I hate Dubai but it's not the place's fault (actually it might be)

Luxury requires an aristocratic setting to make it attractive. Santayana


Kingsley Amis grumbled in the late 1970s that everything wrong with the world could be summed up in the word 'workshop.' I am at peace with 'workshop' but I begin to feel that everything I hate about the modern world can be summed up by the phrase 'five star'.

I suppose I hate disease, hunger, poverty and war too but Dubai is high up on the list.


I love every country I ever visited with all my heart and I even love the countries I never visited with all my heart, but there are two exceptions: Lichtenstein and the United States of America (but I only spent six hours in Buffalo, New York). I even loved Canada for the sake of French Canada. The U.A.E., I correctly guessed, would be the third exception.



I arrived in Dubai where the heat in the early hours of the morning was astonishing, took a taxi anxiously to my friend's flat and got deposited outside an unfinished un-air conditioned building, dark and stiflingly hot. Kind people on the street immediately explained where to go and I arrived at his flat where he was fast asleep having forgotten I was coming. Dubai I started to see was easy. People are friendly and all speak English. Cabs are cheap. Steve however, was even less well organised than I am which was important to bear in mind.

My friend lives in rather magnificent style and took very good care of me. It is not his fault that Dubai and I do not really get on. Nor is it the place's fault. We are just incompatible.


My very biased opinion (I didn't give the place a chance). Dubai, dedicated to luxury, shopping and money laundering, seems to be a completely immoral place. Immorality requires style to make it attractive and Dubai does not have any. Beirut has, in spades, and to some extent Istanbul has, though disastrously rebuilt in the 60s and 70s. There are moments when even traffic-choked Cairo has it (the pyramids and the Sphinx are cool). Dubai, by contrast, is just hubris, money, five star hotels and malls.



Such opulence so close to the Empty Quarter. The history of the Gulf states reminds me of the Beverly Hillbillies, I suppose.

Somewhere I read that Dubai because it has little oil has built an economy 'built on property, financial services and tourism, like normal countries.' And this is normal? Where is the value in any of them? Dubai needs a Juvenal, but so do London and New York.


Although Dubai is a place where people can normally drink alcohol without any problem, food and drink of any sort is not available before sunset during Ramadan, except furtively, as a take away. Steve does not keep coffee in the house so I began every day walking through the blazing heat alongside where the beach had been (they are building a five star hotel there now) to Starbucks or Costa to buy breakfast, listening to stories of homesickness from the Filipino or Burmese who made my coffee and taking breakfast home in a brown paper bag. How can one write about travel in the age of Starbucks and Costa?




17% of the population of Dubai are 'Emiratis' - you usually only meet them, soft-faced, good-looking, languorous and dressed in Bedouin costumes, when you present your passport at immigration. The rest divide into two categories: white people, many of whom seem to come from Essex and Hertfordshire, with good jobs; and brown and yellow people with bad ones, for which they are very grateful. The brown and yellow people often spend years here without seeing their families in the Philippines or Pakistan but speak to them each evening on SKYPE. For the whites, there is always another restaurant opening and alcohol flows like water. Ramadan is the party season.

Dr. Johnson said


'It is a sad reflection on the paucity of human pleasures that hunting should be accounted one of them,' and this is how I feel about shopping, but this is heresy in Dubai.

Relentless, serried rows of de luxe shops. This is not my world. And how small this world is, with the same brands everywhere. Even Smythson's are here, which was slightly shocking. I should have travelled in the 1980s, as I knew – a sin against the light. Oh dear reader, please learn from me that you almost always have enough money to travel and however much less interesting the world is than it was thirty years ago, in another thirty years it will be much less appealing still.



For four months of winter Dubai's climate is perfect. For four months it is too hot and in the summer months it is horribly oppressive.

The heat is often humid but sometimes dry. In August the beach is deserted even at night though I am attracted to going in. Steve says it is like a hot bath that doesn't cool down. I see from my balcony that people play tennis in the open air in the evening but Steve tells me not to walk in the heat and I defer to him – for fear of what? A heart attack? I am later told it was only 41° Celsius and in Bucharest it was 39°. Why does it seem more oppressive in Dubai? Concrete and lack of trees? The feeling of sterility?




Lady Diana Cooper said of the future King Edward VIII:


'No-one ever was or ever will be as common as the Prince of Wales'.
She could, one feels, have been describing Dubai. I imagine it resembles a Muslim version of Las Vegas and is probably infinitely more charming than Las Vegas. Although I think I prefer the honest vulgarity of Blackpool.



Lynne Barber called a spade a spade:


"Imagine an expanse of dusty desert beside a greasy sea, sweltering under a pitiless sun. Now cover it with six-lane highways, flyovers, spaghetti junctions and all the nastiest buildings you have ever seen. Think Birmingham without its beauty, Las Vegas without its culture. Dubai is unquestionably the ugliest city in the world - there should be a socking great sign at the airport saying 'Abandon all taste, ye who enter here.'"
it sounds like she liked Dubai less than I did. It is much better than Birmingham.



(Dubai marina where I stayed, seen from the air.)



We had a truly wonderful Pakistani dinner at the famous Ravi's, a very cheap dive with legendary food and that overhead neon lit basic feel - something real, amidst the expensively cheap luxury of Dubai. This was fun - and $12 for the two of us. But no alcohol, tediously. Then at my suggestion a joyless bar full of working girls and Englishmen of – I hate to say this – my age – but much less style. We have a beer and leave. How boring and how sad dissipation is.




I have seen the future and it works as Sydney and Beatrice Webb said of Stalinism. It's Dubai, consumerist, materialist, post-national and, among the whites, without class distinction or religion.


I conquered my lack of interest in Dubai - I am here just as a stage on my visit to Ethiopia and Zanzibar - and took a cab and went to the famous mall with a wing devoted to Gucci and Louis Vuitton, recommended to me by the most materialistic woman I have ever known in my life (she comes from a very distant, very cold planet and wants to eat the whole world). I went inside to change money to pay the cab and realised I did not want to stay. So I got him to take me to the old port where the spice market is and some small shabby shops and I saw the outside of the museum which is the only old building in the city but felt no desire to enter. An unremarkable mosque. The bridge.

I wondered for a moment whether Dubai was the Anti-Christ but decided this was unfair. Dubai makes people happy, after all, provides employment for sex starved Asians and does no harm. Here property development and tourism, the two scourges of our age, have run rampant but spoilt nothing, because there was nothing here to spoil.

I found Dubai only became interesting when I asked the taxi drivers their stories. All the taxi drivers I spoke to were content but alone and missing their wives or sweethearts and without female companionship. One told me he liked English customers best because they treated him with respect, as did Americans, and disliked most Russians. Another, from Pakistan, complained that there were too many churches in Dubai – twenty, he said, including Buddhist ones.

I feel I am getting slightly bored by Islam, though Muslims, a few of them anyway, are fighting like me against globalisation and Americana (they are not doing a good job in Dubai). But the profound acedia that Dubai induces is lifting and I am happy at the thought that tomorrow I shall have escaped Ramadan and the heat and the malls and be in Ethiopia.