13 August 2026 · Dubai, UAE
25.2048° N · 55.2708° E · UTC+4
Day of life: 15,210 · Day in Dubai: 1,476

The second shift

For almost two years our family had an extra timetable. After an ordinary working day Ira went to university. Several evenings a week — lectures, seminars, texts, deadlines, exams. And I stayed home with the children, dinners, homework, dogs, bedtimes, and all that infrastructure without which no master’s degree in a family life simply works.

That is how Middlesex University Dubai quietly fitted itself into our own geography of the city. Not as a place we sometimes drive past, but as another point on the map of the last two years.

The obligatory photos with the diploma in front of Middlesex University Dubai

Law after work

The most interesting thing in this story is that Ira did not go off to study instead of work. She studied after it.

By day — legal work, contracts, negotiations, endless documents and decisions. In the evening — law again, only now in the lecture room of a British university. Sometimes it seemed rather strange to finish a lawyer’s working day of one’s own free will and then go spend several more hours studying jurisprudence. But that, apparently, is what people look like who actually like what they do.

And so it went for almost two years.

Master of Laws

Now that distance is over. Ira has a Master of Laws — an LLM from Middlesex University Dubai, the Dubai campus of the British Middlesex University. That folder she is holding in the photograph in fact weighs noticeably more than a few sheets of paper: in it are hundreds of evenings, pages read, papers submitted, and hours that had to be cut, quite literally, out of an already full life.

For me this is also a very Dubai story. We came here to build a new life, and gradually the city grows such points: houses, the children’s schools, offices, neighbourhoods, people, routes. Now on that map there is also a university from which Ira walked out a Master of Laws.

One more coordinate

I like measuring life in dates, days and coordinates. They turn the abstract “someday” into a perfectly concrete point.

Today one such point appeared for Ira.

Almost two years of evening study are over. The diploma is in hand. Irina Nevskaya — Master of Laws.

And I can officially consider that I have successfully finished my own part of the master’s — the evening sitting with three children!