{"id":170,"date":"2006-06-14T21:17:04","date_gmt":"2006-06-14T17:17:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/?p=170"},"modified":"2006-06-15T08:37:58","modified_gmt":"2006-06-15T04:37:58","slug":"three-years-in-the-desert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/170\/","title":{"rendered":"Three Years in the Desert"},"content":{"rendered":"

Two days ago\u00a0marked the 3rd anniversary of my emigration from the UK.\u00a0 Just before I left, I put up this post<\/a> on my old blog, saying I’d be going away for 4-5 weeks.<\/p>\n

This is normally how British expats become so.\u00a0 They are sent away for a few weeks’ business, and never come back.\u00a0\u00a0They have a revelation similar to that of the Soviet soldiers who arrived in Germany in 1944 to discover that ordinary farmers had such luxuries as mirrors, clocks,\u00a0and china cups in their houses – items which were so rare in ordinary Soviet society that the soldiers initially mistook these German farmers for aristocracy.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Many a\u00a0Brit travelling abroad finds the developing world to be no\u00a0more filthy than the streets of London, but notices that he is not paying for the privilege of having a local council pretend to keep the place clean.\u00a0<\/p>\n

He laughs heartily when he recalls\u00a0a salesman once\u00a0trying to flog him\u00a0some Vauxhall for thirty thousand quid, and runs his hand over the smooth wing of a Beamer which for the same price is much more to his liking.\u00a0 Upon purchasing a DVD player for the bedroom, he is not offered a monthly payment plan to cover the purchase because it is not ridiculously overpriced in the first place.\u00a0 (Being offered a financial plan for anything other than a house or car is a sure sign you are being ripped off big style.)<\/p>\n

Should he fall sick, he finds \u00a350 and a twenty minute wait\u00a0to be preferable to the National Health system whereby you wait so long to see a doctor that\u00a0the body\u00a0can heal a severed limb of its own accord.\u00a0 The envy of the world, he learns, is not much envied\u00a0around the world.<\/p>\n

He is at first taken aback by the poverty in which many of his new neighbours live, but\u00a0this is quickly met with delight to find that scrotes\u00a0are a uniquely British phenomenon.\u00a0 He can climb on a bus with the poorest of the poor,\u00a0yet will be spared\u00a0the pantomime of some degenerate decked out in three hundred quids’ worth of shell suit and Rockports arguing with the driver over the sixteen pence difference\u00a0of a juvenile fare.<\/p>\n

His joy is further compounded by his being able to watch TV without receiving threatening letters from the state demanding he pays for a channel containing shite which he doesn’t want to watch.\u00a0 True, he gets annoying flyers for umpteen equally shite cable channels shoved under his door, but then nobody slaps him with a fine for\u00a0throwing these straight in the bin.<\/p>\n

In my case, I may be growing a little tired of the Middle East, but the chances of me going back to the UK any time soon are pretty damned slim.\u00a0 I’ll be an expat blogger for a good while yet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Two days ago\u00a0marked the 3rd anniversary of my emigration from the UK.\u00a0 Just before I left, I put up this post on my old blog, saying I’d be going away for 4-5 weeks. This is normally how British expats become … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=170"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=170"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=170"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}