The tinkling sleigh bells are drowned out by screaming sirens. It’s the last Friday before Christmas – or, as it has recently come to be known – black-eye Friday. All across Britain, office parties spew inebriated revellers onto fairy-lit high-streets. Unfortunately, these alcohol-fuelled seasonal excesses, all too frequently, end in tears. This is the busiest night of the year for the UK’s ambulance crews, and Friday, December 19 – black-eye Friday, 2014 – was the busiest night since records began.
As an Abu Dhabi-based British expatriate, I become something of a cultural anthropologist on my visits back to the UK.
On my most recent visit, I witnessed the traditional festival variously known as: Christmas, Christmas or, as some now refer to it, Excess-mas. There are many positive platitudes parroted about the festive season: “It’s a time for family and friends” or “It’s a time for peace and goodwill to all mankind." Only, increasingly, it isn’t.
Once upon a time the magnificent, skyline-punctuating churches and cathedrals were the architectural heart of the festival, but they have now largely ceded ground to shopping malls.
During the festive season, these centres of commerce stay open later and longer, facilitating a vigil of consumption unparalleled in the history of humanity.
Special offers abound, assuaging post-purchase guilt and providing a kind of quantitative easing for the soul. Everywhere gifts are sought and bought with the indomitable determination of the damned. Economic downturn, deficit, recession, what recession?
The supermarkets teem with frenzied shoppers, panic-buying food items like they’ve just received a hurricane warning – everyone is advised to stock-up on essential and non-essential items.
It’s true, some shops did close on Christmas day, but even those reopened within 24 short hours, trumpeting further reductions and more unmissable sales.
It’s easy to go on and on – like a modern-day Ebenezer Scrooge – bellyaching about the over-commercialisation of a holy day.
It’s equally easy to have a pop at vapid, vacuous, consumerism. But in truth, there is nothing overly problematic with either of these. Commercially hijacking a holiday or shopping until you drop are, for sure, the lesser of three evils. The real problem, the real evil, is debt.
We bumped and bullied our way through Black Friday in the run up to Christmas. Then, thankfully, most of us survived black-eye Friday relatively unscathed. But now, looming on the horizon is Blue Monday, the day of doom, gloom and debt.
Slightly apocryphal, Blue Monday was concocted by a psychologist, Cliff Arnall, as part of a marketing ploy aimed at selling winter-sun holidays. Predicted to occur towards the end of January (the Monday of the last full week in January), Blue Monday is touted as the unhappiest day of the year – a great time to escape the UK for warmer climates perhaps?
Factored into the Blue Monday prediction/algorithm is the anticipated arrival of credit card bills and other debts associated with Christmas excess.
Blue Monday calculations aside (this year it’s January 19), debt is always a recipe for dysphoria, as well as being a huge risk factor for suicide. The festive season, it seems, has become associated with debt, despair and hopelessness.
So how can we make Christmas happy again, or at least prevent it from becoming massively depressogenic? Less excess would be a great start.
Rather than indulging too much – gym membership sales spike in January too – a new festive tradition we might attempt to cultivate is a conscious effort to eat and drink in moderation, while simultaneously feeding the needy. Perhaps we could also begin wishing each other a “debt-free Christmas” while greatly lowering our gift-getting expectations. I know one family that made a pact to only gift each other something thoughtful, with a price tag of under £1 (Dh6).
The UK Christmas experience has come to be characterised by record levels of accident and emergency admissions and record levels of consumer debt. I fear, if the celebrations continue on their current trajectory, Christmas will eat itself.
Justin Thomas is an associate professor of Psychology at Zayed University and author of Psychological Well-Being in the Gulf States
On Twitter: @DrJustinThomas
HEADLINE HERE
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Citadel: Honey Bunny first episode
Directors: Raj & DK
Stars: Varun Dhawan, Samantha Ruth Prabhu, Kashvi Majmundar, Kay Kay Menon
Rating: 4/5
Nayanthara: Beyond The Fairy Tale
Starring: Nayanthara, Vignesh Shivan, Radhika Sarathkumar, Nagarjuna Akkineni
Director: Amith Krishnan
Rating: 3.5/5
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F1 2020 calendar
March 15 - Australia, Melbourne; March 22 - Bahrain, Sakhir; April 5 - Vietnam, Hanoi; April 19 - China, Shanghai; May 3 - Netherlands, Zandvoort; May 20 - Spain, Barcelona; May 24 - Monaco, Monaco; June 7 - Azerbaijan, Baku; June 14 - Canada, Montreal; June 28 - France, Le Castellet; July 5 - Austria, Spielberg; July 19 - Great Britain, Silverstone; August 2 - Hungary, Budapest; August 30 - Belgium, Spa; September 6 - Italy, Monza; September 20 - Singapore, Singapore; September 27 - Russia, Sochi; October 11 - Japan, Suzuka; October 25 - United States, Austin; November 1 - Mexico City, Mexico City; November 15 - Brazil, Sao Paulo; November 29 - Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi.
UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
Getting there
Flydubai flies direct from Dubai to Tbilisi from Dh1,025 return including taxes
Sinopharm vaccine explained
The Sinopharm vaccine was created using techniques that have been around for decades.
“This is an inactivated vaccine. Simply what it means is that the virus is taken, cultured and inactivated," said Dr Nawal Al Kaabi, chair of the UAE's National Covid-19 Clinical Management Committee.
"What is left is a skeleton of the virus so it looks like a virus, but it is not live."
This is then injected into the body.
"The body will recognise it and form antibodies but because it is inactive, we will need more than one dose. The body will not develop immunity with one dose," she said.
"You have to be exposed more than one time to what we call the antigen."
The vaccine should offer protection for at least months, but no one knows how long beyond that.
Dr Al Kaabi said early vaccine volunteers in China were given shots last spring and still have antibodies today.
“Since it is inactivated, it will not last forever," she said.
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%3Cp%3EAuthor%3A%20Diaa%20Jubaili%3C%2Fp%3E%0A%3Cp%3EPages%3A%20180%3C%2Fp%3E%0A%3Cp%3EPublisher%3A%20Deep%20Vellum%20Publishing%C2%A0%3C%2Fp%3E%0A
Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.
“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”
The Bio
Favourite vegetable: “I really like the taste of the beetroot, the potatoes and the eggplant we are producing.”
Holiday destination: “I like Paris very much, it’s a city very close to my heart.”
Book: “Das Kapital, by Karl Marx. I am not a communist, but there are a lot of lessons for the capitalist system, if you let it get out of control, and humanity.”
Musician: “I like very much Fairuz, the Lebanese singer, and the other is Umm Kulthum. Fairuz is for listening to in the morning, Umm Kulthum for the night.”
Top 10 most polluted cities
- Bhiwadi, India
- Ghaziabad, India
- Hotan, China
- Delhi, India
- Jaunpur, India
- Faisalabad, Pakistan
- Noida, India
- Bahawalpur, Pakistan
- Peshawar, Pakistan
- Bagpat, India
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