In Star Trek NG Captain Jean-Luc Picard is prone to intone in his best stage baritone: "Make it so.....". At his command the StarShip Enterprise hurls itself in to the void at continuum-wrenching velocities towards the next adventure.
The rulers of Dubai have obviously watched too much Star Trek.
Go to them with a crazy idea on the back of an envelope, and they will tell you to "Make it so......". They'll then back it with enough petroleum-derived folding stuff to ensure that no matter how crazy the idea, it simply will happen....
Welcome to Dubai.

Built on a sandy creek overlooking the Arabian Gulf near the Straits of Hormuz, until 1971 Dubai and the other 5 Emirates were small trading posts full of itinerant Arab peasants and Indian traders, overseen by a benign British Protectorate mainly for historical reasons: we had conquered them hundreds of years previously to ensure our cargo ships were not plundered on their journeys back and forth to India.
The Second World War had enfeebled Britain and during the 1950s and 1960s it made moves towards allowing the protectorates to become self-governing, in order mainly to save money. Finally, in 1971, the United Arab Emirates was born, poor but proud, and the Treasury breathed a huge sigh of relief.

Little did they know that the UAE were sitting on truly vast quantities of oil which over the next 25 years they would exploit and export, ending up wealthier than Britain and one of the fastest-growing economies in the world.

This fabulous oil wealth and a lack of the need or desire to defend itself has created a country with enormous self-confidence. Basically, they've got so much money they can distort the normal rules of politics because anybody who threatens them they simply buy off.

They like the English because we were basically fair to them before Independence (unlike we were to Israel), and we're a good oil market. But they don't need us like we need their oil reserves.

Late-November 2006 England: floods, rain, wind, more rain, gales, short days, dark nights (and did I mention the rain?).
Virgin Atlantic finally and very reluctantly coughed up the airmiles they owed us and late Wednesday night we queued (and queued and queued.....) at Heathrow for the overnight flight to Dubai for a long weekend. Having been to Oman we were keen to experience the other side of the Arabian coin, but first we had to negotiate Heathrow Terminal 3......

Heathrow gets worse every time I travel, every advance in technology designed to expedite the process of boarding an aircraft, such as web check-in and those cool Smiths Heimann x-ray machines (well done Sir Roger for buying Heimann at the right time), has been nullified by pointless triplicated "Security" checks designed to reassure the travelling public that "something" is being done, and manned by insufficient slow, surly personnel. Once I've checked in by web, bag drop should take no more than 15 seconds. So what's going on? I counted 6 times my passport was checked, 4 times my boarding card and my hand luggage was x-rayed twice, the entire process taking 2½ hours. Huh?

Passenger security is simple: equip each flight with 4 air marshalls. Anybody threatens anything, they shoot. Yes, stray bullets will puncture the fuselage and yes, the aircraft may depressurise but it won't lose control, they are all equipped with oxygen masks so no one should die (except the terrorists). Then do away with all but one of the security checks and massively replicate its workings so that no one has to queue. Any queue gets beyond 5 minutes, BAA gets fined £50,000 a minute for however long the queue continues (given to the passengers). Simple.

We made the gate (doing 98. I said let them truckers roll, 10-4.....) in the nick of time and had front of block seats which, for Economy class I have to say were very roomy. Trying to sleep on aircraft is impossible so I shut my eyes for half an hour to provide a mental "this memory is yesterday's, this memory is today's" watershed and watched another film on the (excellent) video-on-demand system.

The sun rose as we made a straight-in approach to Dubai's main airport (what, no Overhead Join?).
This turned out to be clean, orderly and efficient, with Indian workers cleaning every inch of it constantly to ensure it remained spotless, and courtesy phones labelled "For passenger use - free calls anywhere in Dubai" everywhere. We are so mean-spirited in England by comparison.

All the passport staff were female, veiled (apart from the face) and apparently about 12 from what I could see. You can tell an awful lot about a country from the people they put on passport duty. Through a cavernous baggage hall to our already deplaned baggage and out into the sunshine and smells: diesel and kerosene and sweaty bodies and the faint smell of hair oil.

I've noticed that everybody in the Arab world keeps themselves immaculate - they have their hair cut every couple of weeks and keep it beautifully coiffured. They are all either clean-shaven or have long beards but their clothes are always immaculate.

I savoured the delicious irony of being in a taxi where the heavily-bearded salwar kameez-wearing driver's mobile phone ring tone was a Christmas carol.

Out hotel was in the marina: a long way from the airport through atrocious traffic, and everywhere was construction.

Being a trading deport, the inhabitants of Dubai have traditionally been very cosmopolitan and their interest is not in you but in what you have to trade, or your money.

The traffic in Dubai is awful: they have built (and are still building) huge 12-lane highways everywhere, but they don't drive very well or use the roads efficiently, so there are constant hold-ups and accidents. many of the drivers have minimal experience.

I have never seen so many Lamborghinis, Range Rover Sports and Bentleys in such a short space of time. Like Oman, all the cars have a "binger" that "bings" constantly if you drive over 120Km/h (75mph) - apparently all the locals disconnect them. Outside the city you can put your foot down and it is quite normal to see lines of immaculate tinted-windowed 4x4s in the outside lane doing 100mph or so. They have fixed speed cameras but apparently they let the fines build up through the year - their car tax cannot be renewed until they are all paid - and you can negotiate your speeding fines! Only in Dubai.....

Dubai has gone from a flat piece of unappetising desert to a huge metropolis in 30 years and there are only so many identical tower blocks you can build, so they have started to get a bit silly.
Each tower block has it's own motif to differentiate it, and some of the roofs are just bloody stupid. Everyone has tried to come up with something new and failed (it looks like any American city) but in doing so they have tried every outlandish idea: there is an indoor ski-slope, several marinas (with no boats), palm-shaped islands (that you can only appreciate the shapes of from the air), maps of the world islands (ditto), the Burj al Arab hotel that is nowhere near as big or as remote as they'd have you believe and was apparently a bastard to make stay up as the foundations are in sand. We had to get out.....

10 miles out in the middle of the desert has been built a brand-new, no expense spared, state of the art motor racing circuit. I'm no motor-racing fan, but It's an absolutely fantastic place if you are. Most circuits are developed from airport perimeter tracks eg Silverstone so are boringly flat, but this is on the side of a hill and has been really thought about. My friend Clive designed it, so he gave us the guided tour and being sad I asked him to include all the plant and server rooms. No stone has been left unturned for this to be the best-designed circuit in the world, bar none. I didn't get a chance to drive the circuit, although I did go around it as a passenger, and it was amazing. Next time I wanna drive it...... in a Porsche.