Seven am, break­fast time — a late break­fast by the Kingdom’s stan­dards. Already the sun is high in the sky and beat­ing down fiercely on all those who dare to step out­side. The tem­per­a­ture is ris­ing into the fourties, and a weath­er­man with British stan­dards would be start­ing to describe the ‘burn time’ in min­utes rather than hours.

Day One is a day of wait­ing — about eight hours of wait­ing. With our passes expected to arrive at three in the after­noon, there’s lit­tle to do but con­tem­plate how hor­rific each recre­ational option might be. To swim in the pool, almost instantly wash­ing off what­ever sun-cream you apply? To play ten­nis, and sweat about a pint a minute until by the end of the set you resem­ble noth­ing so much as a prune in a t-shirt? To go to the gym, and be out of the sun but sweat buck­ets just the same? The choices are end­less, and end­lessly unap­peal­ing. Instead, we sit in our cool dark dining-room, lap­tops out, cod­ing. Work­ing. Some­how, that seemed like the best option.

Noon. Not two weeks past mid­sum­mer and scarcely a few hun­dred miles from the Tropic of Can­cer, the pale pink build­ings on the com­pound cast just a few inches of shadow. The air here is dry, not like the humid­ity of a July evening in Bahrain, and the empty sky makes the light and the heat all the more fierce.

Inside, behind the closed cur­tains with the air-con buzzing, a cup of tea and a Mars bar in hand, this could be any house in any coun­try of any cli­mate. But one step beyond the front door, out into day­light, and nature makes it abun­dantly clear that you are an aber­ra­tion. You have shel­ter and run­ning water and a shop to buy imported choco­late, but this is a desert. You have built a wall around it and called it home, but up in the sky a trillion-ton fusion reac­tion cares noth­ing for humanity.

The breeze picks up in the after­noon, com­ing onshore, but it has lit­tle effect. Even head­ing across the har­bour at twenty knots doesn’t help, because by mid-afternoon the tem­per­a­ture is reach­ing for the mid-fifties and the wind is just a hairdryer blast­ing you with air hot­ter than your body’s thirty-seven.

At our des­ti­na­tion, reek­ing of sweat and diesel, the gen­er­a­tor has bro­ken down and we’re doing what we can on an hour of UPS bat­tery. The tem­per­a­ture in the office is a refresh­ing thirty, but as the room fills with peo­ple and com­put­ers splut­ter to life, it soon starts to rise. I drink cans of Pepsi from cool­ers shipped over on the boat, because no gen­er­a­tor means no fridge and no air-con, and the cans are the only thing we can use to lower our tem­per­a­ture. It’s still not enough to make me like Pepsi.

And when our hour of power (or at least of 240V sup­ply) is done, we’re off home again for a long, long shower, as big a din­ner as our stom­achs can han­dle, and the promise of doing it all again tomorrow.