Just as London comes out to play with the arrival of summer, so Dubai turns just a little sad as the hot season comes on, and residents begin to prepare for life inside for a while.
The outside restaurants and cafes on the Marina are slowly winding down, and the ones still providing outdoor service are doing so thanks only to enormous fans, a practice that I'm sure cannot be very eco-friendly. Even these will not be able to combat the fierce heat of high summer. It is airconditioned life behind glass for the next few months.
Over at the Dubai International Financial Centre, the entertainment and recreation will also go inside for the summer months. That's a shame, as there has been a real buzz to the district around the Gate building in recent months.
Maybe it's the arrival of new restaurants (with Cedric Toussaint's La Petite Maison as surely the pick of the bunch); maybe it's the expats who have left places such as Manama, Cairo and Damascus and who are enjoying the tranquillity of Dubai; maybe it's another sign of economic and financial revival.
Whatever, the DIFC has taken on a real feeling of open-air cafe culture, appropriate for a working financial hub. Many of the cafe habitues have laptops and tablets, working away on important matters; and all are engaging in that essential activity of a financial market: exchanging the vital information that promotes liquidity.
Not the Dubai International Food Court any more.
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So what looks to have been my final evening of outside recreation, at least until October, came with the Champions League final on Saturday.
Our table at the Jumeirah Beach Hotel was on the edge of the swimming pool, and caught just a little Gulf breeze every now and again, but it wasn't enough to lift the humid fug. Shepherd's pie, normally the JBH's piece de resistance, was not a good idea in those conditions.
The table consisted of bankers and financial people, a PR executive and a chap who works in private equity in Dubai.
I've read his investment reports regularly, and am always struck by the downright pessimism of them. So when he forecast Barcelona 4, Manchester United 1, I thought he was just stuck in Cassandra mode, and took no notice.
Others were more optimistic for the English champions, with one brave soul insisting 3-2 to United.
But even at half-time, after United had managed to claw their way back in it, you had a feeling that Barca, and Messi in particular, had an awful lot in reserve. And so it proved. It ended 3-1, but could have been double that. I think Barcelona actually began to feel a little embarrassed at their superiority, and eased off in the last 15 minutes.
Anyway, my Cassandra acquaintance was suitably pleased with himself. "Now that's how to spend hundreds of millions of euros and make a decent team out of it, not like boring old Chelsea," he concluded. I had to agree.
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If you haven't seen the movie Casino Jack starring Kevin Spacey, I advise you to catch it as soon as possible.
It tells you more about American politics and business than a lifetime's subscription to The Wall Street Journal ever could.
Based on a true story, as they say, it has Spacey as Jack Abramoff, a Washington lobbyist who cuts corners and bends the rules for money, justifying his behaviour as a rebellion against "mediocrity" in all its forms.
"I will not allow the world I touch to be vanilla," he proclaims to himself in the mirror. "And, oh yeah, I work out every day."
If only half of the film is true, lobbying in the US is a cut-throat world of bribery, cajoling and contact-peddling aimed at passing laws favourable to big business.
The "lobby" means something rather different in the UK: the entrance to the House of Commons where politicians used to anonymously brief journalists. Plenty of opportunity for scandal there, too.
In the UAE, it probably just means the foyer of a hotel.
Casino Jack's world falls apart when he tries to defraud some native Americans and gets caught up in gangsterism and murder. I asked a real-life Washington lobbyist, who does a lot of work in the Middle East and enjoys the good things of life, how realistic the film is.
"It's all a Hollywood fantasy," he said. "We can't behave like that now. There are laws you know."
Then he added, with a wink: "But I do work out every day."
