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Now, I belong to you
From this day until forever
Just love me tenderly
And I’ll give to you every part of me
Oh, don’t ever make me cry
Through long, lonely nights without us
Be always true to me
Keep this day in your heart eternally
Someday we shall return
To this place upon the meadow
We’ll walk out in the rain
Hear the birds above singing once again
-A Lover’s Concerto by Sandy Linzer and Denny Randell, as sung by Jane Morgan
I’m in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, three days out from The Trinity Forum, the 21st anniversary of the event I created way back in 2003.
Given such an auspicious landmark, I should be feeling excited. Proud. Happily reflective.
Instead I feel empty. Bereft. For I, like others, are mourning the loss of an extraordinary human being named Colm McLoughlin.
At that first Trinity Forum in 2003, held in London, I shared a stage with Colm, almost 20 years on from when he and his colleagues from Aer Rianta International (ARI) had set in motion what would turn out to be one of the great business success stories of our time – Dubai Duty Free.
My company was less than a year-old then. The Trinity Forum was our first event and I needed the industry’s biggest names to lend it validity. They didn’t come much bigger than Colm McLoughlin and Dubai Duty Free, already by then snapping up awards by the dozen.
Colm didn’t disappoint on stage either. Rarely, something had got his gander up – a remark he had overheard that Dubai Duty Free “had it easy” because it was government-owned and had neither the concession fee burdens nor the profitability concerns and expectations of most travel retailers.
His response was withering. On stage he deployed a repetition of key words that I would later recognise as one of his oratory trademarks.
He described the terribly basic conditions and the witheringly hot temperatures the original ARI team had faced when they set up the Dubai Duty Free operation. The frighteningly short timeline to open. The challenges of recruiting staff in a largely unknown country. The region’s perennial supply chain issues. The ignorance of brand partners about Dubai – one whom memorably thought it was in South America. The world-leading initiatives such as the car and million-dollar draws that continue to this day.
The list went on. Each time accompanied by the wagging of the McLoughlin finger and the same four-word refrain. “Why is that easy?” The winning of multiple Frontier Awards against the biggest, best and most-proven competition in the business. The extraordinary global visibility Dubai Duty Free had gleaned for the by now fast-emerging tourism destination of Dubai. The genius offering of something for all passengers not just the privileged, in the form of Nido milk powder, Tang orange powder and other products for blue collar workers bound for the sub-continent.
“Why is that easy?” Colm demanded to know.
The answer was clear. Nothing had been easy. But Colm had the genius to make it look so.
Colm retired from his full-time executive role on 31 May this year and had begun to enjoy the fruits of a long-deserved latter-life sojourn into leisure. In recent days, however, he fell ill in England and five minutes before midnight on 30 October he passed.
The pain felt by Colm’s wife Breeda, daughters Tyna and Mandy, son Niall and the wider McLoughlin family can only be imagined. The outpouring of grief and respect from the travel retail community (see The Moodie Davitt Report’s and my LinkedIn pages) bears extraordinary testament to both Colm the man and Colm the great achiever.
Colm was far more than a business acquaintance to me. He was my dear friend. During the pandemic, a prolonged and dark period in our industry when by dint of border closures we could not see each other, I took to sending him and Breeda a nightly song link from YouTube, knowing our similar taste in music (always ballads, often Irish). It was a way of reaching out across the miles despite the constraints.
This week I happened to listen to an old song called A Lover’s Concerto, written by American songwriters Sandy Linzer and Denny Randell and based on the 18th-century composition by Christian Petzold, Minuet in G major.
The version I like most is that by Jane Morgan, the renowned American songstress (still living at the ripe old age of 100) who recorded it in 1966.
The song, simultaneously melodic and melancholic, prompted me to return to my pandemic habit and send the link to Breeda, telling her it made me think of the great love she and Colm had shared for so many years. The reply I got, precisely 48 hours later, was not about the song but her sharing the devastating news of Colm’s passing.
There will be no Colm at this year’s Trinity Forum but his presence will be felt through every moment of the proceedings.
By my side in my Interim Bureau here at Somerset, Ho Chi Minh City, I have his biography, written by Graeme Wilson and published earlier this year. I had previously dipped into my copy, signed by Colm himself. Now I am poring through it, learning things even I did not know about this extraordinary man. It is called A Life Well Spent. And indeed such a life it was.
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