Nostalgia is a seductive but sometimes dangerous emotion. We can bask in it but we must also move on from it.
Lifestyle
Raising an 11th anniversary toast to climbing Mount Difficulty
Each year on 9 June I gladly open another bottle, remembering that each vintage marks another anniversary of having reached the peak of this most difficult mountain.
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Lifestyle
“Travel Retail Safe – I’ve been vaccinated”
As a confirmed trypanophobic (someone who fears needles), I have never looked forward to nor enjoyed an injection (yes, it’s true) so much in my life. Heck, I can’t wait to get back to the place 21 days hence.
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Lifestyle
Blooming and flying symbols of optimism
Just as the Bauhinia blakeana flowers in winter so, eventually, will our industry bloom out of darkness.
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Lifestyle
So we beat on, boats against the current
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” I often cite the words of Nick Carraway, the narrator in The Great Gatsby, but never have they seemed more apposite than they do at this point in mankind’s history.
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Events
Getting rid of the rat and riding with the Ox
“The ox, in Chinese culture, is a hardworking zodiac sign. It usually signifies movements so, hopefully, the world will be less static than last year and get moving again in the second half of the year.”
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Lifestyle
Move over Moxie and Martin, your body double is in town
Courtesy of Kelly and Kiehl’s, and with both Moxie and the real Martin now having a body double in place, I’ll surely scale what had seemed not just a hill but a whole mountain range.
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Lifestyle
Ringing the bells that still can ring as a third life chapter begins
Look hard and you will see a Cathay Pacific aircraft rising steeply from Hong Kong International Airport, every bit as beautiful as a bird in flight.
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Events
Surely ye’ll be your pint-stoup! – Bidding a not so fond farewell to 2020
I plan an alternative cry on this, the last day of 2020, an annus horribilis (Latin for ‘horrible year’, or in Antipodean ‘a bloody awful one’) if ever there was one.
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Miscellaneous
A silver-ferned devil in Hong Kong and a breath of fresh Presidential air at TFWA
What a difference a change of President makes. No, I’m not talking the US where sometime between now and Jo Biden’s inauguration day, Donald Trump will finally be prised like a limpet from a rock out of the White House.
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Quirky
How ARI’s resident ‘Andy man’ created an international DIY gin distillery
Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world he walked into his own. Here’s your chance to win a bottle of gin of your choice while applauding distil-it-yourself in-gin-uity.
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Airports
How Changi Airport turned itself into the ultimate destination
The whole concept is the best example I have seen yet of an airport adapting to crisis and one that has the added benefit of permanently underlining the allure of Changi as a destination in its own right.
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Fashion
Masked Men unveiled – and Mask Maker revealed
Colm mistook – quite understandably – the chap on the right for American actor and heartthrob George Clooney…