Last weekend, while out with my wife Asha, I bought a pair of sunglasses. Obviously, to me anyway, I needed to start wearing them straight away. Asha then questioned me, using rather overly-harsh terms I think, about why I was walking around a shopping mall in the middle of the afternoon wearing sunglasses. I pointed out that I was road testing them - making sure, whilst in the comfort and safety of Festival City mall, that I didn't walk into people and things, fall down stairs or trip over imaginary cracks in the floor. This didn't convince Asha, who declared that she wasn't going to walk with me if I continued wearing them. One glance into a convenient shop window mirror revealed the reason why she was right to say this - I looked like a spiv*. On a beach, nobody bothers to look at men so it doesn't matter what they look like, but in town men and sunglasses form a difficult juxtaposition. Women, of course, always look good in sunglasses in any location, but at least 75% of men look definitely spiv-like, and I am, unfortunately, one of them. I will wear them on my daily ten-minute walk from Dubai Internet City Metro station to where I teach, Knowledge Village. Once safely out of the sun and inside Knowledge Village I can take them off and look like an English teacher again.*spiv. English slang word, dating from the 1930's. 1. One who shirks work or responsibility; a slacker. 2. A person who makes a living by underhand and black market dealings.
In my defence, I have to confess he looked like the fellow one often encounters in the back alleys of big cities like Mumbai, Shanghai and Dubai, who tries to sell made-in-China look alikes of Rolex and Omega watches and Apple Iphones, to gullible western tourists who think thay are getting a great bargain.
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