2001-11-13 - 4:29 p.m.

�There�s an hour of sunshine for a million years of rain, but somehow it always seems to be enough��

Trade exhibitions are really quite odious affairs. The last one I was at was about 4 years ago, when I was plucked from the ranks of the software company I worked for (yeah, hard to believe I know, but I was only in charge of rebending the straightened paperclips, and making tea) to demonstrate the speech recognition package that they were staking their existence on cleaning up the market with. 4 days of chattering nervously into a microphone in front of disinterested strangers, with me delivering my script and some millennia later, a kind of vowel-less gobbledygook appearing on a large screen. I�m sure the one person that actually bought it thought it was some kind of English-Polish translation programme. The bosses would glare at me, like I was infecting it with some kind of digital dyslexia, when we all knew the truth�that the whole thing was just guff. Soon after, I left said company after realising I wasn�t much good at my job, spending more time racing around town retrieving stray deliveries than taking orders.

�When love falls from the sky, nobody ever asks why�You just take it or leave it where it was��

Yesterday I went to a travel industry trade fair as a punter, because, contrary to popular belief and immediate circumstantial evidence, I am still technically a travel journalist. It�s a huge event. Every country has a stand and they�re all more or less the same � some chain-smoking fat guy in a suit doing shady deals with other chain-smoking fat guys in suits, and a dolly-bird in low-cut version of the national costume, wearing amounts of foundation that exceed international make-up treaties and handing out free pens. I was only there to see which editors I could get drunk enough to consider employing me without having to resort to doing them sexual favours in lifts (I think I�ve told that story) � I mean elevators, not built up shoes. Half way through the afternoon, after the plane crash story had broken, the head organiser reassured us from her concrete bunker three miles under the arena that she�d �been assured that the tragedy was an accident and not an act of terrorism� (I know not even the news have confirmed that yet, but she must have insider knowledge) which could be roughly translated as �please be calm and do not engage in a bloody ritual of mass suicide given the fact that it�s the end of the travel industry as we know it�. I hit the Scandinavian stalls and ordered schnapps. Later I won a t-shirt signed by tennis-playing bigot Goran Ivanesevic by my card being pulled out of a bucket by Miss Tourism Bitch 2001, who was also Croatian, and whose national costume had the lowest cut front. Yes, I certainly left with a feeling of international camaraderie.

The Afghanistan stand was strangely absent, though. What could have happened?

�Until you�ve had sweet lovin� there�s no lovin� worth the name, but you can go blind from cryin� all the time��

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