A lighthearted look at Qatar

The following newspaper article was sent to me by the mother-in-law in a recent mail package. While it doesn't talk about anything we're not already aware of I did find it entertaining and amusing and thought some of you might do too!

I've included the whole article here as I know how some of you hate having to click on a link to read something ;-)

As I get older, I appreciate a good museum more and more. Or even a bad museum, I’m not fussed. A newspaper once ran a competition to find the worst museum in Britain. The Cumberland Pencil Museum in Keswick ranked high, though personally I find pencils quite interesting. My own nomination would be the Pembrokeshire Motor Museum in Simpson Cross. The Pembrokeshire Motor Museum, or, to invent a fatuous abbreviation, the PMM, is a barn full of dilapidated cars… and that’s it! I’ve been there four or five times and always enjoyed myself, and I’m not interested in cars.

A traditionalist where museums are concerned, I prefer to look at things rather than interact with them, not because interaction is bad, but because interaction is popular. The less interaction a museum offers, I and the people who run museums know only too well, the emptier that museum will be. Just as temperature rather than the quality of the food is the biggest factor in my enjoyment of a restaurant, the absence of other visitors rather than what’s on show is the most important factor in my enjoyment of a museum.

The Sheikh Faisal Bin Qassim Bin Faisal Bin Thani Bin Qassim Bin Mohd Al-Thani Museum has much to recommend it in regard to emptiness. You can only visit it by appointment, and having made your appointment, you have to get there. Sheikh Faisal’s museum is in the desert, that desert is in Qatar, and, of all the sultanates and emirates lining the southern shore of the Persian Gulf, Qatar is probably the least visited. But not by me. I like it there. Not least because it’s hot enough not to wear any underpants.

After two week-long visits in two years, unlikely as it may seem, peculiar what life throws at you, I’m becoming quite the expert on Qatar: population a million give or take, area slightly smaller than Yorkshire, awash with oil, home to a hefty whiff of the world’s supply of natural gas, national pastime filling up the Land Cruiser for thrupence and taking roundabouts stupidly fast. I’ve never had a specialism; maybe this sandy peninsula could be it. A few more years playing at Ryan Sideways, then wind down my career as Our Man in Hydrocarbon Heaven, filing reports on camel races and the latest skyscraper.

Naturally my knowledge of the country got a boost from Sheikh Faisal’s museum, home to an eclectic display of daggers, dinosaurs, Fords, Chevys, Buicks, squashed animals, calligraphy and the best picture caption I’ve ever seen: “Kasnazani dervish enters sharp daggers into his head using a hammer,” next to a photograph of a man doing exactly that. I could have stayed longer but the children grew restless at the lack of any brightly coloured buttons to press.

The Sheikh’s place aside, Qatar doesn’t offer much in terms of cultural tourism. And yet what it lacks in this department, it more than fails to make up for in natural beauty. A flat, dusty plain that struggles to rise more than 20 ft above sea level, the landscape reminds me of Hull. Hull in the sun. Hull in the sun full of Scottish oilmen with bright pink forearms, very big wristwatches and degrees in engineering. I had a fascinating talk with one of them, Aberdeen he was from, about the singular geology of Oman. Well, he talked, I listened.

Geology, that’s something else that comes to life as you get older, although sensible people probably liked rocks when they were kids. I was in the National Museum Cardiff last summer, saw a gneiss from the Acasta River in Canada, 3,962 million years old, and a permineralised section of a tree, beautiful, and an exhibit on coal deposits, sut y ffurfiwyd glo. Even with Rodin in the next room, I thought how piffling is the human imagination compared to what nature throws up. Or lays down.

In a modest way, Qatar makes its own contribution to the earth’s wonders. Usually when something unlikely such as a cave or a tree or a pond is said to “whisper”, or echo, or tap dance or whatever, it’s a disappointment. Not so the Singing Sand Dunes of Qatar, out beyond the USAF base at Al Udeid. Slide down them and after a few feet of gentle avalanche it’s as if someone has started up an organ. Either that or Rolf Harris is sitting in the next wadi along with a giant didgeridoo.

You don’t have to strain or pretend to hear the sound, it’s properly loud, booming, sonorous, downright strange. I commend an excellent article in Physics World for those who’d like an explanation, although researchers are still divided, quite bitterly divided, over precisely how the note is amplified.

Strange to think back to school and university. There we were, the sensitive, arty types, we were so cool, so creative, so controversial reading our Camus and going to our Brecht at Spring Street theatre. It was obvious, it was axiomatic that our preoccupations were superior. And yet, were they? All the while, I have gradually come to believe, it was the chemists and geographers, the physicists and engineers, the medics and mathematicians, who were getting the really good stuff.

Source: Robert Crampton, "Beta Male", The Times, March 15th 2008