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For many of the years I worked in the travel industry, November was always marked by high-profile events.  

The first of these occasions began in the second week of the month when I would attend the World Travel Market in London. This trade fair, which originally welcomed and then didn’t welcome the general public, is a showcase for global tourist destinations to demonstrate their attributes to buyers. 

It’s a big, glamorous event, and for over twenty years, I attended as an exhibitor before latterly altering my attendance to being a visitor. I could never work out how successfully the show promoted the destinations because there was always so much NOISE, but I do know that for the Italian and other southern Europeans I used to hang out with, it was an opportunity to do Christmas shopping, take in some frightful West End musicals, and commit acts of heavy duty socialising that would be filed under the predictable heading; ‘what happens in London, stays in London…’

I certainly enjoyed several glittering dinners and cocktail parties and, to be honest, revelled in a lot of hospitality over many years. The real bonus, however, was that I could get home to bed before midnight, as all this happened on home territory. 

The next November ‘highlight’ was, quite frankly, a pain in the C5. My own business was invited (by which I mean obligated) to pay a handsome sum to attend a three-day event hosted by a major client. The suggestion was that if we declined the invitation, we’d lose the business. So you can imagine that when attending this showcase, my colleagues and I felt a strange mash-up of resentment with the desire to milk it for what we could. It was a case of literal passive aggression. In my case, the aggression was more pronounced because the occasion always took place in an unsightly, smokestack town in the provinces. This meant that, emotionally, I was out of place. I felt like a prince among peasants, a leopard among pigs. I’m aware that these descriptions may seem rude, but the arm-twisting that forced us to attend always thrust me into a negative mindset at the time and thinking about it now, does the same again. 

The final late autumn event was usually a trip abroad, and this was inevitably a pleasant occasion. In my latter years in tourism, it was variously an educational trip to the Salento, a conference in Madrid or a visit to a hotel opening in Paris. It didn’t matter to me what I was doing or where I went, but I always valued the chance to decompress and be anonymous for a few days towards the year’s end.

That was then this is now.

Nowadays, I don’t own or run a business. Instead, I find myself as an employee focused on helping people with physical and mental health challenges. There are no glamorous parties or trips to vineyards. Admittedly, I was invited to Belfast last year, but the jaunt was cancelled because the office I was invited to visit was closed for health and safety reasons. 

But I’m not bitter!

Change is inevitable; it is, perhaps ironically, the only constant there is, and it’s a constant that is neither predictable nor reliable. Therefore, being able to survive the changes is tough, and the way we can do this is to evolve.

In my current work, I meet many people who have been successful in the past but cannot grasp that what they once did is no longer valid. It feels cruel to tell a cartographer or a graphic designer that their skills have been superseded by Artificial Intelligence, but that is the unfortunate truth. 

Evolution among flora and fauna is a set of natural processes that unfold over millions of years. The Adelie penguins, for example, are dealing with climate change by changing their foraging habits. For humans, evolution, as far as working is concerned, is similar. It requires an open mind, the willingness to adjust and acceptance that there is no choice. 

I have also met many clients who have managed to change their occupations. They learned to anticipate the advantages of finding something new and added to it the pleasurable feelings of leaving some of the old rubbish behind. Although this isn’t classic Darwinian evolution, it does show how people can adapt and prosper.