Salut!

Expat life: home town tales

Salut! has been quiet this week. This, my East/West column from The National, Abu Dhabi (hence the UAE references), would have appeared sooner but pressure on space delayed its publication by the newspaper. Read on for an explanation of the photographs ...

For the overwhelming majority of people in the UAE, home is - or was - somewhere else.

That is an inevitable consequence of the expatriate nature of the population. But the notion of a fondly remembered home town is commonplace in our highly mobile society, attached as we may become to wherever we end up living.

Expat life: le retrait de Petite Anglaise

Amid this week's diet of war reminiscences, let there also be levity. The issue has already had an airing here. So beyond wishing Petite Anglaise well with the imminent birth of her second child, I merely reassure the fan who promised to hit the first writer to ask whether Petite's own retreat signals the end of blogging that this week's East/West column in The National, Abu Dhabi is not intended as a deliberate provocation ...

By her own standards, the blogger known as Petite Anglaise had been quiet of late. A month went by without a posting and reader responses to earlier items had dipped as low as the high 30s, pleasing as most people with blogs would find such feedback.

Suddenly, a new post appears and comments double. How does she achieve this? By announcing, in effect, her departure from the blogosphere. “As far as personal blogging is concerned,” she writes. “I’ve turned the page. And it feels good.”

Expat life: gone soft

The sun was still shining, summer seeming barely over, where I was living until recently. A short trip to Scotland to write about mosques taking over redundant Christian buildings was just what I needed to start the process of toughening up for winter ...

Spoilt by the weather I have experienced in the UAE, the south of France and even, on rare days, London, I accepted the challenge of a character-building journey north to Glasgow.

While I was there, temperatures edged no higher than 14°C. Perhaps the hardy Scots considered it a heatwave; I reached for an extra layer of clothing.

Expat life: impersonating the French

An Algerian security official did once tell me, while I was reporting on an aircraft hijacking at Algiers airport, that I was a dead ringer for the equally hairless Alain Juppé, then France's interior minister. That was the nearest I'd got to passing myself off as a Frenchman until I brought my little Var-registered Renault Clio to London ...

On a two-lane motorway, the juggernaut just ahead of me suddenly drifted over from the nearside lane without hint of a signal.

At first I thought the driver had fallen asleep, but he then spent at least five minutes inching past a fractionally slower vehicle as a queue built up behind him.

Forgive me for saying the element of danger took me straight back to the Abu Dhabi-Dubai motorway. But it happened in northern France and the juggernaut was from Belgium, reinforcing my belief that Europeans can claim no high moral ground over the drivers of other continents. Rotten driving occurs wherever there are roads.

Expat life: false steps in fashion

For meetings in public with their own daughters, parents should tread carefully in their choice of clothing and, especially, footwear. We failed the test, as I report in today's East/West column in The National, Abu Dhabi ...

The complete story of what I know about fashion would detain no one for long.

But even I could understand a young friend’s description of the shame she felt when her parents arrived on a visit one Saturday during her undergraduate days at Cambridge University. They were wearing matching shell suits.

Expat life: lost and found

Somewhere, I have a photograph of me sitting on a small boat in the bay of Villefranche, east of Nice. Taken by a friend's son, it captures the exact moment my mobile phone slipped - without any human eyes noticing - from the pocket of my shorts on its way to the bottom of the Mediterranean. Not all of the things I mislay are lost quite so comprehensively, however ...

One warm Abu Dhabi evening, a taxi driver collected four of us, including a colleague who had just flown in from Canada, outside The National’s offices, and dropped us for dinner at a hotel. And then drove away with our colleague’s luggage in the boot.

In life’s catalogue of lost and found stories, this was one with a happy ending. My custom was to note the mobile phone numbers of taxi drivers who spoke good English. As luck would have it, ours did. We were able to call him immediately and he readily agreed to return.

Expat life: looking east

The number of Muslims in France is usually put at five million. Since by law, no one can be asked to declare a religion in a census, this is guesswork. The true figure is probably higher. So it is hardly any great surprise that the Muslim community - Europe's largest - should figure so much in my reports on France for The National, a newspaper based in the Middle East ...

A book I recently rediscovered, by the Canadian journalists Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow, bears the catchy title Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong and sets out, with much success, to explain why the French should be judged on their own terms - "resolutely modern and ferociously archaic at the same time" - and not on anyone else's.

Expat life: crisp thoughts

For another dip into the East/West basket, which contains the midweek columns I write for The National, Abu Dhabi, I chose a subject close to the heart (and probably doing the heart no good in the process): my love of potato crisps. But only if they're crisp-flavoured ...

The effects of poor dietary habits are evident everywhere.

Even so, there is growing public awareness of the need for healthier eating and I like to think I do my bit. If a salad is placed in front of me, I will eat it even if it would not be my first choice. Increasingly, I prefer seafood to red meat; I eat green vegetables, drink tea and coffee unsweetened and put tins back on supermarket shelves if sugar is among the ingredients.

Expat life: wait for it

My colleagues at The National, Abu Dhabi have kindly agreed that I can reproduce my weekly expat column, East West, at Salut! just as I do My Word each Saturday. East West often covers the same sort of ground that is explored by Salut! Since my priority is to write for a living, subjects that would once have been addressed only here therefore find a platform in the newspaper. A certain resident of Toronto (the lesser, Canadian version, not the bustling metropolis on the outskirts of Bishop Auckland) will recognise himself somewhere in this piece about restaurant and cafe service ...

Holidays over, I wonder how many people have returned to the Emirates from visiting France with tales of surly or incompetent service in cafes and restaurants.

In my experience, you have to be unlucky to receive impolite or inattentive treatment when out for a meal or snack in the UAE. In Europe, the rudeness of the French, and especially waiters, is a staple of post-holiday conversation.