The Day it Rained Bricks and Bats: And Other Tales from the Gulf

‘In England, where Madame Tussaud virtually reinvented the queue, it is a national avocation and an integral part of the English gene. English people queue at the drop of a hat. They will form queues to get into queues. It is not what you are queuing for . . . it is how you do it.’ No doubt a description of the British that we are all familiar with, yet we must leave it to Maruf Khawaja to explain the slight spin put on the ‘oh so British’ pursuit of queueing by the inhabitants of the UAE!

‘In the particular environment of the Arabian peninsula, inhabited by diverse, alien and often opposing cultures, a single queue may travel in three to five parallel lines. They may be composed of people who: a) arrived first and got into an existing one; b) arrived second, decided the existing line was too long and made a second one; c) arrived just a minute ago, found both lines too long and made a third. So on and ad infinitum.’

And so we have Maruf Khawaja’s collection of humorous observations of humanity. He covers a wide range of topics in his attempt to reflect the cultural diversity of the Gulf region. For example, in the hilarious ‘Bodies past their prime’, Khawaja places his tongue firmly in his cheek and tells of a middle-aged man trying to follow his wife’s fitness video who ends up in such a state, that it takes ‘three alert Peeping Toms from Neighbourhood Watch several minutes to disentangle him from the tassels of his spouse’s favourite macramé rug’.