"Sure I care who you are"

On Thursday evening I went to Red Sea Mall, the 242,200 square metre 'largest glass covered area in Saudi Arabia' and probably the only building I've ever been in that contains a theme park, a bowling alley and a mosque.

I'm not sure how I convinced myself that a shopping mall was a worthwhile place to visit, especially as I didn't particularly want to buy anything, but I took a giant siesta in the middle of the day and woke up too late to go to a museum. I walked around the mall for about an hour, taking in the space-age consumer beehive, thinking that I had wasted my day off, and listening to the first skull disco compilation - just the kind of music to accompany a futuristic dystopia and some self-indulgent ennui.

At about half eleven I left and started looking for a taxi outside, and the first I found was driven by a skinny guy who looked about sixteen. He noticed my headphones as soon as I got in, and as we left the carpark he swerved accross the road while trying to reach the passenger glove compartment and get out a Tupac compilation he wanted to play me. He was quite a big hip hop fan, and we were able to spin out a fairly sizeable conversation that consisted of one of us naming an artist and the other saying 'yes' or 'good', then maybe singing a line or two from a song. Not exactly Oscar Wilde, but given that I've yet to make any friends outside of work it was good enough for me. After we'd chatted for a while he asked if I wanted to 'go fast', and suddenly I was in one of the cars that I normally stare at, shocked, when going around Jeddah. Luchman and I weaved in and out of traffic, pumping 90s gangster rap and attempting to overcome the language barrier.

It turned out he was twenty seven, not sixteen, his parents were from Yemen and that he lived alone near my hotel. I got the impression that he was as pleased to make friends with an English person as I was to befriend an Arab, and when he invited me back to his flat I could see no good reason not to. We changed our course and Luchman told me I was now travelling with him as a friend and I wouldn't have to pay. The closest I'd come to making a friend up to this point was when a sweaty Egyptian man had starting hitting on me in the Old Town by forcibly holding my hand and telling me he loved me, so this was a massive step up.

On the way to his house we stopped off at a fast food place to pick up some chicken giblets for his cat, and it was around this time that I noticed the T-shirt Luchman was wearing. It was white, with the words 'SURE I CARE WHO YOU ARE' in blue capitals. Had I seen this on anyone else I would have assumed it was intended as catty sarcasm ('sure, like I care who you are'), but on Luchman it had to be sincere. We went back to his flat, a tiny windowless room with a TV in one corner and no furniture except a mat on the ground, listened to a Bob Marley mix and played with Tweety, the cat. Luchman continued to break my heart by telling me how a car had hit Tweety's mother when she was a kitten, and after being refused help at the hospital he had taken her in himself.

Hearing 'Redemption Song' for the first time in ages, I was struck by the fact that the music I've been listening to in my relative isolation has been getting more and more inhuman and abstract as I've allowed the introvert in me to take hold. A couple of weeks ago I devoted over 5 hours in 3 days to listening to Wolfgang Voigt's ambient/drone opus 'Nah und Fern', and the night before I met Luchman I'd gone to bed listening to Stockhausen's 'Kontakte', which is essentially a collection of confrontational electronic noises set to an atonal piano accompaniment. Kevin Drumm's 'Sheer Hellish Miasma', an album of music perfectly described by its name, had also been doing the rounds on my mp3 player.

I stand by all of these, but a song that so clearly came from an actual person, heard in the presence of another actual person, for a moment made them seem completely stupid. It was quite a strange realisation; nearly two months of listening alone on headphones had all but made me forget that music could be a communal activity, and the things I'd started listening to had changed as a result. Suddenly music that you couldn't sing along to didn't seem worth listening to at all.

We left Luchman's flat to go to a Cafe owned by a friend of his, and stayed there until about 3am watching arab music channels and drinking (orange juice). I was exhausted at work the next day, but it was an exhaustion familiar from university: having fun is once again encroaching upon my ability to work. This is a development I'm extremely pleased about.