Up close and personal in travel retail
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.
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.
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.
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’.
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.
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?
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.
“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.”
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.