Thoughts from the Shelf

Flights to Dubai Desert Experiences

Bonkers Dubai is like no other city on earth. Sprouting from the desert, it boasts the tallest, biggest, fastest and largest of just about everything – flashy.

Dubai is fast becoming a popular destination for travellers – both Dubai and Abu Dhabi Airport are major international hubs – and holiday makeres who find cheap flights to Dubai allow them to explore this crazy town

Float above Dubai in a hot air balloon

If you start to feel blasé about Dubai’s extraordinary architecture, it could be time to escape the city and see the dramatic desert landscapes that surround it. One of the most exciting ways to see the desert is to take a sunrise trip in a hot air balloon. The tropical cityscape lies in one direction, and the rugged Hajj mountains in the other, with desert stretching as far as the eye can see.

http://www.ballooning.ae/

Bash some dunes

If heights aren’t your thing and hot air ballooning is out, give dune bashing a try. This desert safari experience involves riding the sand dunes in a 4×4 vehicle, often with other activities included in the package, such as a camel ride, an evening barbecue, and belly dancing performances. There are heaps of tour companies in Dubai offering dune bashing safaris, so they’re easy to arrange for individuals or groups. Not for those who get car sick easily!

Live your Formula 1 racing dream

If you’ve ever played the latest Xbox 360 and PS3 games and dreamed of climbing into a F1-style single seater, and getting strapped in to drive on a race track, get yourself down to  Dubai Autodrome’s Race & Drive Centre. Wings, slick racing tyres and the roar of 180 BHP: you get to drive a high performance racing car and learn advanced driving techniques from an experienced instructor who acts as your co-driver. Fast and fun.

http://www.dubaiautodrome.com

Charity Christmas Cards

Christmas shopping has begun early for the Shelf the aim is to have all cards and presents ready to send the moment there is a window of postal opportunity. This years cards shall be selected from the wonderful charity christmas cards offered by organisations who hope to provide relief natural disasters around the world.

Educational Toys

It may just be that I’m in a particularly bad mood, having been into the toy department of a noted High Street chain store (are we allowed to mention brand names?) to find shelves labelled ‘Boys’ Toys’ and ‘Girls’ Toys’, where the boys’ toys were Lego, dig-your-own-dinosaur kits and generally anything constructive, educational or interesting, while the girls’ toys were, without exception, pink and sparkly, and were concerned with personal appearance and/or celebrity, but I find this actually offensive (it’s tomorrow, and I’m still cross).

Open a savings account with Fish Bank

One marvelous educational toy to get both boys and girls learning about money is the Fish Bank – a perfect way to get the kids to start a savings account

Quirky and interactive, fish bank creatively rewards your saving with cool animations each time you deposit a coin. Able to recognise all sterling coins, it automatically keeps track of the total amount of money deposited and you can even set a savings account goal to reach so when the goal is met there is a payoff.

Charity Gifts for Children?

The popularity of charity gifts may encourage you to choose something for a child.  With the bes intentions at heart we would warn to tread carefully.

I don’t think a present of a goat for a child as a present at all. As for myself I certainly would not appreciate getting a goat. Am I the only one who feels this way – or have I missed the point?

Following our discussion about food hampers for gifts to aid agencies we thought that a quick look at the changes in dress size would be revealing -

Dresses for models wont suit everyone

During the research it became apparant that dresses modeled in today’s fashion shows are unlikely to reach the high streets as they are designed with classic model figures in mind – giving rise to the debate about how a model looks and dresses.

Its true, current trends in fashion & the media in general encourage eating disorders and cause people to be unhappy with their bodies.

However it also true that more people suffer complications & death due to a poor diet & obesity than due to anorexia & bulemia.

Hold the fashion industry to answer for its crimes by all means, but lets not lose sight of the fact that its eating too much which is really doing the damage.

Most people object to unhealthy models, I don’t think you’ll find a huge amount of people who are saying thin people should be replaced by fat people on catwalks. Just that the models should be healthy, as much for their own sake as anyone elses.

Pouting/scowling, wafer-thin models, especially enhanced with dodgy Photoshop jobs, give the dresses they wear and air of sophistication that most cannot achieve

Then again, the excuse is that fashion isn’t about “real people” at all – it’s about designers topping each other’s efforts at outfits, and the industry wants skeletal models because they have the least impact on the shape of the clothing – especially dresses and lingerie. Society would be better off if we collectively admitted that the catwalk has limited, if any, relevance to the real world or the shapes of everyday people and accepted it as the form of performance art it is.

Personally, I think the gossip magazines’ “look at the flab!” celebrity compromise photos are more damaging, as they’re using dodgy angles or places where nearly everybody on this Earth has a little puppy fat to pretend that people on the thin side of average are “shockingly obese”. This can’t help anyone with low self-esteem who ends up reading such things and worrying about the dresses they should wear. Does nobody realise that humans have survived to this point because we’re able to store some food about our bodies in case of starvation?

Christmas Gifts – Aid Hampers?

As Christmas approaches once again our thoughts on the Shelf turn to gift ideas.

Rather than focus on the latest must have toys and gadget

s we thought it kind hearted to once again highlight the importance of helpful giving.

You may be considering buying a charity gift with the hope of helping those around the word in need – terrible natual disasters in Indonesia and the Phillipines have left many communities without shelter and little food.  In Kenya drought is responsible for a chronic food shortage so you could arrange to think about sending aid hampers.

Aid hampers

Christmas in the UK is associated with indulgence – far too much festive food and drink – people even arrange to give elaborate christmas hampers to friends and increasingly hampers are popular corporate gifts.

If aid agencies were on top of their game they would have Gift Aid hampers available amongst their charity gifts we think that they would attract the attention of organisations who feel they should give more to charity as both a great PR exercise and not forgeting of course that hampers bought as charity gifts can be a smart tax offsetting claim.

Depending on where the gift hamper was destined the contents could be picked to best suit the immediate needs of the region.

Mark Easton, the BBC’s home editor, wrote an illuminating post on his splendid blog that suggests far more people are seriously injured on Britain’s roads than the government figures suggest.

Analysis by the UK Statistics Authority, the watchdog for official data, reveals the under-reporting of road accident casualties is a significant and intractable problem

Instead of 26,000 people suffering serious injury after road accidents last year, the Department for Transport accepts that the true figure may be closer to 50,000. And the UKSA fears that the under-counting may mean the issue does not get the attention it deserves.

“The published statistics may not be sufficiently reliable to meet all user needs”, the authority argues, demanding that the Department for Transport “explain and contextualise the limitations of the statistics more fully at the time of publication”.

This matters because the level of carnage caused by drivers shapes road safety policy. As the authority puts it today: “These statistics are used… to save lives and reduce injury on the roads.”

If twice as many people as previously chronicled are suffering serious injury, the arguments for greater use of measures to target bad and reckless drivers become more compelling.

The Department for Transport has long known that its data on road casualties is suspect.

As the National Audit Office recently put it:

“There have been a number of studies of under-reporting, dating back to the 1970s, and from the limited data available it is estimated that there may be about twice as many casualties as are reported, although very few fatalities are unrecorded.”

The question for government, though, is not whether the figures under-record. They accept that they do. “The issue,” as the most recent internal report puts it, “is how constant over time are the levels of under-recording, misclassification and under-reporting, especially of serious accidents”

In other words, it is the trend not the number that matters – and for the last decade, the government has been reporting a downward picture.

The good news is that while our roads have got substantially busier, deaths have declined from around 3,500 a year to 2,500. The less good news is that fatalities in motor vehicles are still among the most common ways for 15-34-year-olds in Britain to lose their lives.

Three times as many people are killed in road crashes than get murdered. More than a thousand more die in motor accidents than from illegal drugs.

In rural areas, where car use is more often necessary and where average speeds are higher, rates can be many times greater. The worst place for road deaths is the north of Scotland.

The average age of a road death victim is 36.9, and three-quarters of those who die are men – predominantly in their teens, 20s and 30s.

While the death figures are probably reasonably robust, MPs are worried about the injury statistics. Earlier this month, the chair of the Transport Select Committee, Louise Ellman MP, referred to the “national scandal” of death and injury on Britain’s roads and the absence of good statistics.

“The Committee was extremely concerned about the lack of reliability in the data on road injuries, particularly those in relation to serious injuries. (…) We want the Government to do more on that issue, as we are not satisfied that the information that we are getting is accurate.”

She also made the point that motoring fatalities simply don’t get the same headlines as those who die in plane or train crashes.

“It is self-evident. Indeed, it should make us think a little – that the scale of the carnage on our roads is not acceptable in any other mode of transport. We are talking about 2,500 people dead and more than 230,000 casualties, and, if those figures related to rail, sea or aviation, there would be national uproar. However, there is no uproar about them.”

Follow Mark Easton @ the BBC