Without A Song

Chapter One: Welcome to my world

By fair means or foul, a few months short of my fortieth birthday in 1996, I found myself in the Asiri region of south-western Saudi Arabia. From here on I'd be working for the British defence company FlightPath, mucking in with an odd collection of over a thousand Poms and Aussies, all living below the crags of The Escarpment, the unbroken chain of mountains that ran from Yemen to Israel. Akhbar was only two hundred kilometres north of Saudi Arabia's southern border with Yemen, a mere pinprick when set into the enormity of the Arabian Peninsula. The Royal Saudi Air Force (RSAF) needed instructors with the right kind of skill sets to teach their trainees how to look after their airbases, fly their aircraft and fix them when they went wrong. What's more FlightPath were in the market for instructors who could load prime and munitions, fix aero-engines, replenish liquid oxygen, fuels and gases, although never together or at the same time. Educators set exams, drivers drove, ground engineers built airfields, quality engineers got in other people's way and the United Kingdom's Ministry of Defence (UKMOD) wallahs brought no commercial value at all, or not at least as far as the regular employees were able to fathom out.

Then there is Lymphangioleiomyomatosis. So difficult to say, you might expect Monty Python to have written a song about it. Lymphangioleiomyomatosis or LAM as it is more commonly know is a rare disease that only kills women. It's that simple or so my research tells me. LAM's a disease that doesn't discriminate between colour, race, creed, continent, or even age. Once inside you it seeks to destroy all lung tissue and nullify lung functions per se. I've found ignorance can be a great friend whereas a little bit of knowledge can be the great destroyer. But wait, I'm rambling and I'm getting ahead

of myself. I didn't get to meet or even hear of LAM as I refer to it in these pages until my first wife had spurned our marriage to sleep with another woman and a man together at the same time, and then another woman. That news reached me when I was three thousand miles away from home, unable to do anything about the situation, unable to prove its authenticity, not wanting to believe the truth within the very facts my respectable friends had sent over the internet. One thing led to another very quickly in my mind's eye and before long I was being rescued from the bottom of a swimming pool by an Australian hunk and one extremely beautiful nurse.

Not far north of the Yemeni border, the Royal Saudi Air Force (RSAF) bases litter Saudi Arabia in the same way as the Royal Air Force (RAF) stations once did in the United Kingdom. When the job was first offered, my wife Sue wanted me to take a post in the sweat pits of Dhahran. She was all for spending her time and our money in Dubai and the United Arab Emirates but, as I told her, I either changed my clothes six times a day in the Persian summer or I froze my nuts off in the mountainous winter. Five hundred kilometres south of Jeddah and another fifty inland from the Red Sea made sure the mountain base at Akhbar won. I'd learn to take pleasure working in those broken crags that rose to over ten thousand feet above sea-level. The prevailing environment made living there a privilege, a challenge but it was so much better than the perspiration rich environment that lined the golden beaches of the oil rich Persian Gulf.

What about the sand you may ask, surely Saudi Arabia is full of sand? Well yes, there's sand and lots of it but there are also pebbles the size of rocks, rocks the size of boulders, and snakes, camels and caravans (not the type you pull along behind a car), trees that make hawthorns feel as prickly as a fur blanket and boys as young as ten shepherding flocks of scrawny goats and sheep with AK47 assault rifles. The snakes you hear about are the king cobras. Scary blighters and scary tales accompany them but you learn to toughen up, enjoy the vast desolation and the emptiness. As with all things you learn to take these facts of life in your stride and get on with it. Many new

arrivals don't get through their first three months before running back from whence they came, unable to cope with the differences between Saudi and home. If it's an ordinary society you're wanting or expecting then prepare for the culture shock. And it is a shock if you're used to a certain lifestyle of luxury. You know the sort of life where television is on tap with takeaway restaurants and public bars at every corner. Take any police show where they race the criminals down lit highways, across hillsides or through towns? It's like that here but without the competent police and the criminals if you believe them. No ordered streets either. It's all higgledy-piggledy in the towns then linked in direct lines between suburbs. Tarmac is laid straight onto sand or concrete to become Romanesque multi-lane, straight-line, dual-lane highways. As with all things, you learn to get on with life. If not, you learn to go on your way.