“What do you mean you detected a fraud at the hotel?” the senior partner of Collins Barrow, Chartered Accountants of Calgary, Canada exclaimed incredulously. “We’ve never found a whiff in 20 years.” Twitching, I let loose a dry cough. “Z-tapes, sir. As part of our...

The 2 essential lessons I’ve learned in life (and please don’t tell my wife) are: You cannot be an accountant if you can’t add. The difficulty of getting fired. On a cold, rainy January morning I entered the portal of Hale and Company, Chartered Accountants of...

As my family negotiated the narrow, winding street, well before reaching our destination, we could hear the tumult ahead. It led us to a square overwhelmed with sightseers. This could have been any tourist trap in Europe. We battled through a surging tide of humanity...

I quickly learned the art of self-deprecatory humour in my pre-teens. Thrown into an all-white, uneducated, low-income housing estate outside London, I was the only coloured inhabitant. Love playing football (soccer), I would trawl the streets on my bike searching for...

When I was born, Dar-es-Salaam (Arabic for Haven of Peace) was an idyllic harbour on the coast of East Africa. After an absence of forty years, only a chance sojourn in Dubai and an advert in the Gulf News offering a three-day excursion enticed me to return home. I...

“Hon, some good news,” Laura exclaimed one day while we were dating. “All my brothers and sisters are returning to the Philippines this Christmas. If I go, what will you do?” “If they’re all coming, why can’t we go and get married there at the same time?” She started...

Enjoy the View Enjoy the view. Dream a little.

I landed at the newly minted Emirates terminal in Dubai after a thirteen-hour flight from Seattle. I expected this billion-dollar edifice to run as efficiently as Hong Kong, which took twenty minutes to exit. Here, I had to take a ten-minute “people mover” underground...

Watching Wimbledon this week, I witnessed the most remarkable sight. A kid was playing a senior player in the tournament. His opponent slipped on the grass, twisting his ankle. The boy immediately ran to his side and knelt beside him until a medico arrived. That kid...

It was supposed to be our day off, lounging beside the pool of the Sandy Beach Hotel, in the town of Pyla on the coast of Cyprus, overlooking the glistening Mediterranean. Laura had vanished to the Philippines to attend to her dying mum, while I was lumbered with two...