Back to Kuwait

Finally heading back to Kuwait to live from September after an absence of a few years.  Much has changed since I last lived there.  It will be interesting to see how I react to living in place I think I know given the fact that my knowledge is based on memories...

Will my new opinions and experiences see Kuwait in a better light or not?

Tea-bagging? You don't know the meaning of the word.

When you think of Scotland and its people, certain stereotypes tend to crop up. Many foreigners see us as kilt-wearing, haggis-eating, whiskey-swigging drunks who live in a Brigadoon-esque time-warp.

These stereotypes do not really bother me because I can, kind of, see where they originated. The one stereotype that really gets to me, however, is the one about us all being really stingy. That really annoys me. In Germany, they even advertise the price cheap of goods as "schotten price" - such is our reputation for frugality! I always thought it was unjustified - until now, that is!

As you know, I work with a particularly eccentric bunch of, ahem, older ladies. In previous posts you have met one of them, The Twitterer, but have yet to meet Mrs. Dooubtfire, The Grey Lady, The Duchess and Miss Smugly Treacherous.

Normally, I keep a low-profile and try to keep out of their staff-room politics but their antics last Friday caused me no end of amusement.

We have a whiteboard for announcements in our staff room and on Friday it bore the legend "Please share your teabags. Either make a pot or share a bag between two cups.". I kid you not.

Sorry folks, but unless someone is a blood relative I am not sharing a bleedin' teabag with them. How bloody stingy.

Anyway, I decided to play along with their post-menopausal reasoning and only had tea from the pot at break and lunch. I still couldn't bring myself to 'share a bag' though. The thought actually turns my stomach. Later in the day I was in-between classes and decided to have a quick cup of tea whilst catching up on some marking. I sneaked into the staffroom and made myself a cup using one tea bag all to myself - such hedonsim. I was in the process of sneaking back to my room when The Duchess appeared from nowhere and shouted, "I hope you are still tea-bagging!"

Oh my God! At least a dozen or so sixth-formers were in the corridor and they just about collapsed with laughter. Now, I know what The Duchess meant by tea-bagging, she also knew what she meant, but I am sure she had no idea that the term has other meanings too. I am also pretty sure that the definition that made the sixth-formers roll in the aisles had nothing to do with Poilitics either.

The Tell-Tale Heart

My husband used to say that I had a white heart. Where he comes from that means that you are a good person, who is kind-hearted. He would tell me this almost every day. You have a white heart habipti, wallah.
He even bought me one on a chain to wear around my neck. I woke up one morning and there was a little box sitting on the bedside cabinet with the white heart inside. I wore it every day.I wore it over the one that was beating furiously, for him, in my chest.
I was wearing it the day he broke my real one.
I wore it on the plane journey home and played with it between my fingers for the entire journey. Underneath it was my own heart breaking and under that my unborn baby's heart was also beating away, oblivious.
When I got home I took it off and placed it in a box, along with my wedding ring, and I cried.
Inside me, though, my heart it still white. But, it is not the white of the pure-hearted. My heart that was once so red, beating with passion and life is now just a little bit colder, just a little bit harder and just a little bit more cynical.
It still turns red and swells with love, however, when I look at my daughter and I know that one day, hopefully, someone will warm it up permanently - you see, my heart may have been broken but I am not.

Families, Funerals and the associated Fallout

My aunt died recently. She has five children all of whom live far away from her. One in Singapore, one in London, one in Leeds, One in Florida and one in Edinburgh. They hardly ever visited her when she was alive, which was not surprising because she was not a very nice person and was quite cruel to them when they were children (sorry to speak ill of the dead but I speak as I find).
Anyway, to cut a long story short, since her death the goings on between these siblings are enough to make you want to puke - talk about picking over the bones of the dead! They do say that funerals bring out the worst in families, well it certainly has in this case, with bells on.
Now, each sibling is due to inherit around 20K once my aunt's estate has been settled which, one would think, would be enough for anyone. This family, however, are currently in the process of fighting over every tea cup and place mat in what was once their family home. They have each travelled miles to lay their claim to this and that and have all fallen out in the process - vitriolic emails, texts and phonecalls have been the order of the day and things are now verging on the ridiculous.
Tonight, one sibling has driven 500 miles to lay claim to a double bed intended for her sister. I mean FFS! All that trouble for a bed, how sad is that?
I told my mother and father tonight that they should spend the lot before they go - seriously, if this is what inheritance does to you then I do not want anything to do with it. So, mum and dad, go on a cruise or five, anything, just don't leave it all to me and my brother to fight over.

Cup a soup - food of the devil.

Gwyneth Paltrow - she of the post oscar histrionics and macrobiotic diet- was once quoted as saying she would 'rather die' than give her children cup-a-soup. Noble words, which no doubt come from a "both my hubby and myself are loaded" perspective. Try living on benefits love.
Gwynny's sanctimonious opinions bring me to one of my pet peeves - celebrity mums.

I hate the way they act as if they are the only person to have ever reproduced. They appear on television and gush out inappropriate advice to an audience of mums who can do it without the millions, the nannies and the publicity. They opt for caeserians so they can have a tummy tuck right away and then get thousands for their 'how I got my figure back' story from trashy magazines. They are then held up as role models by the media - ludicrous.

The real role models are the millions of mums out there who do not need to profit from motherhood or even brag about it - they just get on with it. And... if buying the odd CupaSoup in their shopping makes them bad mothers then I am one too.

Cracked Actor

My little girl attends a Saturday morning Drama class in the city. Every Saturday we go there and whilst she makes friends and has fun I wait in the foyer area with the other mums and dads.

Some are great whilst others are just plain annoying, whiny-accented upper middle-class wannabes wearing odd wellies and sporting home-made haircuts. You know that look, they spend a fortune in Harvey Nicholls and still manage to look like a bunch of pikeys.

Over the last few weeks I have become fascinated by these people and their ways.

One of the things I have noticed is that all of their kids have unusual or original names. Not unusual in the mould of Gwyneth Paltrow, but getting there. They range from the completely made up, moving through to the outrageously Scottish to the just plain daft. It kind of reminded of that old Billy Connolly sketch about the "Second Name Clan" - "Where's Finlay? Oh, he is over there with Crawford and Farquar having a round of golf." Except the Drama class version goes more like this:

"Sorley, Hamish where is Lila? Don't know mum, she was playing with Beeny a moment ago but I think she went off with Sejanus." I kid you not. My wee girl has the most normal name of any child there and she has an Arab one!

The other noticeable thing about these parents is that they are as tight as a naff's chuff. In between classes they produce mountains of sandwiches and flasks of tea. I am all for frugality but would a wee treat from the vending machine or a visit to a city centre cafe every now and again really break the bank? I mean, FFS, I overheard one of them tell her kid, "You can have butter or jam on your scone but not both." Maybe that is why these types always seem to live in huge gaffs in the West End.

Anyway, I digress, the point of this post is not about them but about another one of the parents. He is probably not cracked yet but I reckon, by Easter, he will be. The guy in question is an actor on a long running Scottish Crime Drama and he brings his wee girl every week. No big deal you might think but the sandwich brigade and the hordes of 'resting' actors who teach the kids' classes just won't leave the poor guy alone. You can tell that he finds the collective fore-lock tugging totally embarrassing yet he is polite to a fault. You can tell that he just wants to do the Saturday morning mum/dad stuff like the rest of us instead of having to run the gauntlet of sicophants and crashing bores every week.

Does FaceBook make you feel special?

Mark Zuckerberg, the FaceBook geek, was recently quoted as saying that he believes the success of Facebook is down to the fact that it makes "everyone feel as if they are special."

Really? Not in my experience. Don't get me wrong, social networking can be a great thing and if, like me, you have friends and family all over the world, it can be a great way of keeping in touch.

It doesn't make me feel special though. I sometimes feel like a total arse when I continually refer to myself in the third person in my status updates: "Weegie Khaleeji wishes everyone a Happy Christmas, Weegie Khaliji has just returned from Tesco, Weegie Khaleeji is eating a cheese sandwich". Purleez! I haven't spoke in the third person since I was about 4 and now here I am at 40 using it to record the minutae of my not so exciting life.

No, recording the consumption of every cheese sandwich does not make me feel particularly special at all, especially when I learn that Johanna is currently touring Australia and John is in Africa saving indigenous animals. No, Facebook has the tendency to make me look at the lives of others and compare it to my own. Mine never wins.

In my job, it can also leave you vulnerable, despite the fact that you have the power to invite and block people. Recently, an ex 'colleague' (I use the term loosely) caused both myself and others much distress when she 'invited' a couple of our current pupils to be friends with her. This meant that pupils we currently teach could see posts we had made on this colleague's wall. Luckily, there was nothing too controversial there but we felt we had been compromised, because even though we were able to control who we invited and what they saw we were still compromised due this person's complete lack of professionalism. I think it was then I realised why our school board does not encourage staff to join sites like Facebook.

Facebook, for me however, will be something I continue to use because it is addictive. I would argue with Zuckermen's reasons for this addiction though. I don't think any of us use Facebook because it makes us feel special, we use it because, ultimately, we are all just a bunch of nosey bastards.