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.
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.
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.”
Sabrage is a highly skilled technique for opening a Champagne bottle with a sabre. Sunilage, on the other hand is a highly dangerous technique best avoided as this photo, almost the last one of Antares Cheng taken alive, and which resulted in Dom and Perignon becoming separate brands, reveals.
I heard you calling me, then you disappeared into the dust/ Up the stairs, into the fire/ Up the stairs, into the fire/ I need your kiss, but love and duty called you someplace higher
New Zealand did so well for so long by keeping its borders shut. But the Delta variant sneaked through a defence that had hitherto been tighter than that of the country’s mighty All Blacks rugby team.
We joked that it was the biggest travel retail gathering of the year and remembered that this was like it used to be in travel retail before a certain nasty virus came along and blighted our industry and our lives.
This is just about as quiet an interim bureau as I have ever inhabited during the past 19 years, especially as it is one of those rare places in the UK that has no wi-fi signal, perhaps a sign from someone on high telling me I need to slow down.
As the Dubai Duty Free Irish Open takes place, even with limited numbers and with all of the necessary safety measures, it also offers an important sense of normality returning to Irish life.