John continues his report from the Nuremberg fair…
Another early Friday start for me, in an attempt to summarise what we’ve seen over the past few days in Nuremberg. My ability to craft a carefully honed piece of prose in the early light of dawn has not been aided by a bizarre journey home last night, which saw 300+ passengers (surely every single one from the toy community?) on the British Airways flight to Heathrow stuck on the plane for 45 minutes before being allowed to disembark – or to put it another way, half the time it took us to actually fly from Germany. A series of unfortunate (and frankly laughable) events saw BA’s reputation for efficiency in the mud, and I fully expected the line of BA employees standing on the tarmac to direct us the ten or so metres to the terminal (apparently we couldn’t be trusted not to wander into the path of a passing 747 by ourselves …) to be wearing full clown costumes, complete with wigs and red noses. Sadly not. Mind you, at least we didn’t get to Frankfurt last night only to discover there were no planes taking off due to a security staff strike, as some people did. The week started with a train drivers’ strike in Germany and ended with travel chaos whichever way you turned – but hey, at least the bit in the middle was great.
Following hot on the heels of London Toy Fair, Nuremberg gives the toy community another chance to meet up, review line plans and finalise selections for the year ahead – only this time it was the global toy community rather than mainly UK participants, and the distances between meetings saw everyone’s step counts explode. My Tuesday schedule was particularly brutal: I seemed to go from one end of the showground to the other, then back to where I started (12 to 4A, rinse and repeat), as if I was on a giant bungee chord. I don’t know which idiot sorted out my schedule, but when I find the person responsible, I will be having strong words. Oh wait, that was me…
Read the rest here.
