Latest posts by Martin Moodie (see all)
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“Alexander Rostov was neither scientist nor sage; but at the age of sixty-four he was wise enough to know that life does not proceed by leaps and bounds. It unfolds. At any given moment, it is the manifestation of a thousand transitions. Our faculties wax and wane, our experiences accumulate and our opinions evolve – if not glacially, then at least gradually.”
– A Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles
Welcome to The Moodie Davitt Interim British Airways Bureau.
I’m on BA32, flying over Austria, Vienna and Sankt Pölten to our right (pictured in lightish green below), Graz to our left (in darker green – they say the Graz is always greener on the other side) en route from Hong Kong International to Heathrow.
The two airports have served as my main inbound and outbound gateways over the the past 22 years and three days since I launched what was then The Moodie Report on 16 September 2002.
Unusually for me, I haven’t been working through the flight, partly because of a need to decompress after a momentous few days which saw the sale of our company to UK events and publishing house Mark Allen Group. More of that in a moment.
The second reason was my unbridled joy after discovering that the British Airways inflight entertainment system was showing the TV series version of Amor Towles’ sublimely written novel A Gentleman in Moscow.
It stars Ewan McGregor as the aristocratic Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, placed under life-time house arrest at his long-time residence, the Hotel Metropol in central Moscow after the 1917 Revolution.
I won’t say anymore because I would be spoiling what I consider one of the great joys of the world in reading the book itself.
If you don’t have the time, at least watch the TV version, which while not capturing the deliciousness of the Towles prose, is a gloriously compelling, often poignant, tale. A gourmet meal of words.
“For what matters in life is not whether we receive a round of applause; what matters is whether we have the courage to venture forth despite the uncertainty of acclaim,” writes Towles at a particularly mouth-watering point, one that brings me back to the twin subject of this Blog.
The Moodie Davitt Report sale – or more accurately that of parent company Sixth Continent Holdings – places an important punctuation mark, though not a full stop, into my personal narrative of venturing forth over the past 22 years.
Although the acqusition comes in the form of a 100% takeover, I am staying on in my leadership role alongside my longtime business partner, colleague and friend Dermot Davitt.
Not just staying on either. Right now I’m working on three big ideas that will, I think, not only boost our company but also provide an important service to the industry. And will be a lot of fun.
A word about Dermot Davitt. Well, make that several. It’s 28 years since, as the newly promoted Managing Director of Duty-Free News International (DFNI), I was tasked by parent company Euromoney with selecting a graduate trainee from a thick wad of applications for a scheme that barely paid more than that offered to Spartacus and colleagues in 71BC.
I wasn’t much enamoured therefore by the programme but as it was mandatory for all subsidiaries, I duly flicked through the candidates. Given my late Mother’s Irish antecedents, the letter and CV from one Dermot Peter Davitt, based in Dublin, caught my eye. Most of the other applications, I surmised, were from privileged English childen whose parents could no doubt subsidise their offsprings’ early job experience in such a devilishly expensive city as London.
Dermot’s application was different. In fact, he’d had genuine employment already, working with Guinness in Germany where he honed what remains fluent German (and great fluency in drinking the company’s fine product).
After I made the call a year or so later to fast-track him into the Editorship role, Dermot flourished. So much so that by the time I flew the coop to set up The Moodie Report in 2002, his internal and industry reputation was stellar and he slipped easily into the role of Managing Director.
For the next four years we were rivals in a heavily competitive media landscape, which included Duty-Free Business (now TRBusiness) led by the redoubtable Doug Newhouse (a former colleague at DFNI) and Frontier (then separate from DFNI).
Almost two years after moving to Galway in 2004 (and therefore having to vacate his full-time role at DFNI), Dermot joined me at The Moodie Report. I’d like to say I remember the moment well but after something like five pints in a Galway pub and then further discussion in the Davitt kitchen over a couple of bottles of Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc all I can recall is the outcome. Next day I left on the early-morning bus to Shannon Airport with both a throbbing hangover and his agreement to join.
In 2015 Dermot became a co-owner and on 1 April 2016 we were rebranded as The Moodie Davitt Report. In the ensuing years, despite the potentially debilitating impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have flourished.
So much so, that we now have a new parent company (also, I am happy to say, a family enterprise, simply a bigger one) but nothing changes in terms of our commitment to the industry and our obsession with excellence. The Moodie Davitt Report lives on, the manifestation of a thousand transitions. ✈
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