From today's 7 Days newspaper in Dubai :
There are moments when 42-year-old Jane wishes she had a shotgun. Every time a young woman approach the Emirates compound where she lives with her airline pilot husband and two young children, she has to fight the urge to drive them away.
“In this block, mine is about the only surviving marriage. I look great for my age, but how can I compete with a stewardess in her twenties. They target the married men,” she says.
But, in truth, it is not just the young trolley dollies to blame. Jane’s husband Steve is a good bloke. However, like many otherwise decent middle-aged men he is stuck in the land of perpetual adolescence - one of Dubai’s vast tribe of ‘Rip Van Wrinklies’.
You can tell this, for sure, because he claims he loves cabin crew for their conversation. “They have a lot of interesting experiences - they are very multi-cultural these days,” he says. But as he gets going on their stimulating chat, he glances nervously across the table to where Jane is talking with another friend.
In Washington Irving’s tale of Rip Van Winkle, a village charmer goes into the hills to escape a nagging wife, falls asleep under a tree and wakes up 20 years later to be appalled by the changes the years have brought.
In Dubai, it is only a trip home that will provide a similar reality shock. On an average day, as he tools down the Sheikh Zayed Road in his Jeep Wrangler with Bryan Adams blaring from the radio, there is only the occasional glimpse of his own grizzled features in the rear-view mirror to remind your forty-plus teenager of his real age.
In fact, they often seem blissfully immune to any trace of the self-consciousness that still afflicts their marginally younger counterparts. “When the Human League played the Irish Village, you could see all the thirty-somethings looking a bit embarrassed like kids watching their uncle at Christmas while the forty-somethings just boogied like maniacs,” says Jo, herself a fan of eighties pop.
But in Dubai, it is not just the nightlife that convinces the city’s greying groovers the eighties never ended. The city’s entire ethos also seems a tribute to the heady vibe of the Dallas decade.
“I’m 50 and I’ve not grown up,” says a long-term expat working in the field of hospitality and entertainment.
“I think Dubai keeps you young because of its massive social scene and all those single women. I’ve known three or four broken marriages where the guy says, ‘Sorry, I love you but I need to party,” he says.
On the other hand, he has now seen generations of women give up the late nights to settle down – or at least try to (no easy matter when all the available blokes are still shying away from romantic commitment).
Still, the glory years could be over for the 40-plus party-people. So far the city has never been a place to make an aging hipster feel conspicuous. Expats were all 30-plus, while Dubai’s genuine teens grew up in such a restrictive moral climate that they set an example of responsible conduct to their parents.
Now, though, the demography could be changing. Jostling in the audience at the Robbie Williams gig – to the annoyance of older fans – was a defiant minority of 20-somethings. While the radio playlists are still, in the words of the tune, “preoccupied by 1985”, every week now some superstar DJ flies in to peddle obscure genres of dance to a generation who cannot even imagine it was once cool to like U2.
“There are a couple of tables with the old silver-hairs but it’s only a few,” says the manager of one of Dubai’s hotter clubs. Indeed, with all the younger, less cynical, males now out there in competition, what are the fading swingers still sticking around for?
Even for Steve, there are signs his long-protracted youth could finally be drawing to a close. “It’s really terrible when you fly to a city and you ask the aircrew if everyone is going out. They say no, but then you go out for a drink on your own and bump into them in a bar down the road,” he says.