A wall, a pipe, and some graffiti.

In the UK if a child decided to graffiti your wall, it would no doubt be done with a can of spray-paint and a barrage of misspelt expletives. On my wall today, it was done with a bit of mud caused by last night's wonderfully noisy (but rather scary) thunderstorm (the second one in ten days).

To decipher the Arabic, I showed my students the image. I was expecting a rude 'Get Out Of Our Street' message (more on that in a minute) but rather anticlimactically, all it says is "Tariq Ahmed Aziz Tariq", the name of one of the little Omani boys in the neighbourhood.

The last year has seen a huge increase in rent all over Muscat. A piece of legislation was recently pass in Oman to help protect tenants such as myself from evil greedy Omani landlords who went through a phase of increasing rents by as much as 300%. The legislation protected current tenants from any rent increases over 15% per year.

The clever evil greedy Omani landlords quickly saw however that there was nothing to stop them evicting tenants, increasing the rent and then getting new tenants in to pay hugely inflated prices.

So, another piece of legislation was brought in to stop them doing that, unless... they wanted to either demolish their properties use them to house members of their families.

Two fantastic loopholes, I'm sure you'll agree. (I bet you can see where this is going now).

Last June, we were evicted from our villa due to impending demolition. The villa is still there. At the end of March this year (at the same time as our wedding) we are now on the cards to be evicted from our new place! Our landlord has pulled the family trump card as his son needs to live in our villa after his wedding. The same landlord owns all the houses on my street, one of which is currently lying empty.

Once the Omanis start their nonsense on you, you're buggered. The system backs them all the way. All we can do is bend over and take it where the sun don't shine...again.