What a random evening. I joined EW for a spot of skiing followed by bypassing the queues (? - in dubai- really?) to get in to the Ursula Rucker spoken word evening followed by a short stint on the radio on the way home. From the beginning...

Skiing was completely brilliant. EW was a touch late, as her small people wanted to alternately play, or go skiing with mommy, who was trying to reconcile ski outfit with apres outfit, a tricky conundrum solved only by second top solution. Skiing with someone can be a prickly affair - are they much better and therefore are you cramping their style, and should you then stand back and let them go off alone, or will they think you're snubbing them. Is the person you're with a bit slow. Can you laugh when you fall over? What you do NOT do is what I almost did, though happily caught myself as the words were about to tumble off my tongue.... 'mate... I just can't keep my legs together'... not good phrase to shout across acres of snowboarding wideboys. We did moguls, which was super cool, and though I had three near misses, I had no wipeouts!

Poetry on the other hand, sucked. I was the one sending a billion mails to everyone, trying to motivate them to do something different, however I overlooked the fact that half of intelligent Dubai was doing the same. The organizers had expected (as I had) about 35 chin strokers and 15 hangers on ... I had every intention of being a core element of the hangers on crowd. However, about 100 people showed up, she was an hour late, the stage area was a bubble recess from the egg shaped room, so as it wasn't raised you couldn't see her unless you were one of the cross legged art set on the floor at the front, and the sound was being channeled through a swimming pool with blocked filters... so i could hear about every fifth word. Then she started name-checking people, which for me was so sodding teenage - especially when everyone cheered when she said bob marley. There was no irony. They own the t-shirts. Seriously people. That poem, set, whatever, could have been good if I'd been able to actually hear it, as she was going on about 'when do we say never again, and mean it' which was pretty close to the hearts of a diverse group of vaguely intelligent westerners and gulf/levant arabs, but the deep water effect ruined it. As we were starving, after the skiing, and getting really annoyed with the couple who were talking behind us, and the pretentious idiot who kept tutting at us cos she thought we were talking, we buggered off after the second set/poem/whatever. And got thoroughly tutted at. Waslked past someone I knew after we'd been upstairs and it was all over, this girl was holding court at the bottom of the escalators about how rude people could be, how could they dare leave during something that beautiful. I saw her, she was sitting at the front, with a perfect view and perfect audio. I have no doubt that Ursula Rucker is a seriously talented woman, but tonight's performance was ruined by location, location and location, and I wasn't in the mood to sit around being a chin stroker when I couldn't appreciate the words.

Then I phoned the radio on my way home for a bit of random nonsense. Got through straight away and had 9 minutes of banter with the late night DJ. Mostly about skiing and whether or not I had a boyfriend called tarquin.... apparently I was sounding posh. Highly amusing, and means I get some cds in the post, not sure what cds but does it really matter.

So an evening of skiiing, culture, pizza then radio banter - life is certainly not dull at the moment.