Fat Cat, a City of London insider and new columnist for Financial News in 2010, believes in living life to the full and is frequently amused and bemused by goings on in the Square Mile. Here he muses on the attractions of spending the festive period in Barbados. Watch out for his fortnightly column starting in the newspaper and online from January 11.

Barbados at Christmas and New Year is very like Manchester. Both have long, important, but now forgotten histories and are not uninteresting to visit, and both have a tiny percentage of the population with very significant sums of cash and a desire to splash it.