Monday 25th March 2019, 4.15pm (day 2,769)
So the first stop on my tour of Asia and Australia is Dubai, just for forty-eight hours. My colleague Alex and I were worked hard all day in the University of Manchester office that exists here, in the ‘Dubai Knowledge City’ — which like the rest of this place has been raised out of the desert over the last fifteen to twenty years or so. The towers in the background are the Marina Towers which apparently started the whole property boom off as this was the first place in which non-nationals had been allowed to buy freeholds in pretty much the whole of Arabia.
But though I don’t know this place, not after one day (who could) and so can’t call this a considered opinion — there’s something about it which just leaves me cold. It’s just the antithesis of things I like about the world, in so many different ways. The chopped-up palm trees are my attempt to somehow encapsulate these feelings. The symbolism is deliberate.
Being 42 