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Welcome from The Moodie Davitt Lockdown Bureau in Ealing, West London.
Today is one of the most important days in the 18-year history of the company I founded in 2002, and in which I have shared ownership with my long-time colleague and friend Dermot Davitt since 2015.
It started with an initiative I dubbed Project Aoraki, named after the mountain in my native New Zealand, at 3,754 meters or 12,360 feet above sea level, the country’s highest.
The name Aoraki means ‘Piercing through clouds’ and that was a singularly appropriate phrase for what we sought to achieve, in attempting to scale new business heights and break through the dark clouds of COVID-19 in the face of a slump in revenues (though neither demand nor traffic).
The provenance of the mountain and the symbolism the name evokes brought to mind another New Zealand mountain that I first mentioned in this Blog way back in 2010, shortly after I had been diagnosed with stomach cancer. The mountain also gave its name to a nearby winery. It was called Mount Difficulty.
This blog, for which I’ve chosen the medium of video (below), tells my story of Climbing Mount Difficulty and Piercing through Clouds. [Special thanks to Jess and Jon Howells for putting this film together, including an original music score by Jon]