Muntazah, Maya and the Mad Dash Home

In 2002, I celebrated my 50th birthday on the 25th floor of a tower block on Shaikh Zayed Road. It wasn't my party. In fact it was an unlikely annual event to mark Finnish Independence Day and Burns Night (of which it was neither). I remember thinking it was a strange place for a 'Westie Coastie' Scottish kid to have ended up. After all, my brother and I had accepted, 45 years previously, that