Baku, Sunday 26th November 2006
The local weather is as capricious as ever. Last week I sat here surrounded by miserable cold temperatures and grey skies; today I have been strolling around a sunlit city under blue skies with temperatures just back up in the double figures. London remains reported as warmer though, I notice (see whinge last week).
It has been quite an out-and-about week this week in terms of evening entertainment. This is probably just as well seeing that the one night I did stay in – Monday – became my first night shared with a power cut in the apartment block. I knew they could happen often enough during the day because I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve come back from work to find that my alarm clock has reset itself. Finding myself plunged into darkness on a Winter’s evening was not a lot of fun though: there is only so much romance one can find in candlelight when feeling rather chilled in one’s own living room with the water cut off as well (I can only assume electric pumps rather than gravity feed). Thankfully power was restored within two hours and so far it has reverted to only disappearing during the working day (albeit with alarming regularity).
Event of the week was undoubtedly last night’s St. Andrew’s Ball: an impressive annual charity dinner arranged by the Baku Caledonian Society. I was invited at rather short notice and discovered later still that the dress code was black tie. As my aging dinner jacket is currently languishing in a wardrobe in England I duly set out to learn how best to hire or buy such an outfit quickly in Baku. After a couple of days’ inquiries the general wisdom appeared to indicate that hire was going to cost the same as purchase so Friday night became my rush-out-to-buy-dinner-jacket night. Annalie volunteered to join me as she planned to buy a necklace for the same event, so it came that we found ourselves dropped off in a particular part of town at seven o’clock with a rough hand-drawn map to a shop in hand and an hour to go until closing time. The map turned out to be more of a hindrance than a help as an attempt to use it followed by a quick ‘phone call took us straight back to where we had started and the shop that we had both looked at and thought it would most likely be the one we were after.
As Baku does not appear to be overflowing with shops that sell dinner jackets it is probably fair to say that the staff in this shop has seen their fair share of last-minute merchants such as me: I am sure the phrase “fool in a rush” was emblazoned across my forehead as I walked in there at the end of business hours the day before a black-tie event that the whole city was likely to know about. Those people certainly know their stuff though. We whipped through a quick selection of jacket, trousers, shirt and shoes and even though I could not supply a decent size for any of it (UK and Azeri clothes sizes have as much in common as their respective languages as far as I can see) I nevertheless found myself standing in a very presentable outfit on first pickings; the only thing I changed was the trousers. Then it was time to pay.
Our friends, Riz and Natalya who recommended the shop had made it very clear that a discount should be demanded. Things got off to a troubling start though when the figure that they had quoted for the suit was doubled by the shop staff. Annalie was quick to ask why there was such a difference and the instant reply was: that is the hire price, if you wish to buy it is this much – general wisdom appeared to have fallen flat in one fell swoop. It did not help that the shop did not take plastic and I had specifically obtained a certain amount of cash with which to settle the transaction.
As luck would have it, Natalya had supplied the map and Riz had given the directions over the ‘phone to get us back to the right place. In the process he mentioned that the two of them would be visiting the shop that evening to pick up a shirt he had ordered and, low and behold, they walked in just as the discount negotiations were about to get tough. I felt a little sheepish handing over to a couple of local people to conclude the deal in translation for me but it certainly made everything a lot faster and simpler and while the final price still exceeded my planned budget I walked away with a good outfit for a reasonable outlay and was very grateful of the assistance.
Saturday night rolled round and away we went. The dinner was hosted at the Gulastan Palace: a large ex-restaurant-now-venue-for-hire on the hillside overlooking the city and the bay. I had heard about the place and seen it but never visited before, mostly because I had not been to any functions that were large enough. The Scots presence in Baku is such that the guest list for the St. Andrew’s Ball numbered seven hundred and only The Palace was big enough to accommodate everybody.
The Society certainly laid on a very impressive evening including a twelve piece marching pipe band and a six piece ceilidh band, both flown in from Scotland specially. Dinner was disappointing (as can be expected to some extent with a large event) but the drinks were free-flowing, the atmosphere buoyant and my immediate company most congenial. The only small cloud on my otherwise clear horizon that night was a textbook case of Sod’s Law.
Sod’s Law does not feature in the Oxford English Dictionary or the Encyclopaedia Britannica as far as I am aware but if it did I feel the definition could easily read something like this: Sod’s Law is going to an exclusive, ticket-only event for seven hundred people and discovering not only that your ex-girlfriend who you have not seen since the break-up is there but that she is backing directly on to you at the adjacent table during dinner. Sod’s Law is further refined when later in the evening you exit the huge dinning hall through its tiny door at the same time as said ex-girlfriend is entering the hall through the same door (warning: difficult verbal exchanges may follow).
Ayla’s little monologue at the doorway was a far from pleasant conclusion to what had been an uncomfortable couple of hours spent looking very much the other way during the meal. As it was I remained unbowed by the experience while she and her accompanying ex-husband left rapidly very soon after the exchange. I was also lucky to have some fine friends around me: Annalie, Zamina (my agent), Farah (my manager), Dawn and Rati (two further colleagues) were proven once again to be fine women all as they talked up my spirits and looked out for me during the evening. While there may be times when I feel lonely out here it can never be said that I am alone.
It being that time of year, we get to do the whole thing again next week for the Performance Unit Leader’s Quarterly Awards Dinner. Same place, same time and as Annalie is making the arrangements it should be a good old knees-up too. More news will follow no doubt.
A.