before I came. I didn’t believe them. It’s the dust – it gets EVERYWHERE. And in such quantities! I was used to rarely picking up a duster back in England, in fact it would be unusual for me to do it more than once a month. Over here, it’s at LEAST a twice weekly job. I know this sounds unbelievable; I didn’t believe it myself until we moved here.

Of course, it’s not just all over your bookcases and bedside tables, it’s all over the floor as well. Having vast expanses of shiny floors means that you soon notice it accumulating. We get through approximately four times as many hoover bags over here as we did in England (thankfully they can be ordered online as not many brands are available in the shops here).

As an experiment, I went a whole FOUR days without dusting cleaning the downstairs floors this week. (The following photos were taken on Wednesday and the last time I had done any cleaning was on the previous Friday.)

This is what the coffee table looked like:

And here is the product of a quick sweep of the floor in the kitchen, most of which has been shed from the dog’s coat during the night:

Lounge floor:

This is from the other half of the lounge:

Dining room floor:

The office floor:

As you can see, most of it is dust and sand, although the dog is responsible for a lot of it with her thieving of random tissues/destruction of toys! She is also shedding fur at the moment, which is contributing to it.

So, the moral of this story is, if you’re thinking of moving to Qatar, DON’T get a dog, but DO get a maid! And if you have the former, definitely consider getting the latter!

2011 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,300 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 22 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Raw diet for dog update

Please note that I have started a new blog for dog ownership in Qatar and all of my previous posts about raw food diets can now be found at dogblogqatar.com

Feeding a raw food diet to your dog in Qatar

Please note that I have started a new blog for dog ownership in Qatar and all of my previous posts about raw food diets can now be found at dogblogqatar.com

Is cheap labour sustainable?

I know I’ve not been great at updating this blog, but I am going to try and update it more frequently now I’m settled in Qatar. We are very happy here, life is good and we’ve made lots of good friends and have a lovely house.

Of course, not everything is perfect, as you’d expect. I have the occasional ‘Doha Day’, as they are affectionately known among my friends, when things don’t seem to go well and everything can get on top of you.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the underlying cause of these Doha Days and they all seem to have one common root – the way people and jobs are valued in the Middle East.

Across the Middle East, labour is cheap and people are almost seen as disposable commodities. This applies to Westerners too – although we take home what are perceived to be higher salaries than we would otherwise be accustomed to, in a country with the highest GDP in the World and an almost universally wealthy population, we are still cheap! There are plenty more people who would take our jobs, should we choose to leave, and turnover of staff can be high.

But, for this article, I am mainly talking about the people on very cheap salaries, who have what would be considered to be ‘working class’ or ‘blue collar’ jobs in the West; Shop assistants, medical staff, construction supervisors, hairdressers, administration staff, beauticians.

In my opinion, these jobs are hugely undervalued here. These workers are the cogs in the wheels of society. In day to day life, you might not ever interact with a Geotechnical Design Engineer, but you will almost certainly deal with shop assistants, call centre staff, office managers and waiters.

The ethics of paying such low wages is a separate debate altogether; it’s not black and white, as I have met people here in pitifully low wages who are very grateful to have the opportunity to work overseas and send money home every month.

But regardless of the ethics, low wages contribute to a culture where few people care very much about the work they do. It is not worth their time or effort to try and help you any more than they need to.

As someone paying for services, you can often feel like you’re banging your head against a brick wall, and that’s one of the reasons you might have a bad Doha day!

It also means that it’s harder for us expat wives to get a nice simple job, of the sort you might take in England after having kids; nothing too taxing, but something you can fit in around the kids’ school times that brings home a bit of extra money for treats every month and keeps you busy.

Traditionally ‘working class’ jobs over here are pretty much exclusively given to people from developing nations. That’s partly as a result of the very low salaries, partly because the jobs might entail working 12 hour shifts 6 days a week, and partly, I believe, because of legal restrictions over which nationalities can do certain jobs. Part time working is also illegal in Qatar, as I understand it.

The problem with this is that candidates for such jobs often have no, or little, relevant experience. It’s easy to undervalue shop assistants or call centre staff; anyone can pick up a phone or open a till, right? But then all you end up with is robots who sure can open a till or answer the phone, but ask anything more of them and things start to become difficult.

The low value of staff can be witnessed over here, just by observing how OVERSTAFFED many restaurants and shops are. I’ve sat waiting 20 minutes for a menu in a cafe before now and watched no less than ten waiters and waitresses milling around doing nothing. With responsibility diffused across so many people, none of them take the initiative to come over to your table. You will see a lot more staff on duty in most establishments, compared to the UK, but much lower standards of service.

It would be great if I could join one of these teams and shake things up a bit. Many British people, including myself, have some good retail or hospitality experience behind them, as it’s almost a right of passage to do such work to see you through your school or university days. But I’m not signing up for the kind of treatment I know I would be subjected to over here in such a position.

I was talking to a beauty therapist a couple of weeks ago, from the Philippines. She does intimate waxing (any body hair is frowned upon among Middle Eastern women). Not something you would trust to an untrained or inexperienced therapist, right? She told me to make sure that I asked specifically for her for future appointments, as they were about to bring in four more staff from the Philippines who had no experience at all in waxing, and they were going to be trained on the job. This is in a top-end international hotel spa group! Back home, I used to get my waxing done at a delightful French salon in Oxford, where fantastic French women came to work for a year at a time, and they took a great deal of pride in the service they offered.

My Filipino beautician told me that she works 12-hour days, six days a week, for the equivalent of £400 a month. I have no reason to disbelieve her; it wasn’t a sob story as she was quite happy to be able to send money home each month to help towards her daughter’s education. Her daughter was living with her grandmother.

The other reason for having bad Doha Days is usually on account of the terrible driving, coupled with congested city centre roads.

I can’t help but think that the number of people living in Qatar could easily be halved, taking into account the issues outlined above. This would have a knock-on effect on the traffic, especially when you consider that one of the factors which has such a negative impact on driving over here is because of the melting pot of different cultures all bringing their own rules of the road to Doha’s streets.

So what’s the alternative to cheap labour, and can it go too far the other way? I guess you only have to look at Britain to answer that.

In Britain, an egalitarian society is considered to be something to aspire to. Although Britain still has a very long way to go before it even approaches this ideal, the culture has led to standards being set for the treatment of workers, including the Minimum Wage and the European Working Time Directive.

The problem is that this has left us wide open to being undercut by countries with no such values. As a result, Britain has pretty much lost its entire manufacturing industry to China and India, ships arrive into port fully loaded, but leave completely empty and we have an almost insurmountable national debt to tackle.

So, what’s the answer, and has any society managed to strike the right balance? What will happen to Middle Eastern economies in the longer term as a result of this reliance on cheap labour? And will cheap labour always be available in the future as Asian economies grow?