It's not until you don't have something that you actually realise just how necessary it really is. In my case, it was electricity on a recent Friday. Apparently, there were some emergency works that the electricity company had to carry out in my street, or so the warning notice stuck to the gate of our villa said on the Monday. Even my daughter can do the maths: that's four days before the scheduled shut down.
If it was so urgent, why wait for the weekend to roll around, when everybody would be at home from work and school? Rant over. But I'm not here to argue the logic of timing. Just cause and effect.
Anyway, from 8am to 3pm, we were without electricity. No music, no caffeine, no TV; the usual taken-for-granted pleasures that electricity brings to our appliance-dominated world, not to mention light and that old UAE staple: air conditioning.
So there we were, post 8am and sitting in an increasingly warmer world of silence. It's usually quiet on Friday mornings in our neighbourhood. No impatient beeping of horns as school buses screech to a stop to pick up the kids, no clanging of the gas man as he slowly drives his wares around the streets, holding up the traffic, and no sound of sloshing water as the car washer guy fills up his bucket as he walks from villa to villa cleaning vehicles.
But this time was different. No humming of the air conditioner, no TV in the background, no music, no sound of the computer being turned on. Worse, no sound of the kettle boiling. Nothing but true silence, something I'd not heard in a long time.
Some people would welcome the break because they could sleep the day away, unaffected by the lack of electricity. Or they could head to the pool and sleep most of the day away on a deck chair. Parents call them smug singletons. For others, known as parents, it can be a nightmare. And not just because of the lack of caffeine. Sure, we can go to the pool, but we can't sleep the day away in a deck chair. Then we'd be known as irresponsible parents.
Like most people, a shot of caffeine (OK, a few) is essential to a successful start to my day. Every day, to be honest; Fridays included. So the start to my favourite day of the week didn't go so well.
Throw in my daughter wanting to play an old-fashioned board game, just like families from those pre-TV days, and I could feel the beginnings of a twitch in my left eye. And it was only 8.20am - too early for anything to be open. (Note to Starbucks: you really should consider a delivery service.)
So Monopoly it was. And it turned out to be an expensive morning. Property is one of my obsessions of late. Not just the home itself, but also what goes inside it. You know, the interior design and the accessories. At the moment, it's all things Gustavian grey. But that's probably because I've set my heart on buying a property in Sweden, the home of the Gustavian period, which kicked off in about 1770.
When it comes to Monopoly, I'm patient. And I have to be if I want to balance out my property portfolio. Pall Mall and Mayfair are my properties of choice, with a couple of government utility companies thrown in for good measure. After all, everybody needs water and electricity (particularly me on this particular day).
My daughter, however, races around the board buying everything in sight. There's no plan of attack. And forget the location, location, location strategy. Her strategy is all about colour - the higher on her list of favourite colours that week, the higher the chance that she'll buy it. It's also about how many cards she can build up - the more the merrier - and the 200 Monopoly bucks she can collect every time she passes Go, giving her more liquidity to put another random property card into her growing, disjointed stack. As long as she avoids jail, she's happy.
But the longer we played, the more I thought about real homes and interiors, not to mention caffeine. My focus was waning and I'd just been outplayed for Mayfair, thanks to my daughter suddenly deciding that blue was up there with crimson in her all-time colour favourites. Like any sensible parent, I threw in the towel (like an eight year old) before it got worse. After all, if I can't have Mayfair, there's no point in trying for Pall Mall. What we could have, though, was a trip to Småland, the playroom at Ikea on Yas Island, and some caffeine for me. Perhaps I'd spot some Gustavian-style reproductions in the process.
Småland turned out to be a disaster. Strict height requirements meant that my daughter missed the cut off by a centimetre. Tears and "why didn't we stay home and keep playing Monopoly WHEN I WAS WINNING?" followed.
I didn't see any Gustavian-style reproductions, but we did get a new sofa. We needed this like a hole in the head. I blame the lack of caffeine. And no electricity. Now a few thousand dirhams out of pocket, I have learnt my lesson well: stick with Monopoly money, never mention Småland again and lose graciously, even if there's no caffeine in sight.
[ fglover@thenational.ae ]