Read Online Here and There by A. A. Gill - Free Book Online Page B

function, everything was carefully chosen for its practical application: the uniform of compatibility and outdoor competence. I realised that what they had was anti-fashion, given that the essence of fashionable style is to put on an attitude or an aspiration, to project a character, essentially to be someone you’re not. What the Norwegians dress as is themselves so they can continue being themselves. This season’s look is the same as last season’s look. It’s very, very damned cool. Freezing cool. I turned to Tom, my photographer, who occasionally works for Vogue , and I told him blonde is the new black.

Luxe gone wild
    Glamour and camping have come together. They call it glamping, and the latest travel extravagance is a tent with a flushing bog.
    I went to lunch with a big travel company, a big, big international holiday firm. I don’t normally waste a lunch on business. It’s that horrible hybrid: work, wheedling, and pretending to be social and chummy. Anyway, the food’s invariably corporate-ghastly, and there’s a presentation of unreadable brochures and a pen that doesn’t work and a luggage label that I really don’t want. Anyway, this time I went because, you know, I’m feeling sort of sorry for the travel industry. They’re having a really horrid time. It’s the inexplicable but rather enjoyable truth about the travel business that it provides the nicest, most fun and exciting weeks of our lives, and is consequently the most consistently reviled, railed against, sued and detested business in the world. This particular company trawls the expensive end of the market and so has to deal with some of the most irrationally bad-tempered customers in the world.
    Now I expect you’ve noticed that the tempers in airports are short in exact relation to the shortness of the queues they’re standing in. Economy will have a snake of several hundred people patiently shuffling their regulation-size suitcases along, reading books, chatting, and giggling with holiday anticipation. Business class will have a queue of 20 irritated people hissing at children called Tamsin and Roland and trying to corral skittish herds of matched baggage. They are regular travellers and therefore hate travelling. In the queue for first class, where there is a vase of real flowers, and an attendant of cinematic beauty and unparalleled diplomacy, there will be one fat woman in a fur coat who is having a histrionic tantrum, swearing banishment and humiliation to all the staff in the airport and a slow death in particular to the baggage handler because she has lost her mink face mask and they don’t have her brand of moisturiser in the bathroom. As anyone in hospitality will tell you, other people’s happiness is a miserable career, and the more happy you strive to make them, the more miserable they’ll make you.
    So I went to lunch, and they gave us the good news, which was that the market was very fluid and contracting and that many companies were going to find things very difficult and would go for long holidays never to return, but for people who could move with the prevailing climate, adapt to the sudden change in commercial environment, then there were great advantages to be taken. There were vast opportunities for the plucking.
    My accountant has been saying much the same sort of thing: there are fortunes to be made in recessions, he says. And a banker I know mentioned darkly that some of his mates have never been richer. If this is all true, why don’t we have a depression every other month so we can all have a go at being carpet-bagging plutocrats? They all look at me with a bland pity when I say things like that.
    After the steamed sea bass and something chocolate over coffee, the travel bods got into their presentation and pointed out the bullet points on the screen. They came on like the mantras shouted by rugby teams in their dressing room before they go out and get