So the summer has finally come to an end. It’s official. How do I know this? No, not because the temperature is apparently dropping, and not because the calendar is edging towards October. It’s because my British friends and their seasonal wardrobes have started sliding towards ‘dangerously inappropriate’ on the skimpy-o-metre.
Perhaps I ought to be thankful for their miniskirt abstinence over the summer months. Yes, there was the small matter of Ramadan and the due respect that it commanded, not to mention more general concerns over UV damage, but it’s unlikely that either were the reasons behind their wardrobe decisions. It’s more likely that they covered up to avoid catching cold in the air-conditioned office. Brits are very sensitive to temperature change, it seems.
Being a Brit myself, I can confirm that – as a sun-starved nation – we’ll lap up the rays at any given opportunity. It doesn’t take much more than a brief parting of the fog to encourage men of a certain age to tie napkins to their heads, roll up their office trousers and strip down to their string vests. In London, they’ll happily pretend the grey banks of the Thames, stinking wharfs rotting under centuries of fouler weather, are
prime deckchair spots. Imagine how the cooler months of the UAE must appear to these people. ‘Paradise’ probably doesn’t even begin to describe it.
Last week saw the release of the FIFA Club World Cup tickets, and we can once again be thankful that a British team didn’t make the final. Ignore the lager lout reputations, Abu Dhabi’s real fortune comes in avoiding the world’s most pasty fans, burnt to a uniform lobster colour (but mad fer it, man!), most of them on their third nose of the week. December, 2010: Abu Dhabi could well have become the Village of the Damned.
The skimpiness extends only to the lower limbs here at TOAD Towers, and I’m keen that it remains that way. We’ve already got certain members of staff (Brits, naturally) swanning around in flip flops and shorts as though this fine bastion of journalistic excellence were Brighton Beach, and this morning’s Twitter chat seemed entirely based on the idea that the city is now cooler. In fact, as I write, the temperature is flitting between 41 and 42 degrees – from excruciatingly hot to ever so slightly less excruciatingly hot; obviously a massive leap in British meteorological terms. Anything more drastic and they’ll be arriving in bikinis, or perhaps pulling on pullovers. My apologies; even I’m getting confused.
And, with that last sentence, I think I may have summed up the predicament. It’s not that we Brits are any more unthinking, disrespectful or UV hungry than anyone else, it’s just that unobstructed sunshine bamboozles us. Maybe it’s a hangover from pagan times, when the people of Stonehenge took solace in the summer solstice, or maybe it’s just that our brains overheat and malfunction. Either way, it’s not very healthy. The only real cure is a bitter, damp winter, with short days and long nights. Yes, a nice bout of seasonal affective disorder. That’s got to be the answer.
