Up close and personal in travel retail
After such events I feel as if I’ve been put through a mental wringer, the psychological equivalent of being run over by the Springboks forward pack, the unrelenting concentration required meaning that relief rather than exhilaration is the dominant emotion afterwards.
This is why Americans think the economy is terrible,” wrote the irate critic on X (formerly Twitter) above a photo of a burger, fries and three sachets of ketchup (I know, I know, a journalist should never reveal his sauces).
It looked as though I might have to honour my pledge to retire, become ‘free of duty at last’ and to rename our title after my Irish business partner Dermot Davitt.
My Interim Bureau over the next few days is a very different place from the dazzle of Cannes but on a personal level offers incalculable riches that a swanky city on the French Riviera can never match.
We are on location for a sporting weekend like few others in the company of Qatar Airways and Qatar Duty Free.
Our schedules are jam-packed throughout the week and thanks to that and the fact that news from the rest of the world will continue to pour in over coming days, we really will live up to our moniker of ‘the website that never sleeps’.
I’m up, up and away again on one of those aircraft, on a 16-hour, 8,045 mile flight to New York, the first leg of a two-week journey that will in six days hence see me in Cannes for the TFWA World Exhibition.
I have known Sunrise Duty Free Founder and General Manager Fengyi Zhang for most of those 24 years and am always struck by her kindness and grace when we meet in China or at TFWA’s Cannes and Singapore shows.
“Allez les Bleus!” I guess the nice immigration officer woman at Paris Charles De Gaulle Airport couldn’t help herself when she saw the kiwi on my cap.
Black meets blue, the very same colours that the players’ bodies will bear after what will no doubt be a fearsomely physical encounter.
In fact the greatest threat to air safety on this flight might be being hit by a shopping bag as the passengers alight. Still, look on the bright side. It would be an appropriate way for me to go.
For a moment prospects of recovering my laptop seemed between slim and none. And slim, like my train, had just left town.
This is known as the Tumi Tracer, a product identification and recovery programme that helps reunite customers with their lost bags. Perhaps given my travel schedule and worryingly advancing age I should contemplate fixing one to myself.
