Hottest place on earth ...

... according to our UK neighbours anyway, who saw it on Sky News so it must be true. It certainly felt that way last night at the Hash - a one hour run at night in temperatures in the mid-thirties. It was 45 degrees today and it's not high summer yet.

I still haven't got a hash 'name', but it'll probably be something traffic related. Janet reversed the Durango into a little car that she couldn't see yesterday and squashed it. I then made the mistake of telling a fellow hasher that we have now collectively had 6 car accidents in 11 months. Another hasher has accused me of kerb crawling her, at the top of her drunken voice, when I slowed down to offer her lift so that's a likely candidate as well. At least it would be better than Ker-ching - the harsh hash name of a young south east Asian lady married to a middle age Aussie!

I had another culture shock when one of the local Emirati hashers, Little Mo, brought his two small under-fives, and ran off and left them in the middle of nowhere for an hour! They were still there when I left at ten o'clock. Keeping children up late is very common here though - there'll be kids in the malls even at midnight.

Nightlife in Dubai seems to revolve around (apparently) famous DJs performing in trendy clubs. There is the odd headline big act (Shakira, Roger Waters and Aerosmith being the most recent) but generally not much. Last weekend, however, we went to see 'Whose Line is it Anyway?' at the theatre. I recognised three of the five from the TV show. As they said, the only difference is that there is no 'little fat (expletive deleted) in the corner'. Although it didn't all work, generally it was very funny and we had a good time. My favourite game was when one of them left the room and then had to guess what he did for a living suggested by the audience (UAE censor using lilac highlighter, in a shed, of modern parenting and architectural review magazines). Quite bizarre.

I've also just read that Dubai has bought the QE2. It's going to be refurbished and permanently docked at the Palm Jumeirah. Some people have cynically suggested that this will be the way to introduce a casino in a Muslim country since it will be 'offshore'. I wouldn't be surprised, but I preferred the other suggestion that it is, in fact, a giant lifeboat in case the Palm sinks.