If you’d offered me 20 years back then I would have, as they say, bitten your hand off. Probably, without sounding too cannabalistic about it, your arm, elbow and shoulder too.
Events
Show time… from a distance
It almost feels like déjà vu looking at my colleagues’ daily update from Florida with the usual show diet of exhibitor photos, workshop speeches and social gatherings. Almost. Some of the exhibitors are wearing masks, something we would have considered weird at the equivalent show in 2019.
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People
None shall sleep: How Khun Vichai’s legacy will be remembered forever
I shall never forget the scene at The Trinity Forum in Shanghai when the 550-strong audience stood as one to honour Khun Vichai, a giant photo of him beamed out while the mournful lament of Bill Fay’s ‘The Healing Day’ played.
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Events
Ready for the next diversion as I head down Route 66
Age is just a number runs the old adage – albeit one mostly quoted by the old aged. The depressing thing is that my number just happens to be rather a large one.
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Events
Behind the masks of darkness
Just six weeks ago Nemiroff vodka was celebrating the release of a space-themed expression to honour the launch of the Ukrainian ‘Sich-2-30’ satellite. Today the distillery has closed and several employees have left to join the defence of their country.
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Events
Travel retail speeds around the Parabolica but Hong Kong stalls in the pits
Colder than Galway. Is that possible? Having holidayed in Galway many years ago with my two oldest kids one ‘summer’, however, my solace is that it will continue to rain there for approximately 362 days in the year (the other three it snows) while here it will get warm – very warm –soon.
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Events
Why I am sticking with Hong Kong
Fortunately both tests came back negative for as it stands every positive case is sent to a government-run isolation facility – not the kind of Interim Moodie Davitt Bureau I crave.
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Events
When a Mallard ducked out to find his Barry Manilow collection
New Zealand, a gentle country of some 5.1 million people, is not known for torment nor maltreatment of its people. But this was surely as bad (perhaps worse) than any form of punishment since the torture rack of medieval times.
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Events
Entering an age-old spirits world with a contemporary twist
Martell is an example of a craft spirit born long before the term became bastardised with an almost implicit naivety at best or arrogance at worst that nothing that had come before was ‘craft’.
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Airports
Travel retail as an auction house of the future
The best airports (and Istanbul is high on that list) are magnificent amphitheatres that house not only people but emotions (sadness, excitement, anticipation, joy) and are therefore ripe for great experiences.
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Travel
Only three more sleeps until Christmas
Who would have possibly believed back then that most of the photos of people working in the travel retail community less than two years later would show them in masks?
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Events
Omicron anxieties pale in the wake of Kentucky tragedy
The darkness that dominates world headlines over the pandemic is nothing compared to the despair of catastrophe and loss in the deep south of America. We must strive to retain perspective, insist on it in fact.
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Events
Political insanity, media inanity, and wailing into the wind
“CNN and other Western media have misunderstood China. They only see China’s ‘calm’ but they seem to forget how China has firmly adhered to the path of ‘dynamic zero-case’ policy.”