Derek Jones

I came to Berlin late. A corporate career working exclusively for Swiss and German owned businesses has at times made European cities like Zurich and Hannover feel like second homes. The regular rounds of meetings and conferences have at some point in the last twenty years taken me to most of the major European capitals. But for some reason, until this week, Berlin had eluded me. To be introduced to Berlin properly for the first time in 2017, post-Brexit, post-Trump, and in the week of the French Presidential election, was a sobering experience, even more so when I found myself listening to a line-up of senior German politicians sharing their thoughts on the future of Europe, in German, to a mostly German audience… and me. It hard to describe exactly how Germans view the result of our EU Referendum, especially when you only have anecdotal evidence collected on a two-day visit, but on a walkabout in Potsdamer Platz (more of which later) I struck up a conversation with a local. W...

I can’t imagine my life without travel. ‘Find a job you love’, so the saying goes, ‘and you’ll never work a day in your life’. In the last ten years I’ve been lucky enough to visit more than 30 countries and my constant companion (the only thing that I know for certain has been on all of those trips with me) has been my passport. We have a lot in common, me and my passport. As we’ve travelled together, we’ve aged together; the cover has gradually become weatherworn and wrinkled, not unlike my face. The stamps and visas emblazoned on the pages inside trigger memories of places visited and friends made. We’ve spent so much time together I think, by a process of osmosis, we probably share the same DNA. So this week was a sad week – it was time to renew. Arriving back from Stockholm late on Wednesday night, I slid my old passport face down for the very last time into the scanner at the Heathrow border. And as the glass gate opened in front of me, I said a quiet (but still quit...

A year is a long time: The last time we headed to the attic to dust off our baubles, Cameron was Prime Minister and Boris was Mayor of London, the EU Referendum wouldn’t be announced for another two months and the bookies were giving Donald J Trump a (generous) 2% chance of becoming the next President of the United States. The first sign that things were starting to get a bit weird was when Leicester City climbed to the top of the Premier League, but back then we knew with complete certainty that it wouldn’t last. We settled into our festive break safe in the knowledge that all was just as it should be. I don’t need to tell you what happened next! If you find yourself in a few years’ time struggling with the ‘What was the Year?’ round in your local pub quiz, my advice is simple - just say 2016! For travel it’s been yet another year of geopolitical challenges. I’m not sure if I can remember exactly when terrorist attacks stopped being exceptional events and became part of the...

Some products lend themselves to very highly targeted marketing opportunities. I’m thinking here of the sort of things that end up being advertised on small posters above men’s urinals in motorway service station toilets. Currently filling this particular marketing spot is a poster featuring three naked men, each holding a hat over his Cox and Kings. Well, two of them are holding the hat; the middle man’s hat appears to be levitating of its own accord, supported we can only imagine by his very own medically assisted, erm… hat stand. This thought was running around my head as I was having my hair cut last week. The usual - a number three at the back and sides, and shorten the top to match. Simple haircuts need simple tools and so my barber comes simply equipped with a comb, a good pair of scissors, an electric trimmer and a hairdryer. The hairdryer by the way is not for drying, it’s for blowing any stray (mostly grey) hairs off my shoulders when he’s finished. Notably miss...

Australians like to tell it as it is. In 1989 when the Transport Accident Commission wanted a powerful road safety campaign to emphasize the personal costs of drink driving they came up with possibly the best advertising slogan ever: ‘If you drink, then drive, you’re a bloody idiot.’ In that year there were 776 deaths on Australian roads; by 2012 it had fallen to 303. Anyone who’s been to Australia in the last decade will have heard that phrase; it’s still used as a friendly warning in pubs all the time. So when the Foreign Office launched a public consultation on its travel advice and said it was looking at the Australian system I was immediately keen to know exactly how it worked. I have to be honest, deep down I was hoping that somewhere on the Aussie Government website I’d find the phrase ‘If you go to North Korea, you’re a bloody idiot.’ Sadly, that’s not the case but as I expected, their advice is clearer and stronger. The website is just called Smartraveller, nic...

I could kick myself.  I fell for it. I thought I knew my country.  I thought I understood who we were and what we stood for.  Sure, there were always going to be a few people at the edges who wanted to pull up the shutters and stand alone; who saw immigration as a mortal threat to our way of life; who dreamt of a return to a mythical ‘better time’ when we were in control of our own destiny. But as the EU Referendum debate has taken hold I’ve realised that I was wrong.  I seriously misjudged Britain (or more accurately, England).  This is possibly the most depressing conclusion of my lifetime.  It means that the values I hold dear, values that I thought I shared with the vast majority of people in this country are not in fact the default values of a sizeable share of the people in Britain.  I thought that tolerance, compassion and inclusiveness were part of our DNA and I was proud to be called British. Whatever the outcome of the EU Referen...

There’s a scene in Toy Story 2 (the one with Big Al’s Toy Barn) where Andy’s mum has a garage sale on the lawn at the front of the house. Boxes full of once cherished toys are laid out on a table ready to be sold to the highest bidder. It was this scene that jumped into my mind when Tui announced the sale of all of its specialist holiday businesses last week. Will Waggott has gathered together all of Peter Long’s precious toys and put them on show at the end of the drive for any passers-by to pick over. Tui, like Andy’s mum, knows that the special toys need to be kept, even if it’s just for old times’ sake. So Woody and Buzz (Crystal and Lakes & Mountains) have been taken inside and popped back under the bed, whilst Wheezy, Slinky and Hamm have been boxed together in a job lot with all of the other (now unloved) toys. But when the trestle table has fifty toys on it, it’s inevitable that there will be a Big Al on the scene trying to separate the collectors’ items from ...