Up close and personal in travel retail – Sponsored by Victorinox
I get the Hong Kong government’s position. We’re just going to have to take it on (and in) the nose. While that means further frustration for Hong Kong residents and the tourism industry, it’s all about the size of the prize. And no-one can doubt which is bigger.
Omicron is a variant of concern to the WHO, to governments, to all of us. But it is not Armageddon. Nor was Delta nor Mu nor will be any of the variants that inevitably emerge while much of the world remains shamefully unvaccinated.
Qatar Duty Free and Hainan have been the two shining lights of our channel during this prolonged period of deep gloom. Both are set to glow even brighter in 2022.
Photos of a maskless (and clueless) Boris Johnson in a hospital ward just add to a widespread external perception that the UK is what the New York Times famously dubbed ‘Plague Island’.
“This community was founded at the peak of the pandemic when everyone felt isolated. Women were leaving the workforce at four times the rate of men at that period.”
The crack had appeared in the all-important distal phalange, one of 14 phalanges (a posh word for bone, as in ‘I’ve got a phalange to pick with you’ or ‘My favourite red wine is Côte de Phalange’).
As I write, two members of my team are suffering from COVID, caught in the maelstrom of the pandemic as it rages once again through the UK, where some 9.3 million people have suffered from the disease and almost 142,000 people have died.
There have been numerous calls for Trinity to be renamed Quaternity, with the fourth player being the airline. So would Fraser’s Quaternity become a Quinternity? I’m afraid not. No matter how many google pages I scoured Quinternity did not make a single entrance.
You can almost picture the scene at Ramesh’s table as William Shakespeare opines “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players” and Oscar Wilde retorts, “The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast”
One can imagine those first encounters in Morrison’s as delegates struggle to make themselves heard. “Sorry Barry, I can’t hear you. You’re on mute!” “Are you ok Dermot, you seem to be shaking?” – “Yes, no worries, I’m just buffering.”
I feel like I have been through the mental equivalent of being laid out and then stretched on a medieval torture rack for a week.
Moodie Island has an area of just 90 square miles and, best of all, it is uninhabited. Well, I’m about to change all that. And with no-one else living there, I won’t even have to quarantine.
I like that George Soros quote “When you’re a catalyst for change, you make enemies – and I’m proud of the ones I’ve got.”
