FoodSheikh

Whenever I tell my friends back home I’m taking the kids to the mall, I get the impression they think I’m raising them in a casino. But Dubai doesn’t really have town squares or piazzas. It has air conditioning.

The mall here does the job the park does everywhere else — it’s where teenagers in Lyon meet, loiter, share fries - and other things? Probably - ignore each other, fall out, make up.

Where mine are concerned, it’s mostly running about and demanding things. My daughter loves it. My son, on the other hand, claims he can’t go because he gets “mall sick.” Like carsick, but for retail.

I’m not sure the mall is worse than a park, just different. I do wonder what they’ll be nostalgic about in twenty years, though.

The smell of Cinnabon, probably.

I have not, in my adult life, had cause to apply sine or cosine. Tangent has come up once, possibly, in a conversation about something else, I forget what.

They sit unused in my brain alongside the periodic table and the precise year of the Battle of Hastings, which I do still remember, oddly. 1815.

Hours of my childhood went into balancing chemical equations, making the coefficients match on both sides of the arrow, and I remember the slight panic of getting it wrong, and the teacher’s promise that this would matter one day. It has not. Not once.

What has mattered every day is food. The pleasure of it first, the sitting down, the cooking for people. Then the health side of it, which I came to late and the hard way, working out which foods make you feel good and which ones don’t. And then the cultures. You can’t really understand a place until you’ve eaten it. A bowl of pho can you as much about Vietnam as most of the history books. Ask Bourdain.

Nobody taught me any of this. I wasn’t even shown how to scramble an egg. I learned that from my mate, on his parents’ Aga, aged nineteen.

Same with philosophy. Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living, which seems like quite a big sentence to leave off the curriculum. At no point in eleven years of school did anyone suggest I might sit quietly with my own thoughts.

They did make sure I could recite the quadratic formula under duress. And then there’s all the practical stuff. How to change a tyre, although in fairness my method for that is to drive to ENOC and let someone else do it, which I think counts. How to hang a painting straight. How to spackle a wall or change a plug. None of that came from school either. Although I suppose that was always sort of dad’s job, wasn’t it.

The food and the philosophy though, nobody picked up. I’m not anti-maths. I’m sure a structural engineer somewhere is profoundly grateful for trigonometry. Good for them.

The rest of us left school knowing the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, but not really knowing how to feed ourselves, or how to think about why we were here.

It’s an odd set of priorities, when you think about it.

30 Days of Daily Observation - Day 3

I’m driving a Tesla at the moment (no, not moonlighting as an uber driver) and the key is my iPhone.

I pulled up to a hotel valet recently and realised, halfway through handing over nothing, that I had no key to give him. He stood there with his hand out. I stood there with my phone, which was the key, which I obviously wasn’t handing over.

I have no protocol for this yet. I don’t even know how to open the glovebox.

So I did the only thing I could think of - pretended to receive a very important and life-changing phone call, mouthed an apology, and drove off in great haste.

But the Tesla can’t perform the dramatic exit - it’s hard to look urgent in a car that makes no noise.

Obviously, I can never return to that hotel again.