You can go home again – but it’s a rocky welcome

Colin Randall

• Last Updated: March 31. 2009 9:30AM UAE / March 31. 2009 5:30AM GMT

The sharpest brushes with reality came early. Among the accumulated mail were letters from the taxman.

When I climbed into my car and saw it needed petrol, it cost Dh300 instead of Dh40 for three quarters of a tankful.

This was my welcome back to the West. A lot of us are experiencing it, and it can be bumpy. If correspondence from the Inland Revenue and high fuel prices were predictable, let us say that after nearly 18 months in the UAE, I was getting along happily without either.

It doesn’t stop there, of course. Indeed, it doesn’t even start there. On arrival at Heathrow, it is disconcerting to note that delay is now considered such a normal part of the arrivals procedure that the signs telling you about it have acquired a permanent look. The taxi fare is enough to make a visit to the ATM a precondition of travel.

Back in suburban London, yet another takeaway had opened where there had previously been a shop.

At the entrance to my drive, one of two brick gateposts had been given a makeover and bore passing resemblance to the leaning tower of Pisa. A van delivering groceries had given it a clout, my daughter sighed. Yes, accidents happen everywhere. But this one occurred on Feb 1 and, eight phone calls later, no one at the store – part of a chain with a household name – had bothered to ring back.

In the media, there was more of the nastiness and gloom I had encountered on my last visit, in December. “This country of anger and fear” was the headline above one account of a 16-year-old boy’s violent death after a minor dispute with another youth in a London baker’s shop; up in Scotland, a leading building society was in deep trouble.

Britain, if you’ve been away from it – not only for those 18 months in my case, but for more than three years beforehand – is, on first reacquaintance, an oddly unattractive place.

Most of the world is struggling at present. The Gulf is hardly exempt. But it is weathering the crisis with, so far as I can tell, greater signs of resilience and also more trace of a smile. I expect the region, and especially the UAE, to profit when green shoots of recovery truly spring up through the topsoil of recession.

But let me also look around for upbeat features of the Europe to which I have chosen to return. The relative cold and the rain don’t concern me. March is not quite over, and I would not expect much different. The clocks have gone forward in any case, meaning longer days. My granddaughter, not yet seven months, is more gorgeous than ever. I have a weekend in the Yorkshire Dales to look forward to, and will soon be reinstalled in the corner of France that I love. And the decision to come home was made a good deal easier by the knowledge that my association with the UAE is strong and will continue.

On both sides of the English Channel, then, there is plenty to be thankful for. But like the new boy in school, I am just having to feel my way.

crandall@thenational.ae