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...