Three concrete needles on a headland in the gulf, two of them skewering blue spheres clad in eight thousand glazed ceramic discs that shift colour with the light. They are water tanks dressed as a monument, built in 1979 when the country decided it needed a symbol, and the upper sphere holds a revolving restaurant at a hundred and twenty-three metres. Shelled during the Iraqi occupation and reopened since, they are how Kuwait signs its name.