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I have been driving around Doha for the last couple of days, which was initially daunting because they drive on the wrong side of the road and almost every intersection is controlled by a roundabout. Roundabouts I generally regard as one of the more enlightened forms of traffic control: as long as everyone keeps cool and keeps moving the traffic slips on through with no problems at all. But add in the factors of having to remember to look the other way, and the standard of Qatari driving they can be a bit nerve wracking. We're all still alive, though, and I've gone a long way through the heat and dust with large 4X4s looming in the rear view mirror with the driver mouthing in Arabic unkind things about my parents . Doha is about the size of Auckland, both in geographical and demographic terms. It is criss crossed by a network of new roads, often up to 8 lanes wide, which feed traffic into a maze of smaller and often older streets. Yesterday the wide roads took us to the Vil...

I’m not really a business class sort of person. The thought of paying the price of a pretty reasonable second hand car for a couple of glasses of champagne, a meal or two and the rental on a chair for 12 hours sticks in my craw a bit. But here we were, for reasons I won’t bore you with, taking the right hand gangplank and heading uphill to the top story of the world’s largest airliner. And here we were being shown to our seats, and by seats I mean cubicles, by an astonishingly pretty young woman in that particularly elegant uniform worn by Emirates cabin staff. There was a sort of bedside cabinet thing containing a minibar, yes really, and spaces to stash your stuff. There was a TV screen not much smaller than the one we have at home, and if the effort of reaching across to work it was too much, two, yes two different remote controls to fiddle with. There was an armchair with lots of Homer Simpson seat goes up seat goes down doohickery going on. If you got bored with more TV channels ...