I've been thinking about our time spent in Abu Dhabi, UAE., this morning... We had dusty, tiny balcony's outside the lounge and bedrooms. They were so narrow, one could open the sliding door and take just a single step to reach the railings. It was stifling hot. Too hot up there, and anyway too dusty and humid, not to mention noisy, with the traffic of a dual carriageway only a few floors beneath our feet. The taxies went by honking their horns to say, 'I'm free for hire.'. I've a photo of my eldest daughter crouched-up on one of the balcony's, alongside her stands the little girl from the next-door apartment. The child who got her hands stuck as the lift went down. The apartment-blocks elevator's had those metal doors that remain closed on the floor you get on at but a concertina metal gate to the actual lift compartment. She'd put her hands against the metal door through the gate and as the lift went down her hands became trapped - awful!! Luckily she kept those little hands, but she'll probably still have scars, she must be in her mid-thirties now, around thirty-five years have gone by since those times. So.... there they both are in the photograph, my eldest squinting because the glare of the sun against the marble and concrete is so bright. Her skin is so light - transparent almost. She has on a deep cobalt-blue dress with little bead tassels and her hair is in plaits.
It's one of those days when I think if only I felt well enough to sling on a pair of jeans, tee-shirt and jacket, jump in the car and together with my husband zoom off to somewhere like.... Harrogate. Handsome Harrogate with Aunt Betty's Tea shop and fairy-lights twinkling in the twilight of the evening after a lovely sunny day amongst the stone buildings and the cherry-blossom! Aunt Betty's with it's mile-long queues for a table, it's waitresses in little black dresses with white aprons and white caps. It's gentle music and conversation, mirrors and delightful fare. Heaven!
