The Back Beach – Photo by Ivan on Unsplash
Trips to the beach as a child used to smell of industrial white spirit. Like a heady, petrol-infused candle you might find in Shell’s corporate gift shop.
We’d come back from our weekly trip to the ‘Back Beach’ (because it was behind the airport), a short drive along the ‘Back Road’ (because it ran behind the motorway), past the ‘Back Shop’ (because it was behind where we lived) and our dad would make us stand at the ‘Back Door’ (because, well, that’s pretty standard nomenclature).
My sister and I would wait there patiently while Dad went to get a rag and a bottle of clear liquid plastered with orange triangles and skulls to get splodges of sticky plasticine-like black stuff off our legs. I thought that every child in the world was going through this post-beach ritual of having your legs buffed clean whilst trying not to get dizzy on fumes. They weren’t.
We lived in Muscat, Oman, and that black stuff was tar. Oil that had sloshed overboard from the ever-present sea tankers on the horizon as they sailed out of the Gulf of Oman and off to power the rest of the world. Accepting Dalmatian-tarred legs after splashing in the sea is like accepting your dad has to dust cocaine off your knees every time you leave the playground. Or that your mum has to hose away the film of kerosene in your hair after your walk home from school under a flight path. (Must remember to hose down Arden tonight.)
It’s a good example of how each child, and therefore each generation, comes to accept the world they live in – and how that plays into a ‘shifting baseline’ and a distorted perception of what’s ‘normal’ about life on earth, particularly the natural world.
Bugs on the car windscreen? I couldn’t even tell you if I have screen wash loaded.
I long to go back to Oman but we haven’t been away, away on holiday for a while. No airline would let me take my required litre of flammable white spirit for the beach but mainly – I’m feeling more and more uncomfortable about flying. I fear the moment is approaching when I have to tell Rob that we have a locomotive donkey tied up in the garden and the Golf is now a hay shed. (My mum would say that’s not a far stretch from how I use the car now.)
I’ve had first-leg experience with oil and can attest it should stay in the ground. So, I’ve had to find a new way to travel. Last summer I went to the Bakhtiari Mountains in Persia with Vita Sackville-West, South India with Michael Wood, revisited the Rocky Mountains with Isabella Bird (here’s last month’s Substack on her) – and then finally, back to Oman with Jan Morris.
I thought I knew all there was to know about Oman – but what I realised was, I knew about Oman as it has been in my short lifetime. It’s next to ‘shifting baseline syndrome’ in the compendium of human maladies. Let’s call it ‘own era arrogance’.
But, if you’re not familiar with the country, let me get you up to speed on what I confidently knew…
Oman is the most influential country most people have never heard of. (Unless you’re good at pub quizzes and know that it’s the only country in the world that starts with the letter ‘O’, or have been in my company for more than five minutes.) If that part of the Middle East is the Ugg to Italy’s knee-high stiletto, then Oman is the ball of the foot to the toes – with Yemen to its heel. Guidebooks eschew this description in favour of ‘the jewel in the crown’ or ‘the Switzerland’ of the Middle East on account of its beauty and neutral (but not passive) stance on tetchy political matters.
Now, I’ve mentioned politics, tankers and Yemen. Current events give you an idea of its strategic geographic position for anyone interested in the safe passage of oil out of places like the U.A.E and Saudi Arabia. On a daily basis, about a fifth of the world's total oil consumption passes through the narrow Strait of Hormuz to the north of Oman. On the other side of the strait is Iran. It matters to a lot of people that those waters are peaceful.
And peace has been the name of the game for Oman. The late Sultan Qaboos bin Said reigned over Oman in a benign dictatorship for close to 50 years. Proof that you don’t have to become a bad guy when you get a taste of power, through ‘quiet diplomacy’ he brought nations together and brokered deals including a historic peace deal between Iran and the USA. If Roger Federer was an Arabian Sultan, you’d get something close to Sultan Qaboos. (And his successor, Sultan Haitham seems to be carrying on the torch.)
I only once caught a glimpse of Qaboos driving his maroon ‘95 Mercedes in a dusty old part of Muscat near the palace – but he was an ever-present figure in my childhood. His photo hung in every school, public building and shop (albeit by decree) and in the run-up to Oman’s National Day, thousands of empty photo frames on every other lamp post along the motorway would be filled with his majestic image.
I know what school he went to (Sandhurst), his favourite instrument (bagpipes) and his favourite colour (Wedgewood Blue) so I feel like I know the guy to the point I could have guessed his password. Peace be upon his departed soul.
It’s what Oman was like before the ‘Qaboosian’ era (before my era) that was unchartered territory for me. So, I threw my rucksack into the back of a metaphorical pick-up truck and took my place alongside Jan Morris, author of ‘Sultan in Oman’, as they travelled in convoy across Oman with Sultan Said bin Taimur – Qaboos’ father who he overthrew in a bloodless coup in 1970 with a little help from the British.
Let me touch on that coup briefly because even at the time few knew about it. In 1970, the Western world and its newspapers were focused on the Vietnam War – but there was another communist uprising that was far more precarious to world peace. Backed by the Soviet Union, there was a rebellion stirring in Oman's southern Dhofar region. Remember that bit about Oman being critical for the flow of oil? Well, the Brits cared about the oil and had little faith in Bin Taimur who had become paranoid and controlling. So they sent their best officers to Muscat and kept quiet.
Back to 15 years earlier in 1955, with Jan Morris at his side, Sultan Said bin Taimur embarked on a long journey across Oman. Whilst the rest of the world was busy erecting the first golden arches and launching ITV – Oman was still medieval and had no agreement on who was ruler or even where its borders lay. Mysterious ancient tribes inhabited caves and goddamn cheetahs still lived there. I know, think they’re African? Lions were found in the wild in Arabia until 1975. Shifting baselines.
The country was even called Muscat and Oman then. And the journey Sultan Taimur – who was quite optimistic and progressive before power got him in a spin – was about to embark on was to establish his rule amongst the villages and tribes. From verdant Salalah that catches the tip of the monsoon in the south of the country, up and across the barren ‘Empty Quarter’ where little survives – and then through the rugged mountains which run along the collarbone of Oman and back along the long stretch of coast to Muscat.
At least as it seemed then, the trip was successful and they were waved through ceremoniously. (There were a few tribal leaders who would eventually have other plans, but at that point, they were waiting for their order of Post-it notes to arrive. They didn’t dare plot without them.)
It doesn’t make for a very eventful story. It was tea ceremony after tea ceremony. Yet I was gripped because of how much Oman-then tells us about where we are globally-today, and why.
Not much else was happening so Jan Morris had a stark centre-of-the-sun-white backdrop against which to observe oil companies and how oil (or the mere hope of oil) pulled at every string in the creation of the nation they were witnessing. Whilst the Sultan sat on the floor with the village leaders (called ‘walis’, which seems unfair) and sipped tea with provincial charm, there was an invisible pendulum of global proportions swinging above their heads. The USA held the end of the rope on the pump jacks in Saudi Arabia – and Britain had made their bets on the potential of oil and subsequent riches in Oman.
Morris writes, “Places inhabited by oil companies, however intrinsically prosaic, always manage to develop a peculiar opulent magic. You sense it equally in the magnate’s house in Los Angeles, with its tall languid dogs, its brimming bar and its minks; in the offices in London, poised discreetly over a department store, with an atmosphere of good cigars and panelling; in the fields of Iraq, where the company guesthouse offers you bath salts and a new toothbrush wrapped in cellophane… Oil companies not only have money, but seem to enjoy spending it. Their house magazines are heavy with colour pictures on shiny paper. Their aeroplanes most willingly give you lifts. The writers, filmmakers and photographers they employ scour the earth for material that often seems to have little immediate bearing on the functions of the industry.”
If you’ve experienced the momentary thrill of complimentary bath salts and toothbrushes, imagine being offered a flight or a Rolex – or an art commission. It’s a spell and with combined record-breaking profits of nearly $200bn across the biggest oil firms in 2022, they’re not running out of fairy dust. More than ever, we need principled leaders who can’t be bought – because it’s not free money, is it? There is a cost that amounts to global boiling, and we pick up the bill.
But back to Oman, what would happen if they did find a wealth of oil? Until then, they had only struck water searching for the sticky black stuff.
Morris muses that there would be social clubs, technical schools and ‘innumerable respectful portraits of the Sultan’. Check, check and check. There would be ‘well-dressed Muscatis with grand posts and small responsibilities’ and expatriate communities of ‘gossipy families, whose children would play with wooden trains in scratchy gardens and whose wives might conceivably (though this might be stretching fancy too far) bring out heir testy mothers from Esher to visit them for Christmas.’
It’s painfully close to the bone.
Morris continues, ‘Nor could Muscat hope to escape the purely physical changes. Oil and the money it brings have a frightening capacity for warping the psychology of peoples. Before very long, if things went according to practice, the Muscatis and Omanis would begin to lose their old Arab courtliness, their flowery manners and their taste for battle and their shuttered simplicity; and a trace of boastful greedy arrogance would enter their conversation’.
Thankfully, that didn’t happen.
Omanis didn’t become arrogant or boastful. Perhaps, because, in the end, they didn’t find as much oil as they’d hoped for. But perhaps it was because when Qaboos eventually took over from his father (who subsequently lived in exile in a suite at The Dorchester in London) he modelled what it meant to be Omani – kind, respectful, generous, tolerant and understated. He adopted a policy of ‘quiet diplomacy’ on the world stage. And unlike in other places across the Middle East, like Iraq and Egypt, people didn’t have to demand where the money from oil went.
Even throughout the civil war that spanned his first years in power, he invested in the country to take Oman into the modern era with roads, hospitals, schools, universities and even a fried chicken shop franchise suspiciously called… Penguin. Qaboos brought stability and the Omani people along with him in conversational, detailed addresses. And whilst he had palaces around the world, yachts and a fleet of aircraft, his grave was decidedly humble as he said he came from the earth and would simply go back to the earth.
I’m not going to launch into a nuanced thesis about his rule and methods for that would take a 400+ page book. There are questions and challenges. But there’s an interesting and important parallel between Oman and where you and I are now that I’ll leave you with.
Qaboos knew that Oman would prosper with stability – just as humans have prospered over the 10,000 years we’ve had a stable climate that delivered reliable seasons and therefore the ability to grow crops with some degree of certainty.
(This ‘Holocene’ period occurred accidentally, but not without cause. The natural world has evolved into a self-regulating harmony with the creation and capture of carbon – and as you probably well know, we’ve tipped the balance and are on the brink of collapse if we don’t reduce carbon in the atmosphere.)
I’ve heard people argue against the ‘we need stability’ argument quoting that great innovations and societal change have come through war. But it misses the point. These innovations came about despite instability. They happened because of urgency. (The Covid pandemic proved this with everything from vaccines to test-and-trace technology and unprecedented, speedily-implemented policies.)
And now we find ourselves in a (relatively) stable world, with an urgent existential crisis we know is coming (and you could say is already here). It should be the perfect condition to catapult us through change and into a new era.
But with vested interests in the old world built on the back of oil (Hey Boris, who’s paying for your holiday this year? Yo Rishi, is that a Rolex?) it’s not being treated by those at the helm as a crisis. There is no urgency. So talk about it. Make it urgent.
Don’t worry about killing the vibe at a party. People don’t think it’s a problem because no one else is panicking. It’s like looking at the air steward when there’s turbulence and if they don’t look like the plane is about to go down, I’m alright. Well, bloody panic. It’s more than turbulence if we don’t do something about it. Go there, because our leaders aren’t.
What I wouldn’t give for a sensible leader with vision, grace and heart – who’s read a book or two on climate change to navigate us through the next era.
And in more prosaic matters, what do you think I should call the donkey out back?
Homework Club
Curiosity stoked? Here’s some further reading, scrolling and marvelling at Oman…
For an introduction to Oman that’s closer to the travel guides, there’s a brilliant Anthony Bourdain Parts Unknown podcast episode (and there are more field notes on his website here).
You can read the archived New York Times article (for free) announcing the coup in 1970 and Oman’s entry to the world stage
The publisher Eland saves travelogues from going out of print, and you can still buy ‘Sultan in Oman’ by Jan Morris in good bookstores (and WoB).
I completely neglected to talk about the natural beauty of Oman. Take a look at the official tourist Instagram account Experience Oman and you’ll see why this was an unforgivable mistake.
And finally, if you’re a door-phile like me, Doors of Oman is a good place to knock.
Nice one! You’ve shifted my baseline on Oman 🇴🇲. Thanks. (The flag emoji was auto-suggested. Nice flag.)