Ding Dong Merrily Dubai

The title is shamelessly plagiarised from The Sun who are praising Dubai for showing how to celebrate Christmas. Really they are just launching a festive jingoistic campaign and don't mention that Dubai is stuffed full of expats doing their Christmas shopping. Someone said to me that Dubai is a Muslim country until there is a business reason not to be (like the Duty Free warehouse, the pork counter at the supermarket ...) and that rings true most of the time.

Anyway, our tree is up and the festive season has kicked off with Lucy in a carol concert at Rainbows. Tonight we're off to do our Christmas shopping at Dragonmart - friends and relatives can expect a few 'Made in China' labels in their stockings.

It has been a terrible week to be an Englishman abroad following the most abject defeat I can ever remember in the Ashes. I was depressed about it, but how much harder for my friend Jim in Australia. Whilst looking for something to cheer himself up on the net he came across this defining what it is to be an Englishman, written by George Santayana, a Spaniard, whilst in England in 1922.

Instinctively the Englishman is no missionary, no conqueror. He prefers the country to the town, and home to foreign parts. He is rather glad and relieved if only natives will remain natives and strangers strangers, and at a comfortable distance from himself. Yet outwardly he is most hospitable and accepts almost anybody for the time being; he travels and conquers without a settled design, because he has the instinct of exploration. His adventures are all external; they change him so little that he is not afraid of them. He carries his English weather in his heart wherever he goes, and it becomes a cool spot in the desert, and a steady and sane oracle amongst all the deliriums of mankind. Never since the heroic days of Greece has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master. It will be a black day for the human race when scientific blackguards, conspirators, churls, and fanatics manage to supplant him.

Jim goes on to say, in his own words, "An Englishman in exile has roots in the old country which are deep and true and in these difficult times it is important to return to them for sustenance; oh, and don't forget to pull your hat down over your ears and wear sunglasses, go out after dark only and take the phone off the hook till it all blows over, sometime in 2009 the mocking laughter will die away I think..." Amen to that.