Attended a vapid, expat dinner party last night until past midnight. The usual fare of conversation: poking fun at the locals, la-dee-dah-well-we-went-to...on-vacation braggadocio, reminiscences of former colleagues and their whereabouts, CultureTalk, and the workplace. A very uninspiring evening but with good food and drink. I must be fair, though, I was the only one who had not worked in the same workplaces as the rest of the guests.

The spacious flat is located in a compound whose security leaves little to be desired. I've entered it a number of times in my car and the wooden arm-gate is usually up. The guard sometimes does not even venture outside his guard box but peers from inside on his chair. The same entrance has an exit and the wooden arm is usually down when I approach it to leave. So much for common sense. Burglary seems to be common inside the compound, especially of those who had assumed the security guards were doing their job and had left their flats unlocked.

Yet one topic of talk last night was the pigeons roosting in certain crannies and leaving their droppings and how to get rid of them. Should the housing office at work be contacted first or the management company who maintains the complex? Putting spikes in the crannies was deemed a good solution.

Yesterday in the Gulf News, 32% of its poll of 700 readers thought that the UAE was ripe for a terrorist attack.

Went to the desert with R and W and my son and his mate to play bocce and sand boarding. There are some high dunes on the outskirts of Al Ain near the Al Ain airport. I met R and his wife W at the camel roundabout, which is the last roundabout north of Al Ain. Beyond is the yawning maws of the crested dunes that were shades of pink to burnt siena in the late afternoon light. W's mother, who is visiting, came too. She was looking forward to a game of bocce on the dunes all day.

We started from our vehicles into the desert after tossing the little white ball ahead of us. The boys found a dune to surf down. The water filled colorful plastic balls took odd bounces and rolls depending on the terrain, which alternated between soft and hard. The larger grey grains of gravel made the ball even bounce, leaving an odd pattern of two concentric circles, a dent inside the larger circle where the ball initially hit the ground. This made for a kind of combination golf and bocce game, as if one were in an interminable sand trap. Sometimes the little white ball rolled back down the dune in one of the soft sand tracks between the tiny ridges that curved along the surface of a dune to the feet of the launcher of the little white ball. Other times the launcher tossed it over a dune so that we had to blindly toss our two balls after it, according to the rules of the game. On the whole it was an utterly zany fun-filled relaxing way to spend the afternoon in Al Ain. A topological, non-Euclidean geometric funferall.