Latest posts by Martin Moodie (see all)
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And I won’t feel the flowing of the time when I’m gone
All the pleasures of love will not be mine when I’m gone
My pen won’t pour a lyric line when I’m gone
So I guess I’ll have to do it while I’m here
– Phil Ochs, When I’m gone
It’s been a sombre couple of days. Life at its most fleeting and fragile. Nature at its most brutal.
Yesterday, in my role as a commentator on an industry that has given me my living for coming on four decades, I had to fulfil a task as unenviable as it was an honour. It is one I have fulfilled way too often down the years. They call it an obituary. I call it saying goodbye.
Andreas Fehr (right), the former Mondelez World Travel Retail Managing Director, who passed on 31 August, was a highly successful man but much more importantly a very good one. Kind, warm, funny. Read the tributes below our LinkedIn post and you will see those qualities referred to over and over.
When I wrote in this Blog about his retirement in 2018, I cited Andreas’ comment to me that it was time to attend to his ‘bucket list’.
“Andreas,” I wrote, “may that bucket overflow with joyous moments, good health and happiness.” For that is what the cliche about a well-earned retirement is all about, right? Alas, at 67 (born one day short of a year after me), way too young, those moments have been stolen from him and his family. Rest in peace Andreas.
I mentioned nature. Often so beautiful but in a warming world too often brutal. Super Typhoon Yagi largely spared Hong Kong this week, its impact mostly restricted to more than 100 trees being toppled, nine people being injured and dozens of flights cancelled.
The same could not be said for the northern Philippines (16 dead) nor Hainan. The Moodie Davitt Report has a three-person team on the island and the video clips and photos shot on their phones (shown below and on our website) by Dachang Wang, Lara Netherlands and Zhang Yimei, underline the terrifying power nature possesses when unleashed in all its fury.
Like the illness that claimed Andreas with obscene prematureness, such an event serves as a reminder of the fragility of what we have and how easily it can be snatched away. It is also a salient reminder of priorities.
The fine American folk singer Phil Ochs wrote of the temporariness of life and therefore the need to enjoy it while you can in the song above, for which I have great fondness. On 9 April 1976 he committed suicide through hanging. He was 35. ✈
Won’t see the golden of the sun when I’m gone
And the evenings and the mornings will be one when I’m gone
Can’t be singing louder than the guns while I’m gone
So I guess I’ll have to do it while I’m here