Nick Hardcastle

<p>My aunt has decided to buy a house in Tunisia, a place that she has been visiting with her sister for quite a few years now. Given that the British weather is so awful and the cost of living so high, emigration may seem like a good idea. That isn’t her plan though. Having sold her very nice, if small, house in England, she is also going to buy a caravan. She is intending to live most of the year in my grandmother’s garden. I am aghast.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Now if anybody is looking for an idea for a soap opera … I am reminded of the old lady that lived in the garden of Alan Bennett.&lt;/p&gt;

Thursday evening isn’t the best time to drive around Al-Khobar. For many people it is the start of their weekend here. After evening prayers the streets become crowded with vehicles, most of which are at least twice the si§ze of the average car in England. To get things into perspective, Range Rovers look small in Saudi, dwarfed by Suburbans, Ford Explorers, Hummers and the like.

As the roads have become busier here in the last 5 years, the average person’s driving skill and patience have gradually have declined. This is particularly noticeable when the weekend drivers load their kids into the four by four and head for the malls. Seat belts are required by law, but then so is sticking to the speed limit and stopping at red lights. Most kids bounce around the back seats, excited at the outing. Occasionally, as I run, I find small shoes at the side of the road amongst the fragments of shattered windscreens.

Everybody, of course, has the right to be on the piece of road that they choose. If somebody else is already there, blowing a horn or driving slowly towards them in a determined fashion will surely displace them. If it doesn’t, waving a hand in the air in despair at the stupidity of others on the road may help. People are patient here though. If honked or cut in front of, the standard response is to hold your right hand in the air, fingers and thumbs together as though you were indicating through mime the deliciousness of a meal. It means something like ‘have patience’, although I have found it more satisfying to think of it as ‘your penis is this big’.

Road rage doesn’t exist here … usually. On my run last night I saw two accidents on the Rainbow Roundabout in the space of five minutes. One caused because the chap in front didn’t set off fast enough for the man THAT spot. The second was the result of a gentleman who had decided to park on the roundabout in order to determine which exit he needed. He flagged another driver down to ask directions. He pulled alongside. Whilst they were chatting, most drivers just drove around without a murmur of discontent. Not one chap though; he just ploughed straight into the back of the cars.What I do find remarkable though, is that none of the drivers I have ever seen involved in a prang here has ever got out of the car looking angry. There is no shouting, no angry recriminations. Amusingly though, once you have crashed you are not allowed to move your car, even if it is in the middle of the highway and causing an obvious hazard. Instead you must wait for the police to turn up and complete a report. This must be great for establishing blame and filling an insurance claim, although I do wonder how many additional accidents it causes.

I’ve spent most of the afternoon messing about with my computer, trying to get new programmes to work as I want them. I’m trying something called Iview MediaPro which is photo cataloguing software. I downloaded 29 thousand files at one go and overloaded it. Oops. Now I am trying something called MacJournal, which looks fantastic, if I could only get it to post to my blog.The chaps have just been round to clean the dust out of the aircon. They were washing the filters on the roof. The water runs off and into the garden. OK if Dave and Bernie Reeves hadn’t been sitting outside having dinner.

I have just downloaded what looks like a very cool programme called Macjournal. In theory you can write journal entries in it and then, if you so choose, email them or post them to a blog. It looks excellent … but I have spent the last two hours trying to get it to post to this blog without success.

Now I am trying to configure macjournal to post to this blog.

I did 27 pull-ups in one shot today – on the Metolius pull-up holds. I am obviously getting stronger. Last week I managed to go from a set of 20 right down to 1, in sets. Now if only I could manage Chinese pull-ups up to 20!

I’ve been without Internet connection for about 24 hours. Having now got used to a relatively fast connection (well, for Saudi Arabia) and a WiFi house, this has been traumatic. If feels a little like finishing a really good book and being well out of reach of a bookshop. I reinstalled my Airport Extreme base station, played with settings, restarted my machine; all to no avail. About ten minutes ago I gave up and rang Dave Reeves, my neighbour. He recommended that I unplug the LAN and then replace it. I did. A solution that took precisely a third of a second to accomplish.

My car was orange this morning. So was the air. There is usually a strong wind when we have a sandstorm, but this morning there wasn’t even the slightest breeze. The air was thick with dust so fine that it both tickled the nose and caught the throat. It didn’t clear up all day and was so bad that we had to cancel climbing club – a very rare event.

At great expense I managed to buy more ink for my Canon i9950 printer, but nobody has any good quality printing stock. Most frustrating.

I am working with Omni Outliner Pro at the moment. It is an amazingly simple note taking program. The fact that I can export things directly to dynamic html and project the results is an added bonus.

I made my third visit to the computer repair shop this evening, and no, they hadn’t managed to effect a complete repair of my Toshiba. They had replaced the missing keys but couldn’t do anything about the hinge. After writing down my mobile number on a piece of masking tape, the repair man assured me that he would call me as soon as a spare came into stock. Yeah, right.

The doorbell rang about 5.30 and a small dog was waiting to come in. A stray found in Hofuf by someone on the compound and given to LuAnne. Very quiet and cute. We took it to the vets for a distemper jab and a general checkup. She has decided to call it Winston Churchill.

Climbing was good today. Al the pull-ups Sue and I are doing are having a major impact on our climbing. We are getting so much stronger. We played add-a-move, creating between us a ridiculously hard traverse on the overhang.

I’ve been printing photographs from the Borneo expedition. It is a frustrating process. I really need to buy the hardware to profile my printer so that I can get predictable colour. I had got used to the performance I could expect from one paper stock and was achieving consistant results. Now I find that it is almost impossible to buy good paper here. Each time I change paper type, it takes me ages to get the colours right again. I keep waiting for profiling gear to come down in price, but I suppose that I will eventually have to bite the bullet.

Just getting around al Khobar on a Thursday evening is a challenge, especially near prayer time. There is so much traffic on the roads and it seems as though everybody feels that they have the right of way and that everybody else is going too slowly. With some roads already a total of twelve lanes wide, and full, it is hard to imagine what the city is going to do next to solve its traffic problems if the car owning population continues to grow. Enforcing traffic laws and educating drivers in road safety would be a start.

I’ve managed to get my Toshiba laptop fixed. Well, almost. When I got to the shop it was in a distressing state. The technician assured me that the pile of components scattered across his desk could indeed be reassembled into a perfect machine. Well, with the exception of the fact that it runs on Microshaft Windblows.

I managed to make it to Olive Garden just as the sun was setting and waited out prayer time with a superb Greek salad. I don’t know where they buy their black olives and fetta cheese, but they are better than anything you can buy in the supermarkets here.