Tap dance

Today, 3rd March, was Arab Water Day or some such commemoration that wasn't publicised in advance. I was listening to the presenters and guests on Dubai Eye talking about how everybody in the UAE wastes 250 litres a day, and that the UAE consumes more water per capita than any other nation on the planet. In a former life I did water audit work. At the time, total domestic daily consumption in the UK was taken as 180 litres per person.

Most potable water comes from desalination, which is a huge consumer of energy, producing millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Even with (the now environmentally friendly because it doesn't produce carbon) nuclear fission producing a quarter of the UAE's electricity by 2020-something, that's still a shitload of drowning polar bears.

The UAE has to reduce its water demand.  According to Dubai Eye, hundreds of dams and more desalination plants are to be constructed, and there are plans afoot to cap domestic consumption.

I have a few ideas relating to reducing consumption.

• Ensure that everybody pays for the water they use. The most sensitive part of the human body is the wallet.
• All new builds should include grey water recycling. This can be a nightmare to retro-fit into existing buildings and is only really practical if a building is being seriously renovated. The local version of serious renovation is usually to tear it down and start from scratch. So install a grey water tank, and then you can flush the loo and water the garden with minimally treated shower waste.
• Don't make it a criminal offence for watchmen to boost their meagre incomes by washing cars with bucket and sponge. And neither make it an offence to have a dirty car. An automatic car wash typically uses between 68 and 265 litres per cycle; whilst enthusiastic use of a hosepipe might use up to 450 litres, a bucket to wash a car plus another to rinse and leather will use probably 20 litres.
• Discourage houseboys and maids from using hosepipes to sweep sand from driveways. A broom is just as effective and costs nuppence.
• Try to get the Afghan ex-truck driver who masquerades as a gardener not to leave hoses running for an hour or more. I tried to reduce water consumption by fitting spray nozzles to my garden hoses. He simply removed them every morning, drowned the entire garden, and then refitted them when he left, in the apparent hope that I'd not notice. That was the guy that Beloved Wife fired when she caught him standing in a thunderstorm watering the cacti. His replacement has a similar attitude to water conservation: "I'm not paying for it so it's OK if I waste it."
• The biggies for domestic consumption are where hosepipes are involved. Modern toilet cisterns are presumably designed with Fitness For Purpose in mind, and many have an economy flush feature for where only liquids are involved, but putting a brick, a hippo, or some other device in the tank to reduce the volume of the flush may be false economy. Apart from the nasty prospect of having to flush again and again, insufficient water flowing in the foul sewers causes very real problems of blocked drains and all that this implies.
• In accordance with one of the guidelines of Abu Dhabi's Estidama manual, plant native species in public areas where possible. Plants from northern Europe may temporarily look pretty, but they drink a massive amount of water and still have to be replaced when they burn up under the Arabian sun. A lot of the public flowerbeds are watered with treated sewage effluent, which is a step in the right direction, and this re-use of grey water needs to be extended. I refer to my earlier comment.
• Growing local fruit and veg consumes enormous quantities of water. I'm not going to sit here and do the arithmetic, but the carbon footprint of watering local tomatoes could well be greater than that of air-freighting them from Spain.

As for my bit, the car gets washed once a month down at the EPPCO, the bike generally gets a weekly once-over with a duster and some furniture polish if it's been out. We shower rather than bath. I even turn the tap off while I'm brushing my teeth. Beloved Wife wanted a dishwasher, and I refused until she showed me a model that used less water than washing the pots in the sink. Our extravagance is the garden, and that would use a lot less water if I could convince the gardener (q.v.) that aloe vera and agave really don't need to be drowned every morning. In the winter we seldom get a DEWA bill beyond the green (lowest consumption and therefore cheapest rate) zone of less than 6000 gallons a month. That's still 450 litres a day per person, and is on the whole shameful. Over the past couple of months our consumption has been half that, but it always goes through the roof in the summer.

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Optical fibre

I don’t actually want a fibre-optic cable into the Crumbling Villa to deliver internets, telephone, and cable TV. When Beloved Wife and I first moved in over five years ago, the only telephone service available was through the execrable Itisalot. Getting a telephone landline presented little difficulty, but internet was more of a challenge owing, apparently, to a lack of capacity at the telephone exchange.

In fact, the Head of Customer Service at Itisalot’s Deira branch had promised internet within two weeks of the application. He subsequently hung up or was otherwise not available whenever I phoned him. This is Head of Customer service; just as well he wasn’t some disincentivised minion.

We got a wireless internet eventually, and it works fine except when the cheapo wire from the squaerial on the roof to a box in the study perishes in the sunshine and has to be replaced with more of the same. Tropical grade co-ax is apparently Not Coming In Dubai.

But leaving well alone isn’t in Itisalot’s business model, it seems. I’d been putting off random “You should migrate to our all-singing and all-dancing eLife service” phone calls for over a year until in October 2012 when, under threat of having the existing connection cut off, I finally said, “OK, you want to install a fibre-optic cable for eLife? Make it so.”

Sadly, Itisalot’s technicians have had extreme difficulty in making it so.

Sometime in October 2012, a team arrived and put new optical fibre cable from the junction box in the street up to a hole in the skirting board under the stairs of the Crumbling Villa. A second team arrived and advised that there was no signal from the telephone exchange. This would be fixed, and then someone would come and fix the modem, and we’d have our eLife.

• Itisalot phoned to make an appointment for 3^rd November 2012, but nobody turned up.
• Itisalot phoned and made an appointment for 12^th November, and nobody turned up.
•  I phoned Itisalot on 29^th November to find out what had happened, and got a vague apology.
•  Itisalot rang on 28^th January 2013 to make an appointment to fix the eLife cable. Never mind that the cable was already fixed, and the problem was at the exchange.
• Nobody turned up on 29^th January. So much for the appointment.
•  Itisalot rang on 4^th February, demanding to know why no-one was at home. We were in Cyprus; I got the technician to make an appointment for 7^th February.
• Nobody came on 7^th February.
•  On 9^th February, a technician rolled up and declared that the problem was at the exchange, not in the Crumbling Villa. Thanks, but we knew this in October.
•  Finally, on 20^th February, an Itislalot technician got a signal from the exchange. He fitted a box to the wall at a jaunty angle, and then disappeared, promising that the modem would be fitted by another team ‘tomorrow.’
• Tomorrow never comes. On 24^th February a different team phoned, promising that they’d come today at 2pm. At 2:30pm they rolled up and declared that a different team would come “Later today without fail” to fix the modem. Exactly the same story spun the previous week.

Here is where I lost my rag. I tried to complain, but was first told that I’d have to give the technician’s phone number to the Itisalot call centre. When I called back, I was transferred to Complaints. Here, they declared that they had no record of my eLife application. This is weird, as the previous call person I’d been talking to had found the details on the same computer database. I’m forced to conclude that lying to customers is endemic and not limited to technicians.

Aside from the repeated lying and theft of my life days at a time, why should I worry? I neither want nor need cable television, and the current internet and telephone systems work adequately. OK, eLife would marginally reduce the monthly payment, and I can buy a Scotch egg with the monthly saving.

So the telecom company can continue on their inefficient way as far as I’m concerned. Phone and make appointments if you must, but I’m past staying at home to await your non-arrival. If you can’t arrange and then keep your own appointments, there’s little reason why I should hold up my side of the bargain. It is surely not in Itisalot’s financial interest to pay contractors to make repeated visits to customers’ houses to undertake the same task. And it certainly flies in the face of customer satisfaction to employ people who lie to customers.

Edited 2nd March to add that: Itisalot rocked up at 1150 today, having phoned me at 9am. Just over two hours later they've gone, leaving me with a working internet (q.v.) and a landline and cable TV decoder that will come on line 'in 24 hours.' Now I have to visit Itisalot to get my old connection cancelled or I'll be paying for both. Oh, and while the guys were here I received an SMS to say that they'd be arriving on 9th March. I wonder if anyone will turn up?

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Like a Rocket

Judge Grumpy on his Lawmaster

I took my bike in to the workshop to have some work done last Saturday. It's four years old, so the brake pipes ought to be replaced, and I mail-ordered steel-braided hoses. Replacing the hydraulics is a job I've done before on other motorbikes, so this time I wisely paid someone else to do the work.

It turned out to be an excellent decision: the mechanics had trouble bleeding the system and even resorted to dismantling the master cylinder to its component molecules in a fruitless search for a mechanical fault. Beloved Wife had dropped me off at the workshop, briefly looked around the showroom, declared how much she liked the looks of the cruisers, and then driven home.

The ongoing problem bleeding air bubbles out of the hydraulic system meant that my bike wasn't ready by 6.30pm after all. I suggested that if the shop would let me borrow a bike for an overnight test ride, it would take the pressure off the mechanics and they could finish the job on Sunday.

And so I found myself astride a 2011 model Triumph Rocket III Touring. By a staggering coincidence, this was the same machine that Beloved Wife had so admired earlier.

The Rocket III has the largest engine ever bolted into in a production motorcycle. It's a monstrous 2294cc in-line three cylinder water-cooled powerplant that produces massive torque at pretty much any revs. The Touring version that I rode is a bike that comes with a windscreen and panniers, and the engine has been tuned for cruising. There's an unfaired Roadster version of the same bike that produces 40 more horespowers and even more torques. I've a friend in Qatar with one of those, and acceleration coupled with no wind protection make a strenuous effort to pull his arms out of their sockets whenever he rides con brio.

The Touring version (105BHP and 150lb.ft, which is 78kW and 203Nm in Centigrade) encourages cruising. There's a very comfy riding position behind hugely wide handlebars in a capsule of still air. The simple clear polycarbonate windscreen is extremely effective at keeping the breeze off the rider. There's no tachometer, but this is hardly an issue because the bike accelerates strongly in any gear from pretty much any speed. As with a lot of shaft-drive bikes, the tail lifts when accelerating, and the front forks extend as the bike attempts to wheelie, and the overall effect is one of lifting her skirts and going for it.

At first, I got the impression that the handling wasn't up to much. Compared to my own Kawasaki 1400GTR the Rocket III seemed twitchy. But I think a lot of this is to do with the enormous handlebars that are over a metre tip to tip. Actually, the Triumph is very light to steer, considering its 395kg kerbside weight, but flickable it certainly isn't. There was a hint of a weave up at the national speed limit, but I think this was mostly me trying to see if it would. Cruising on straight and gently curving roads, the Triumph behaved impeccably. I didn't test the ABS, but it's a comfort to know that it's there.

I'm new to footboards and the cruiser style of motorcycle, and the rear brake pedal position took a little getting used to. The gearshift has both heel and toe, so it's possible to change up without scuffing your shiny shoes. I thought the five-speed gearbox was clunky. There are probably pieces of girder bridges inside to withstand the huge torques and pass them from engine to rear wheel without going ping.

As for equipment, the panniers are hugely long but very narrow. A 200mm wide top opening won't swallow a helmet. But a nice touch is the lids can be secured without locking them. Instruments are very basic, consisting of a single tank-mounted speedo and fuel gauge, and an array of warning lights. There's an LCD panel that houses the odometer and clock, two trip meters and tank range. The last lot are all accessible via a single thumb switch on the right handlebar. I should have liked to see a cruise control fitted to this cruiser.

I didn't ride it enough to measure fuel consumption, so the next bit is from the internet: I'd expect to be refilling the 22 litre tank every 250km or so. Nobody buys a 2.3 litre motorbike and expects it to be economical.

The three cylinders exhaust into a single manifold that then splits into two silencers. The example I rode had some rather loud aftermarket exhaust pipes that caused popping and banging on over-run. If I owned the bike I test-rode, I'd put the stock silencers back on.

Overall, I liked it. Definitely, it's a bike to put a smile on my face. And Beloved Wife likes the looks of the machine, which is a bonus. But would I buy one?

"Not this year," says Beloved Wife.

I returned the Triumph and rode my GTR home. I still like my sports-tourer more.

Thanks to DusejaMoto of Dubai for the test ride, and for fixing my brakes.

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There and back again

Thank you so much, Beloved Wife, for the Christmas present of an EWI. What is an EWI? It's an Electric Wind Instrument; essentially a synthesiser that the player blows into, and produces music by fingering the keys as if it's a flute, or recorder, or oboe, or saxophone. I use the term "music" loosely, but because the instrument is electronic, all the tooting and parping during practice can be limited to the player's headphones.

The EWI came from Sax.co.uk in London, a shop that specialises in saxophones but that has a sideline in other woodwind instruments. They were very helpful.

Unfortunately, my EWI has a fault, in that it won't play if it's plugged in to an external power supply. Sax.co.uk have agreed that the unit should be replaced. All I have to do is get the existing one to London and they'll swap it. Simples.

Herein lies the problem. Aramex, who do so well with their Shop-n-Schlep service, won't insure the package without seeing the original receipt. I did show them a document entitled "Customer Receipt," but apparently that's not good enough. Aramex also want a sizeable portion of the value of the instrument just to ship it: Five hundred dirhams.

At least the thing will run perfectly on four AA batteries, and you can buy a lot of Duracells for less than five hundred dirhams.

But I've encountered Aramex's reluctance to ship from the UAE before. How is anyone supposed to ship used goods when they won't accept them for carriage without seeing some form of invoice, and they won't insure without an original sales invoice that Aramex alone will decide is acceptable. I didn't have any sales paperwork for a small gift that Aramex refused point-blank to ship to Australia.

One solution is to use Emirates Post, where they'll accept a package provided the sender fills in a customs declaration that gets stuck on to the package. Another is to beg favours from colleagues, friends or relatives who are travelling internationally.

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Suggestion box

Gary Larsen - The Far Side

Since September, I have been undertaking the Identity Card Experience, and I still don’t have one. Well, I do, but it expired last July and when I started the Experience, the nice man at the typing centre punched a hole through the chip and rendered the old card useless.

In order to prevent anyone from falling through the cracks and not getting an ID card, the current procedure is to apply for the card before obtaining a Residence Visa. In fact, Residence cannot be confirmed until proof is supplied that the resident has applied for an ID card. The ID card application is automatically rejected because there’s no residence visa on file. Then, once the visa is in the passport, the applicant goes back to the same typing centre where the original application was made, a scanned copy of the visa is put on file, and the ID card arrives within two weeks.

Based on my experience, I have a couple of suggestions that might make this simple process even more of a pleasure:-

If there is a problem with the application, such as the passport and visa serial numbers held by the Identity Authority not matching those held by the Immigration Department, the applicant should be contacted and advised. It is not helpful simply to tell the applicant that his card will be delivered within two weeks, and then to repeat this lie for three months.

The Identity Authority should ensure that if the applicant is told that someone will speak to him by telephone within a week, then that phone call should be made. Cancelling the entire application two days later “for not performing the required modification within the communicated deadline” is not the way to ensure customer satisfaction. Particularly when no required modification nor deadline were communicated.

One of the reasons why it takes five hours of waiting at the Identity Authority office to learn that the problem lies with the Immigration Department is that up to thirteen of the sixteen available desks are unoccupied. Employees working at the occupied desks should serve customers and not stare vacuously into space, nor fiddle with their bottles of antiseptic hand lotion for ten minutes between each customer.

Someone at the Immigration Department has to type the new passport and visa details into a computer in order to produce the printed sticker that goes into the applicant’s passport. It would be helpful, then, that these records are proliferated across the Immigration Department and Identity Authority’s computers so that out-of-date information doesn’t frustrate the ID card application process.

There is little point in the Immigration Department opening at 0700 if the computers don’t come on line until 0800. The servers are presumably working continuously to process people entering and leaving the country at any time, and it isn’t really rocket surgery to provide Immigration officials access to the database whenever they’re at work serving customers. Whoever pays the Immigration Department salaries would surely appreciate not paying for an hour of non-productive time every day for every employee.

Is it really necessary for updates of Immigration records to be undertaken not at the Immigration Department but at a separate office in the central Post Office?

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Stalwart fellow

An Alvis Stalwart. Not a Fiat 500

According to reports on the British telly, 2012 was the wettest year since 2000, and that was the wettest since records began. Beloved Wife and Goat arrived in a damp but mild Blighty just before Christmas, and headed from the Heathrow terminal by fun-bus to collect the extremely Budget rental car. And the rain started.

The Goat has picked the cheapest available car from a rental firm that he’d actually heard of, and ended up with a Peugeot 107 (which is identical to a Citroën C1 apparently), a minuscule five door hatchback suitable for five adults and their luggage. Human adults, each carrying more than an iPad? Probably not. They wuz havin’ a giraffe, innit? As it turned out, neither Budget nor Avis could find a Peugeot 107, having left it behind a waste paper basket, and thus offered a free upgrade to a Fiat Cinquecento. Joy: only three doors, but a tarmac-rippling 1200cc powerhouse instead of a mere 1000cc from Peugeot-Citroën.

The Goat flattened the rear seats and shoehorned both suitcases into the back of the Fiat, and then set off with Beloved Wife and her new GPS (Clarissa II) attached by suction cup to the windscreen. New Clarissa had some interesting ideas. Instead of the most obvious route from Heathrow to Plymouth, which is along the M4 to Bristol and then M5 to Exeter and A38 to Plymouth, Clarissa decided that the A303 was cheaper, shorter, and would burn less fuel. The Goat was too tired to argue, and so the A303 it was.

In the dark and in the rain, the bendy comedy roads were a rude awakening for a Goat who’s not driven in the UK for nearly two years. But he reminded himself that these were the conditions on every driving lesson he ever took, way back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.

Somewhere between Yeovil and Taunton, the increasingly-erratic Clarissa decided that a jolly around some tiny country lanes was in order. They got smaller and damper until one lane involved a rather deep puddle. The Goat figured that as the grass verges were visible, the puddle could be forded. Onward! More narrow bendy roads, no other traffic, no signs of civilisation. No, wait, a village (Ottery St Catchpole, or something) with a church and pub, and then more lanes and another puddle. This time, the Goat had seen red tail lights ahead, and he figured that a main road must surely be near. The puddle got deeper and deeper. It was time for bottom gear and slipping the clutch. Beloved Wife held her breath. The only sound for hundreds of metres was the bubbling of a submerged exhaust, a revving Fiat engine, and mumbling that “If I have to get out and push, I’m gonna divorce him.”

A nearby upturned wheelie bin indicated probably 15 inches of water, and the rest was creeping through the door seals and soaking the carpets. Clarissa declared that a right turn was in order at a T junction, but as this was in the direction of a river, the Goat turned left in the hope of finding higher, and more to the point, drier, ground. Beloved Wife breathed again as the Fiat shook itself dry and drove past the back of a “Flood. Road Closed” sign.

The Fiat 500 Stalwart performed faultlessly before, during, and after this incident. Fifteen inches (which is 381mm in Centigrade) is well beyond the design parameters and the warranty, one suspects. A filthy tide-mark halfway up the doors was soon washed away by the rain, but the leaves and twigs remained stuck in the car’s teeth for the whole holiday.

Foul weather continued. The national news carried stories and video showing that the main West Coast rail line had been washed away in Devon (again), and a landside near Swindon had effectively killed all rail services between London and the South West and Wales. The Goat’s decision made months previously to rent a car rather than rely on public transport had been vindicated.

A quick shout-out to Tiger Treats of Looe, a traditional sweet shop recently purchased by some of the Goat’s very old friends. This was part of some pre-Christmas tourism, that also included the magnificent Burne-Jones (yes, that Burne-Jones, and constructed by William Morris both associated with the PRB) window in St Germans church. Tiger Treats specialises in liquorice, and the Goat insisted that they be cleaned out of Spogs, that are otherwise inexplicably Not Coming In Dubai.

St Germans church. The Burne-Jones window

Following Christmas presents chez Nanny Goat, everyone trooped over to the Goat’s sister and family for dinner, which was predictably huge, unsurprisingly excellent, and was followed by the inevitable tryptophan coma.

A brilliant plan to drive up to Dartmoor for a brisk Boxing Day walk was thwarted by the unutterably foul weather. There were crazies running a lap (or more, who knows?) of the road around a full to overflowing Burrator Reservoir. Beloved Wife wanted warmth and dryness. This was first provided by Fiat, and then by the local cinema. On the subject of cinema, the Goat drove over Sheepstor, which is where some scenes from War Horse were filmed. Beloved Wife was not too fed up of water to see Life of Pi, a film involving a tiger and the entire Pacific ocean.

Burrator Reservoir, full to overflowing

Beloved Wife and Goat took the Goat’s youngest nephew to see The Hobbit the following day, before leaving to see various of the Goat’s other old friends. Thank you for your hospitality, everyone. At random, the Goat took Beloved Wife to Winchester to see the oldest pub in England (since 1030AD, allegedly) and the even older cathedral. And they also seized a brief respite from rain to visit Portchester Castle (since about 200AD)

Portchester Castle

The nave of Winchester Cathedral.
Given that it was Sunday and all the wards and protections would surely be in place, the Goat still managed to get in. He's Lawful Good after all.

Eventually, early in 2013, the rain stopped for a couple of days. The Goat returned the rental car to Avis, who made no remarks concerning compost in the grille, and purchased Oyster cards to use on London’s public transport. Beloved Wife’s treat would be a London visit, including going to see the excellent show Wicked. And more Pre-Raphaelite art at the Tate, as it turned out. A bonus was a saunter along the banks of the Thames and Lambeth Palace; the walk from Green Park to Victoria turned out to be longer than expected, even if views of Buckingham Palace are better from ground level than from the Victoria Line.

Lambeth Bridge. Lovely weather for DUKWs

One thing that was surprising was how mild the weather was. Most of the population was in winter coats; the Goat and Beloved Wife found sweaters more than adequate to keep warm. How can this be, given the thinning of the blood and intolerance of cool weather that years in the Gulf are supposed to produce?

And Clarissa? Clarissa has been reset to devise either the "Fastest Route" or "Shortest Route", and none of this "Route that drowns fewest polar bears" nonsense.

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Bill Stickers is guilty

Unfortunately, it seems that Dubai is one place where the Goat's particular incarnation of Mr William Stickers is not going to be prosecuted.

Not a day goes past without unsolicited crap being hung on the gate of the Crumbling Villa. The cast alimininium curlicues all over the outside of the gate seem to encourage the practice. The Goat isn't particularly interested in the new pizza joint, nursery school, hair salon or dental clinic; he has little use for a borehole in the garden (which is apparently illegal anyway), and always gets his cooking gas from the same outfit. So it's futile hanging the garbage on the garage.

One thing is certain. The Goat always removes the paperwork and stacks it unread on the footway for collection. If that constitutes littering, then address the cause and not the effect. If you prevent everyone from plastering the Crumbling Villa with junk, the Goat won't dump it in the street. Simples.

Just lately, things have got worse. Cars parked outside get additional copies of the same handbills stuffed in the door handles and under the windscreen wipers. These blow off eventually, but the Goat will certainly not read them, nor avail himself of the product or service advertised. The purveyors of cooking gas and of satellite TV rather unfortunately have self-adhesive stickers that get plastered by the elusive Mr Stickers all over the Goat's electricity meter cabinet. They get removed and dumped.

The Goat made the mistake of leaving the gate open the other day. He found yet more junk, left all over his parked motorbike and even shoved under the BACK door of the Crumbling Villa.

He's tried complaining. The Municipality seems to do nothing, and calling the number advertised on the junk results in somewhere between: "The manager isn't available, and will return your call" (which he doesn't, of course), to "Neanderthal grunt."

On the rare occasions when the Goat catches Bill Stickers in flagrante lectaro, on the footway on his motorbike, and asks him to refrain from littering, the relief is extremely short-lived. About ten minutes. Then it's back to paper and plastic waste being stuck to the wall, attached to the car, shoved in the gate, hurled over the wall into the front yard, and even hand-delivered under the Crumbling Villa's door.

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