I decided to give London a miss this week and headed east while the leaders of the world’s 20 biggest economies fuelled up their Boeings and Airbuses and headed to the UK capital.
I’m not sure why there was such a fuss about President Barack Obama’s security detail as it was no more muscular than anything George W Bush would have motored around in. There should have been some more noise made about the cringy photo-call on the steps of 10 Downing Street. All the shuffling and rearranging of leaders and their spouses by prime minister Gordon Brown suggested there’s no longer anyone in the protocol business at number 10 (or any of the other 19 leaders’ offices for that matter).
Many attendees looked as if they had pulled themselves together in the backseats of their blast-proof cars. Russian leader Dmitry Medvedev and his wife have some serious issues with shape and proportion in the tailoring department. Who told him that a longish suit was flattering? Who let Mrs M out of the shop with that top? Or was it all part of an ensemble? And someone needs to tell Michelle Obama that there’s a time and place for bare arms and it’s not on an early spring evening at a rather important global conference in London.
I departed London last Saturday with my colleague Pam, heading for Zurich. For some reason I thought terminal two would be relatively quiet on a Saturday afternoon. As it turned out, it was reasonably calm save for the painfully long security queues caused by only two open lanes.
On board the Swiss Airbus, we were both annoyed when the flight attendant couldn’t hang our jackets because the wardrobe had obviously been replaced by a row of seats and a slimline cupboard that might be good for vertically storing five or six sheets of A4 paper. An hour later, all was forgiven when the chocolate basket was passed around and Pam stuffed her purse with some goodies and I politely took one.
Though our final destination was actually Basel for the watch fair, we decided Zurich would make more sense as a place to lay our heads, thereby escaping the dinner crowds of diamond dealers and tourbillon assemblers in Basel. This turned out to be a good move because it meant we could enjoy a late night dinner at the restaurant Kronenhalle and study Zurich society up close.
Our key observations included: people still make an effort to get dressed for dinner; they like to stare and they don’t flinch if you stare back; cash is still king for settling the bill; you see more tables shared by people of all generations than you might in London or New York.
We also noted that it was still OK to smoke in restaurants and there was something about the scent of a bit of tobacco in the air that added to the overall ambience.
On Sunday morning, we headed to Basel and visited watch brands big and small and then dashed to Hauptbahnhof to catch the TGV to Paris. I failed to notice that I had mislaid my wallet in a wine shop at the train station and it wasn’t till the following morning at the George V hotel that a message popped up on my BlackBerry informing me that my wallet was safe in the manager’s office (all the cash and cards included) at the shop and that it could be collected.
As my flight to Tokyo was boarding in 12 hours and there was little chance of getting a replacement set of cards and even less possibility of a stack of cash being delivered to the hotel, Pam decided to spring a plan with my new assistant Alex (yes readers, Gaby’s now running the Monocle merchandise business after almost 11 years as my personal assistant).
The plan involved having our Swiss colleague take the wallet to Zurich where he would be met by our new intern Jonathan, who was dispatched from London to deliver the wallet to Paris. While some very high winds almost delayed his flight’s approach to Zurich, Jonathan eventually made it to the small cocktail party we were hosting on Rue Royale with enough time to knock back a glass of champagne before we had to leave.
Ninety minutes later, I was already dozing as the Air France 777 rumbled along the taxiways to the take-off runway. As a message or two crackled over the intercom, I drifted off wondering why some airlines take off with the lights off and others with the lights on. (If anyone has the answer to this, then do feel free to drop me a note.)
Ten hours later we were on final approach to Narita and I was praying there wouldn’t be high winds like the week before. As I was grabbing my luggage after landing, a Fast Lane reader recognised me and asked how I managed to cope with so much travel. I managed a half answer as the doors whooshed open and I led the charge out of the door and through the airport.
There’ll be more from Japan next week before I head off across the Pacific to play shopkeeper in leafy Brentwood, Los Angeles.
Tyler Brûlé is editor-in-chief of Monocle
tyler.brule@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/brule
