{"id":11438,"date":"2011-10-11T15:31:40","date_gmt":"2011-10-11T11:31:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/?p=11438"},"modified":"2011-10-11T16:48:53","modified_gmt":"2011-10-11T12:48:53","slug":"when-a-man-is-tired-of-the-palm-he-is-tired-of-ah-luxury-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/showcase\/when-a-man-is-tired-of-the-palm-he-is-tired-of-ah-luxury-life\/","title":{"rendered":"“When A Man Is Tired of The Palm He Is Tired of, Ah, Luxury Life”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>A retired English cricketer is leaving Dubai and it\u2019s big news apparently.\u00a0 Check out the \u2018most read\u2019 and \u2018most commented\u2019 sections of the local English media and the fact that Freddie Flintoff is forsaking the blue skies of a desert winter for the grey mists of Surrey is cause for great debate.\u00a0 The chunky erstwhile bowler and imbiber-in-chief of the England team which put the Aussies in their place wants his kids \u2018not to take the sun for granted\u2019.\u00a0 They\u2019ll be lucky to remember what it looked like in three months.<\/p>\n

Before he leaves maybe he should organize one of those supremely cheesy\u00a0 Dubai photo sessions on the beach in front of the Burj al Arab with the sun setting behind. You know, the one where the family lies in a line wearing white t-shirts and rolled up jeans, hands on chins grinning inanely.\u00a0 A good way to preserve his \u2018solar memories\u2019, no?<\/p>\n

The message coming loud and clear from Mr Flintoff\u2019s widely publicized comments is that he was simply bored of the place.\u00a0 \u00a0 Fair enough except his only role, as I understand it, was a nicely undefined \u2018sort-of-ambassador\u2019 job to promote the city.<\/p>\n

The template for this type of celebrity endorsement of the city was set by David Beckham and his wife\u2019s purchase of a villa on the Palm in the heady early days of the Dubai property boom.\u00a0 Having worked on this announcement myself I can testify what an immense impact this had in putting Dubai and specifically The Palm on the map.<\/p>\n

The problem though with these celebrity endorsements is that you\u2019re operating on a law of diminishing returns.\u00a0 Lionel Richie, Shah Rukh Khan and Boris Becker are among the dozens of \u2018slebs\u2019 who\u2019ve read an autocue on a slickly produced DVD extolling the virtues of owning your own little plot of the UAE.\u00a0 Lionel Richie, allegedly, even appeared in person to a small group of potential investors and rattled out a few bars of \u2018Say You, Say Me\u2019 to entice them to part with millions of dollars. How could they resist?<\/p>\n

Mr Flintoff\u2019s biggest mistake, as far as I can see, is to have chosen to live on The Palm.\u00a0 Don\u2019t get me wrong I\u2019m no \u2018Palm-ist\u2019, I have a great affection for the place or rather for what it used to be.\u00a0 For me The Palm was at its best when it was a sand-bar.\u00a0 These were the days when I used to lead press trips out of Mina Seyahi port on a bizarrely constructed boat made out of a cut-off Toyota people carrier (don\u2019t ask).<\/p>\n

We used to hare around the island on quad bikes stopping closer than we should do to marvel at the rainbow dredgers which were firing huge arcs of sand as the world\u2019s largest manmade island was built inch by inch.\u00a0 I used to love touring the site with the engineers as they told me about the apparently intractable problems they had to solve to continue on schedule.\u00a0 The helicopter trips over the island with the good-humoured pilots from Dubai Police were sensational.<\/p>\n

I was on the island again last week and visits there always fill me with a slight melancholy.\u00a0 I still envisage the original plans which included elaborate Tuileries-style parks with flowing streams, the plans which disappeared with the inevitable interruption of financial necessity.\u00a0 I know people who live happily on the island both in the apartments on the Golden Mile and in the grand Signature villas on the island\u2019s fronds.\u00a0 They wax lyrical about the facilities, the lower temperature in Summer, the feeling of being \u2018away from the madding crowd\u2019.\u00a0 But, that for me, is the problem.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s the cachet of the address, and the not unimportant fact that you can own your own home on the island but I would much rather be part of a community (and not a gated one) where you can walk to a shop, exchange \u2018good mornings\u2019 with the local characters, watch gardeners pedal past your house with lawn mowers attached to their bikes.\u00a0 I can have a chicken shwarma from the ubiquitous \u2018Eat and Drink\u2019 or cheesy bread from a Lebanese bakery in my hands within five minutes \u2013 all features which may have enhanced your stay here, Mr Flintoff.\u00a0 iPOD docks for the chilled swimming pool and\u00a0 electronic gates only go so far.<\/p>\n

So farewell, then, Freddy and give my regards to ice on the windscreen, horizontal rain and the M25.\u00a0 If it all gets too much for you and the kids start nagging for the sun again why don\u2019t you give Mirdif a whirl?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

JAMES MULLAN: It’s the so-called ‘Eighth Wonder of the World’, it’s ‘Iconic’ but for some people The Palm simply doesn’t measure up. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":11439,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56,173,482,187],"tags":[9087,197,3020,3611,1317,9091,16482,6019,18316,162,18337],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11438"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11438"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11438\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11439"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}