With a record number of five Middle Eastern countries qualifying for the 21st Fifa World Cup tournament (Tunisia, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Iran), fans across the region are feeling the football mania.

Bars and clubs all over the city are showing the matches, and some huge fan zones have popped up, some of which can hold thousands of people. Two of the city’s top cinemas are also showing the action on the big screen, with popcorn and prizes to boot (excuse the pun!).

I, meanwhile, am still working out how I can watch it at home on the TV.

At work today, footie fans begged our IT guy to download a VPN so we could watch England play. Alas it wasn’t to be, so a chap sitting nearby kept us updated with the score as reported by Google. It played out something like this:

“It’s 2-0.”

Me: “Really? Wow!”

I work with mostly males, so I leaned forward towards my female friend opposite me and whispered: “Who are we playing?”

“Panama,” she replied confidently, before changing tack. “But don’t get too excited. It’ll all go wrong now.”

“Another goal! 3-0.”

Me: “No way?”

Before this news could be processed, it was 4-0 – then 5-0, and only half -term. “You’ve got to be kidding!” we cried. It was only the fifth time in World Cup history that a team had scored 5+ goals in the first half of a match. Was Russia fiddling with the news again?

I even started feeling sorry for Panama, who must have been extraordinarily bad.

The final score has to be recorded for prosperity, and what better image to feature than Dubai’s very own tallest score board…

Ten years is a long time to wait for your favourite sandwich store to open. In that time, my children have grown from babies to pre-teens, I’ve seen friends come and go, we’ve moved house several times, I’ve gone back to work, and, if I look in the mirror, I see that a few more fine lines and sets of crow’s feet have made an appearance on my face. I certainly don’t remember inviting those bad-boys to the party.

Anyway … finally, the day arrived – Pret A Manger opened in Dubai, in a place I can visit without a boarding pass. You see, in 2016, the sandwich chain did a rather cruel thing – they opened a store at the airport’s Terminal 1, making their sandwiches, toasties, treats and organic coffees available only to travellers using that particular terminal (which happens to not be the Emirates terminal). I almost travelled on another budget airline deliberately just to grab a Pret at Terminal 1.

With that store unreachable, I instead made do with begging the pilot husband to bring me back sandwiches every time he passed through Heathrow. This was a good stop-gap arrangement, and my heart soared every time I opened the fridge and saw that my favourite tuna and cucumber baguette had arrived overnight.

Now. Wooohooo! All I have to do is go down the road, to Dubai Mall, where the newly opened Pret is located on the ground floor, with its famous star sign, chrome furniture and freshly prepared offerings – just like in London. Happy days!

See you there for lunch!

I had two things in mind for December: we were NOT going to do the Elf on the Shelf, and – for the first time in a decade – I was going to put up a real Christmas tree.

December 1st draws closer, and the day before, Son2 starts talking excitedly about the Elf.

He knows it’s me. He even calls it the Elf/Mummy. But that doesn’t dampen his enthusiasm over the little fella’s arrival.

“Where do you think the Elf/Mummy will appear?” he asks, pinning me with an intent, knowing stare.

I can’t wriggle out of it. “I don’t know,” I say with a shrug. “Erm … You’ll find out in the morning.”

My certainty that this was the year I was NOT going to spend every night from 1-23 December moving a foot-tall plush doll around at midnight evaporated. (For those not in the festive loop, the Elf is sent by Santa Claus to check whether children are being “naughty or nice” – s/he flies off to the North Pole every night, and reappears every morning in a surprising new location in the house.)

Why can’t I shelve this elf?

“It’s okay,” I tell myself at midnight that night. “One more year of Elf/Mummy will be fun … Never mind that what starts out as a good idea quickly turns into a chore, especially when the Elves on the Shelves of 2017 can’t just alight on the toaster or on top of the fridge; kids expect them to be floating round the living room in a miniature hot-air balloon, or ziplining into the Christmas tree.

I suppose a bit of me thinks it’s cute that Son2 still wants to believe in the Elf/Mummy, and so I decide to go for it … But where the hell is the damn Elf? Where did I store him? Yawn. It’s 12.15am by now.

I look everywhere. I search all the cupboards upstairs, I practically crawl under the beds. I have a vague recollection of Son2 opening a drawer in July and coming face to face with the Elf, his eyes widening into saucers, the penny dropping. An image of the Elf being carried around in the dog’s mouth shortly after its discovery also springs to mind.

After a fruitless, late-night search, I give up. The Elf is missing, awol. And in the morning, Son2 is crushed with disappointment.

From then on, he asks every night about the Elf’s whereabouts. “Will he come tonight Mummy?” And, of course, after nearly two weeks of this, I buckle and order a new Elf online – only for the courier to knock at the door and hand over a box that Son2 rips open.

“Mum, the Elf’s here,” he calls out gleefully. “Souq.com [the UAE’s wannabe-Amazon] has delivered …” His voice tails off as I rush in and swipe the box away from under his nose.

Not quite how I’d planned Elf/Mummy’s first appearance.

In the meantime, I’ve got my hands on a real Christmas tree. It’s an extravagantly tall, shapely fir and it fills the Christmas-tree space by the patio doors perfectly. It’s shedding needles already, but it emits the most wonderful sharp, dark green, pine scent, and has springy branches with ample hanging space for baubles, tinsel and lights. I’ve ingeniously used green string to tie the trunk to a curtain hook on the wall, so our kitten (Cookie) can’t topple its six-foot splendour.

But Cookie has other ideas, of course. She scales the foliage like a monkey, causing every needle to quiver and a hundred more to drop to the floor, where there’s a dry, brittle carpet of green collecting. In collusion with the dog, she’s learnt how to bat the shiny baubles off, and then chases each ornament around the house, until the dog eats them. With just two days to go before Christmas, the bottom third of the tree is now in a rather sorry, naked state.

Christmas calamity #3 came yesterday, when I really felt like something sweet and discovered the boys had eaten all the chocolates from the tree, but had left the wrappers dangling from the branches (they were Lindt chocolates, too, the little blighters!). Then, today, we got home from a trip to see Paddington 2 to find the dog had opened all the presents.

Merry Christmas everyone!