Sitting at breakfast this morning, looking over the Bahrain museum and the road junction immediately in front of it, it finally felt that relaxation had come to us. The massage yesterday afternoon and a good night's sleep were no doubt contributory factors in the equation. Not that this mattered much, we had to check out and head back in this direction - yes, we're back in Riyadh, a place full of unhappy people according to last night's taxi driver. He had worked there for 5 years a while back doing something finance related. Odd then that he preferred his life back in Bahrain as a taxi driver rather than have the money Riyadh probably gave him. I could empathise with him.

At the check out desk were a pile of leaflets advertising Christmas at the Diplomat. Christmas lunch, the reindeer choir singing your favourite carols and The Boxtones on live - sounds ideal. The older I get, the less inclined I'm becoming to want to be back in the UK. If it weren't for the expectation heaped on you, probably unknowingly, by family, I'm fairly certain both AM and I would much rather head off somewhere warm to relax. The UK is too cold, too wet, too dark and too damned depressing to want to spend time there during the winter. Not only that, but it seems a never ending round of driving from place to place - time dutifully killed behind the wheel of a car. Not that our own house would be much better. Since buying it seven years back, we've barely spent any time in it. As tidy as it is, it's never been given the opportunity to become a home for either of us.

More than once this weekend, we've toyed with the notion of staying just that extra day, but that's a slippery slope that could lead to a very expensive hotel bill to be repented at pleasure. So we'll content ourselves with a couple of nights and wait until the next time. Talking to the receptionist as we departed, it would seem that we will be expected...

It's quiet here in Bahrain at the moment. AM is asleep on the bed - the consequence of an Imigran tablet a little earlier today. The light has subsided outside and what traffic there is on the corniche has slowed to a crawl. Not exactly fertile material to blog about. What then to offer you today?

How about if I give you some music to go take a listen to. I'll do five albums that I think are worth a place in anyone's collection:

1. Pearl Jam - Ten: As debut albums go, this one is hard to follow. I'd go as far as to say this was their finest hour and something they've yet to match. For your consideration, I give you "Jeremy", a fine song regardless of the rather dark subject matter.
2. Rush - Signals: Rush are a band whose early material I found a bit of a tough listen, primarily due to Geddy Lee's vocal style. It wasn't until I shared a room with a Rush fanatic, when in the RAF and I heard "Exit... Stage Left" that I caught onto their undoubtable musicianship, from where on in all else was history. I had the pleasure of seeing them live 3 times on their 30th Anniversary tour and would love the opportunity to see them again, should it arise. The song presented here tells of the pain of loss through the ageing process. It's not something they've ever performed live due to the need for Ben Mink's violin part - "Losing It".
3. A Perfect Circle - Mer De Noms: When Maynard James Keenan decided to step outside the confines of Tool, he couldn't have done so in better company than with Billy Howerdel. The result was A Perfect Circle. APC are far from your standard rock act and should be required listening on anyone's' play list. Here is a track called "Breña". Enjoy!
4. Smashing Pumpkins - Machina/The Machines of God: Smashing Pumpkins had their coming of age with Siamese Dream and a hard to beat high point with Mellon Collie & the Infinite Sadness, but here I've gone for one of their less well known albums with Machina, a piece of work that I suspect is badly underrated. This is my favourite track from it "Stand Inside Your Love", which always reminds me of AM.
5. Biffy Clyro* - Puzzle: I know next to nothing about Biffy Clyro, except that they're from Ayeshire (there are worse places). Here I've picked "Folding Stars" for you to listen to, a truly beautiful love song that can easily bring a tear to the eye. Not sure who Eleanor is, but it sounds like she's worth writing songs about.

Perhaps nothing there that's too far from the mainstream, stuff you may well have heard of in all likelihood, but did you buy them (does anyone still do that? You should)? Give the links above a try and see what you think.

Postscript: Just been to the excellent Margarita Mexican at The Gulf hotel. It's a new undertaking for them, but on the strength of this evenings meal, they should be kept busy for some time to come. If you get there, the chocolate pudding is a must - chilli infused chocolate mousse, with a raspberry coulis and a little whipped cream to top it off; absolutely to die for.

* Talking over the subject of todays' post in the restaurant, AM enquired as to who "Billy Clitoris" was - kind of hard to explain that one really. You had to be there...

We are now in Bahrain, have been since 12:00 or so to be more accurate. Smooth passage across highway and causeway, can't complain really.

The day has been spent, as ever, browsing round the bookshop in Seef Mall, buying books, buying magazines, drinking coffee at Caribou, buying undies and skirts (latter not for me I should add). Heavy stuff, I think you'll agree. Aside from the traffic along the corniche, the day has been one of relaxation and idleness personified. The lounge has served us with a bevy of fines wines for an hour or two, after which it was on to the Fiddler's.

I have mentioned The Boxtones a couple of times (1, 2 & 3) now and they were on again tonight. Just for a change I was more than happy to see the band.

It's an odd thing you know, the difference between how the Boxtones come across on stage, and how we were beginning to look. Gary & co look absolutely effortless, whilst we were struggling to put single songs together in any sort of coherent manner. It really is a joy to see a band put heart and soul into something and all the while make it look effortless, like they've barely fallen out of bed and thought "I know, that's what we'll do today - for a bit of a crack and maybe some beer money", but it's what they seem to do. They've been out here, doing sets most nights, and still look fresh as a daisy and not a care in the world. Not too sure how it's done to be honest.

Tonight's set included, a Beatles medley, Jason Mraz (again), Lynryd Skynrd's "Sweet Home Alabama", Green Day's 'Basket Case', GNR's "Sweet Child of Mine", a Foo Fighters track the name of which escapes me right now, and others. What slightly threw me though was seeing them with an audience demanding an encore, something they duly obliged with a Rage Against the Machine track from their first album. Now it wasn't a piece of music I knew, but the sheer gusto that it was performed with and the reaction of their audience had me laughing, not from amusement, but with out and out enjoyment. To see both band and audience enjoying themselves so much was wonderful.

Talking with Gary afterwards, I gather they have now has their contract extended until next August they like them so much. I'm quite delighted at this news and hope to see them on more than one occasion between now and then. The only downside of this is that they are not allowed to have guests on the stage, much to my chagrin. You will not be seeing me on stage at the Diplomat any time soon - I will get my day though.

Well the week for me is over. It seems early I know but I've taken tomorrow off so AM and I can get over to Bahrain early and not get quite so caught up in the queues on the Causeway. As vital to the sanity of the average expat as Bahrain is, getting over the Causeway and off 'dry' land is a profound PITA. For most of the year they seem to have been rebuilding and remodelling the island in the middle where all the immigration and customs points are. To be fair it desperately needs the work, but it isn't half getting in the way of the free flow of passage between the two countries. Catching the Causeway at the wrong time (any time after 15:30 on a Wednesday) means you are going to be stuck there for a long time. It's been known to take 4 or more hours to get across, which in the height of summer is no fun at all. The trick is to keep pushing towards the right, where the road widens out and hopefully you get just a small jump on those to the left. There are no rules here, every man for themselves and fortune favours the brave, more so the stupid.

Given that most of our indigenous colleagues are now on their Hadj/Eid break, the office has gone into something of a funk. Dealing with local vendors is almost impossible and now the BST has ended, our first 4 hours of the day are unsullied by anything as remotely taxing as dealing with the UK. Our working week with the UK is now down to a 15 hour window - something of a limit in trying to move matters forward that end. The whole effort of going into the office to do anything seems slightly pointless, we get done what we need to though. Is it any wonder I'm looking forward to tomorrows' road trip and some time away. Maybe I'll even get the camera out and get me away from pillaging the archives so heavily.

Till next time then, when I'll be coming at you from the wrong side a a few glasses of vino rosso... Cheers!

Given that I spent most of the evening pre-occupied with fixing up the CSS code for the site, time has become somewhat limited for content creation round here. I thought therefore, to tell you a little about that peculiarly British concern, the weather. Not though the British weather, no none of that. Instead to give you a feel of what it's like out here at this time of the year.

For most people, there is perhaps the belief that the Middle East is always sunshine, with never a cloud in the sky. Hopefully by now, I should have disabused most of you of the 'clear blue sky' thing, it's just not happening for the most part. Aside from a period of time around March/April and some time around November, rain is pretty much absent - the lack of which is what's used to define a desert, something I can see all around me, or at least outside our compound cocoon. Rains generally coincide with the change of seasons; winter/spring into summer, summer/autumn into winter. This then is pretty much where we come in now.

Everyone knows that Saudi Arabia is hot - exceedingly so at times; ever seen 55C on your garden thermometer? Mmmm... not so many hands up for that question. What is perhaps less well known is how cold it can be during the winters. OK, so it's not Arctic winter Canada cold, but it still comes as a bit of a shock to the system when it arrives. After a period living out in this region, the blood tends to thin out a fair bit, meaning you feel it that much more keenly. There also the more or less total absence of humidity, it's often below 10% and can drop to 1-2%, certainly in the central region where Riyadh is, away from any body of water - the Gulf is some 300 miles distant from here. Humidity has the effect of holding the heat in against the skin. So thin blood, no humidity and a whopping 40C drop on the summer peaks, and you can see why it feels rather more chilly than of late.

I can understand why the very occasional visitor is more than a tad baffled at what we might be complaining about, but it's all relative against what you're used to. Already, many have ditched the a/c for the winter (or at least the chiller part), woolly jumpers are now the norm in the evening, talk around the office is of putting the BIG quilt on the bed. The temperature isn't such that the heating has gone on yet, but give it another month perhaps, not that this really does much to be fair. Come January or February, we can expect it to drop below 0C overnight on a regular basis. Three years back we had a sustained period where the overnight temperature dropped to -8C; most people living here just aren't geared up for that, with the plant life around the compound even less so, as it killed off literally hundreds of the newly planted flame trees around the compound. That was apparently the coldest Riyadh winter for over 20 years though and it was the first time I'd ever seen frozen puddles on the ground in 10 years - I'd seen a frost on the grass a few times, but ice was a new one.

So where are we at the moment then? Well todays' maximum was forecast for 23C, though it never made it above 20C. It's now around 17C, with the expectations that the overnight low will be in the region of 15C. Most of the day has been cloudy and we are expecting rain on Friday, though I shouldn't think it would be too heavy - the spring rain is generally much heavier and prolonged. It's a little unfortunate that I'll be on my way back from Bahrain on Friday, where it's also forecast for inclement weather. The prospect of a trip back along a rain soaked road that hasn't seen a drop in over 6 months, is not overly enticing, as the aggregation of rubber and diesel will likely turn the surface into a greasy slick reminiscent of a well lubricated eel. No fun at all and the RTA rate goes through the roof - a good time to park up and stay the hell out of it.

Still, we'll get ourselves (AM & I) over there and see what's what. At least Bahrain will have a sensible level of humidity in the atmosphere, so it should feel warmer even if technically it's little different from here. I'll let you know...