Day Eight – Flight

Song of the Day: I’m Like A Bird – Nelly Furtado

I think I mentioned before that there’s a girls’ high school up the road from Apollo – quite a smart one by the look of it. Well, I noticed today that it looks directly onto my balcony and in through the patio doors, albeit from about 200 yards away. So now I’ve got to be careful. I don’t want any accusations. Nudity in the privacy of your own home is perfectly acceptable here, but the lines get blurred when you open the net curtains just at the same moment as a bunch of Year 12s happen to be gazing distractedly out of the classroom window. So I won’t be doing that again.

Today’s lunch time discussion centred around diets. It began because Sue the Sub had a slice of water melon and a fancy looking biscuit and she described the melon as ‘qualifying fruit’, i.e. the fruit qualifies you for the biscuit. That’s the principle she adopted with her kids. You want a biscuit? Have a piece of fruit first. Anyway, it led on to carbs and caveman diets and the 5-2 diet and fasting and chimpanzees and diabetes and… there’s a big diabetes problem here. They do like to sweeten. Everything from coffee to fruit juice. And it’s taking its toll. A predicted three-quarters of Qatari women will be classified obese by 2015, due to their diet and inactive lifestyle; 53% of Qatari women and 47% of Qatari men above the age of 20 have diabetes. That’s according to the graphs here showing research by Hamad Medical Corporation – although at the top they say 16.7% of Qatari adults. Either way, they’re concerned about it, as they are about salt. They don’t put salt out on the tables. There’s a concerted campaign to kerb its consumption. Anyway, having ummed and ahhed about having a banana, I decided to settle for just the huge plate of pasta and topped up with a Snickers from the fridge when I got home – defrosted over a cup of tea.

Had a good experience with Qatar Airways – ‘the world’s 5-star airline’. Having caught three flights with them in the last six weeks, I thought I’d look into the air miles situation. So I signed up for the Privilege Club and followed the instructions to claim Qmiles for past flights. This was yesterday. Today I looked and saw that my claim had been rejected. Outraged, I discovered that it was because the name on my flight tickets didn’t match the name on my Privilege Club account. They’d printed my first name last on the ticket so as far as they were concerned I was Mr Raymond Glynne-Jones Timothy – speaking of which, our friend Al went to see her friend Polly in Dial M for Murder, and he was acting alongside none other than Christopher Timothy, he of All Creatures Great and Small fame. He’s 73 now and looks hard as nails – but I digress. I rang them up and my unfortunate predicament was ironed out in a trice. So well done, Qatar Airways. I now wait with baited breath to see what my miles amount to. Will I have enough for the fondu set? I wonder.

Off to give a sample of blood in the morning for my Resident’s Permit. After that it’s finger prints (all of them), a waffle of paperwork and it’s all laid to rest. With the Resident’s Permit comes the Drinks Permit. And with the Drinks Permit come the deportation papers. I’m joking. I ain’t going nowhere. It was a beautiful day today. Clear. You could see the high-rise skyline clearer than I’ve ever seen it. In fact, I hadn’t noticed it from there before. I think we could have sun tomorrow.