But, hey, this was a chick who spoke cute English and was polite with her ‘excuse me’, ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, detailing her kids expenses (“very much”) and lack of job opportunities for women (“here work no is”) so I fished about in my pockets and found 10 riyals - about £1.66 - not much admittedly, but she’d only asked for five.
Through the eye slit in her all-encompassing sack dress, I could make out that she was black and her eyes smiled coyly as she caught me staring. She stood for a while longer, looking at my laptop screen which was displaying a panorama of the Himalayas. I did try to explain the trip but she was none the wiser.
“Beautiful,” she murmured, finally moving away before the religious cops nabbed us.
Other than the ladies I deal with on the phone at the Arab News or the travel agent, that’s probably the longest conversation I’ve had with a Saudi woman, face to face. Entirely down to this deprivation, whenever I go on holiday I find myself gawping at almost every female form on show. Eye candy ain’t on the menu at the al-Fanar coffee shop, or any other place in the sand. It’s nothing to do with religion; it’s all to do with the jealousy of the men, as one of the more honest characters once told me.
A lot of people ask what I do with my free time out here and chasing chicks is clearly a hobby I’ve had to put aside, rather like a monk. While the weekend is Thursday and Friday, work is from 7am to 3pm, and time is plentiful, especially as I only teach two hours a day.
So, I write (novel on the way; film script in the hands of an agent), cycle (considered extremely odd by the natives), jog/walk in the evenings (sweating buckets), smoke (too much – fags are a quid a pack), read a heap of books (unlike most other expats here, I’ve noticed), kind of got into cooking (pretty much living on chicken casserole), watch loads of movies (Phone Booth today – excellent!), watch loads of football on TV (Arsenal’s demise), used to swim in the sea (some unseen creature started gnashing it’s jaws not far from the beach), sleep well and wake up clear-headed having dreamed wistfully of the day I leave this place next summer. Hallelujah!
There is no cinema in Saudi, no theatre, no musical events, no bars, and no discos, let alone strip clubs. There isn’t even one river! Desolation desert! Restaurants are segregated with single men in one section and married women and families in another; coffee shops are all-male domains; and gatherings in public places are restricted solely to public executions in chop-chop square – wasteland next to mosques - that attract good sized crowds . . . of men. The only time a female gets to see an execution is when it’s her own and she’s up to her neck in sand having her head pelted by rocks.
“What are you doing at the weekend?” I ask the Saudis at work. “Sleeping,” is the inevitably dull reply. But once they wake up they do go to shopping malls, drive around (aimlessly and appallingly) because petrol only costs 10 pence a litre, and have countless accidents as a result. It’s pretty much the national sport. Apparently this epicentre of oil production will be importing the black stuff by 2030 as so much is wasted, mainly on air-conditioning, electricity, desalination and driving round appallingly.
Compared to the locals, my free time is pretty full and I’ve barely driven for years, let alone stepped inside a shopping mall.