It’s a strange thought, but if ghosts could be put to a useful purpose I bet every stretch of the highways would greet oncoming drivers with the groans and screams of all those who have perished in accidents caused by speeding and reckless driving.

A car that’s going too fast could be as treacherous and recalcitrant as a wild animal might be. The risk of mixing petrol with bad judgment is appalling. It’s a pity most people in the UAE don’t realise this.

They pat the bonnets of their SUVs and say admiringly: "It makes 150km an hour feel like nothing." What these heavy-footed incurables don’t know is that 150 kilometres an hour is almost 140 feet a second – a speed which puts a viciously unjustified responsibility on brakes and human reflexes.

For a while I suspected that Mrs Farooqui had a secret vault and that she had been squirrelling away a major chunk of the money I gave her on the first of every month to run the house. I had my reasons.

In the past, not too distant, she’d manage with half the damage. Not any more. These days she just haemorrhages money – squeezing it out of my pocket every few days and then not satisfactorily explaining where it all went.

It took a visit to the neighbourhood grocery the other day to allay whatever suspicion I had been harbouring against the good Mrs Farooqui, but the experience was more enriching than visiting the library. The hike hit me like a sack of rice but the visit was worth my while.

A young student living in the UAE recently presented me with a quandary. Her parents were born in the US, she was born and raised for some time in Brazil. Then her father uprooted the family again and they have lived in three different countries, before coming to Dubai.

Where do I belong, she asked me.

I knew immediately that this would be an extremely difficult question to answer.

As a young working mother with two pre-school children I was often caught between a rock and a hard place.

My mother – my rock – a shift working registered nurse who raised five children encouraged me to juggle work and home and be financially independent. My mother-in-law, a homemaker who also raised five children, gave me a hard time with her constant criticism of my housekeeping and parenting methods.

I’m glad I listened to my mother, but my mother-in-law also had a valid point.

My adult son called me last weekend. He was down in the dumps. He had his mobile phone stolen at what he described as a "dodgy party" and he didn’t know what to do.

He didn’t really care about the phone – although it cost me a pretty packet – but he was upset about losing the phone numbers of people who have been his friends since middle school.

Like most mothers, I lectured him to stop the self-pity, buy a new phone, get a replacement chip and move on.