When you roam far from your homeland as have so many in this unique country, some mornings you might wake and surmise that entire news operations have conspired to dupe you.
As you strain to follow the distant sporting events from the motherland, and you miss some altogether from sleep or time-zone blur, you might open your eyes across the world and find your server spewing outright poppycock.
It might even tell you they held the mighty Daytona 500 on Sunday in Florida - sure, knew that - but that the winner was some greenhorn from Tennessee whose name you might have heard once or twice tops, and that this alleged driver managed to turn 20 on Saturday, his face unvisited by ageing and infrequently visited by razors.
Right.
Oh, but as such puckish pranksters, these storytellers calling themselves "reporters" assert that he won and squawked into his radio: "Are you kidding me?" They note that when he received directions for driving into Victory Lane for his feting, he missed the turn.
That is quite a tale, so creative, but you know how some people get so excited making up stuff they don't know where to stop?
These guys say that supposedly this Trevor Bayne - wait, got to double-check the name, hold on, OK - had raced in the Sprint Cup, the top flight of Nascar, the top American circuit, this many times before:
One.
Sure. You have some guys spending decades trying to win just one Daytona 500, and this barely living neophyte wins on debut, maybe even drawing from his only other race, some so-called 17th-place finish last November in Texas, when only the most unsalvageable hardboots keep track of 17th in November in Texas.
Then he comes to a victory press conference as a sudden star on hallowed ground and says: "Sorry if I'm bouncing around with the questions and answers. Figure I can do whatever I want since it's just a dream anyway."
What frustrated screenwriters!
In fact - taking that word "fact" lightly - here is how many points this Trevor Bayne received from winning the United States' biggest race of the year: zero.
That's because if you are a driver, you have to check a box for which circuit you choose for points collection, and he chose a lower circuit, not expecting to race much at the top. In fact - or, not - he said he reached Daytona Beach in his pick-up truck, which he planned to drive back home, of course, but now needs somebody else to drive.
Yet they have the gall to claim that in a frantic finish he held off such celebrities as Tony Stewart, Bobby Labonte, Mark Martin and Kurt Busch, that he kept assuming they would pass and wound up saying: "Then nobody ever did."
And: "I'm a little bit worried that one of them is going to come after me tonight. I'm going to have to sleep with one eye open."
Of course, in this case of wild-eyed fiction, the outrageous outcome capped a vivid race of new rules, a new track surface, much confusion, 74 lead changes, 22 leaders (more than half the cars) and a record 16 cautions.
And just at the first hint of plausibility, when they throw in that this Trevor Bayne actually started at five, won three World Karting Association championships, blah-blah-blah, there comes this:
Allegedly he won the race for a storied old team that had faded into melancholy over time, a team credited with inventing the modern pit stop, yet a team winless in the entire Sprint Cup since 2001. The Wood Brothers. The … Wood … Brothers?
In truth, they started a generation back around 1950 in rural Virginia using a chain and a low branch of a birch tree to yank an engine from a car. And as they sank such that they did not even qualify for Daytona in 2008, Eddie Woods recalled: "It's almost like somebody died … When you walk through the garage, you run into people that you see every week, and they're afraid to look at you. It's like they don't know what to say."
Now in a hurting sport, at the 10-year mark of the death of the legendary Dale Earnhardt in a crash in the 2001 Daytona 500, this forgotten team finds a magic day with a driver who cried with his family over Earnhardt that day in Tennessee at the age of, well, nine?
You know how you tell a story and by the time it goes down the street and makes three turns, it comes back to you with the facts all mangled? In that light it probably makes sense, what remorseless fairy tales you get from nine time zones.
cculpepper@thenational.ae
if you go
The flights
Etihad, Emirates and Singapore Airlines fly direct from the UAE to Singapore from Dh2,265 return including taxes. The flight takes about 7 hours.
The hotel
Rooms at the M Social Singapore cost from SG $179 (Dh488) per night including taxes.
The tour
Makan Makan Walking group tours costs from SG $90 (Dh245) per person for about three hours. Tailor-made tours can be arranged. For details go to www.woknstroll.com.sg
Pearls on a Branch: Oral Tales
Najlaa Khoury, Archipelago Books
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.”
Essentials
The flights
Whether you trek after mountain gorillas in Rwanda, Uganda or the Congo, the most convenient international airport is in Rwanda’s capital city, Kigali. There are direct flights from Dubai a couple of days a week with RwandAir. Otherwise, an indirect route is available via Nairobi with Kenya Airways. Flydubai flies to Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo, via Entebbe in Uganda. Expect to pay from US$350 (Dh1,286) return, including taxes.
The tours
Superb ape-watching tours that take in all three gorilla countries mentioned above are run by Natural World Safaris. In September, the company will be operating a unique Ugandan ape safari guided by well-known primatologist Ben Garrod.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, local operator Kivu Travel can organise pretty much any kind of safari throughout the Virunga National Park and elsewhere in eastern Congo.
