August is known as the silly season. It is also the holiday season in the northern hemisphere. So, perhaps not surprisingly, this blog is having a bit of a holiday from writing just about education.

This post is being written from Dubai, so why the headline? Well, when I first visited the USA ,in the summer of 1968, these were the two signs that I saw that stuck in my mind. The first, because we have no word sign for pedestrian crossings in the United Kingdom at that time, the transport Ministry preferring pictograms. The second because, although only a couple of years after the Cuban Missile crisis, there were no signs in Britain of what people should do if the threat of nuclear war became a reality. Were the British just more phlegmatic, or just further away from the action? I suppose an ICBM from the USSR could have hit New York, and in the UK were were still more concerned about the threat of a conventional war. In the late 1960s, the British Armed forces still had over 50,000 troops stationed in Germany in case of a threat from the East.

As an aside, that threat in the summer of 1968, while I was in North America, came when Russian troops invaded what was then Czechoslovakia and put an end to the ‘Prague Spring’. In the USA, the threat turned out to be internal, not least to the Democratic Party with assassinations, and the riots outside the Democratic Party’s convention in Chicago.

But, back to the point of this post. After three days in Dubai and a visit to Fujairah, another Emirate in the UAE on the Gulf of Oman, I have seen no signs of either anxiety about what has been happening in the Gulf for the past six months, nor any warning to the population of what to do if there was a drone or missile attack. All feels exactly as it has been on my other visits to Dubai, the last of which was a recently as 2024. The building boom goes on, with ever more extravagant design for high rise buildings: bits chopped ot, bridges connecting two buildings at a high level, and almost any other non-functional design you can image, and a few you probably cannot.

To add an education note; the UAE, and especially Dubai is an important location for British-style schools, many independent schools have offshoots here, free from the demands of the VAT-person. There is also the offshoot of one state school: something I wrote about earlier. see What is the role of the State in schooling? | John Howson There are also many schools for the nationals from the Indian sub-continent that make up much of the workforce in Dubai where employees have been able to bring their families.

i did wonder whether I should have tried to export Drone Football as a new game on the back of the World Cup, but this was a holiday, so perhaps that’s for another time. If you are interested, drop me a note in the comments and I will put you in touch with the organisers of the game in Oxfordshire.