Age: Boo-hoo, boo-hoo.
What? Sorry, they're weeping sounds. I'll try to pull myself together.
Thank you. Age: The man was 203 yesterday. His company is 170. Boo-hoo, nuuuuurrr.
You haven't quite grasped that mimicking crying doesn't work in print. Anyway, what's your problem? This most venerable of travel agents, set up by the God-fearing Thomas Cook to take a group of temperance campaigners from Leicester to Loughborough in 1841, is in big trouble. Its share price has collapsed on news that it is running out of cash.
No fortnight in the Canaries for Thomas Cook this year then. You may think it's a joke, but it could mark the start of the unravelling of the company. Hundreds of stores will close, thousands of jobs will be lost, this great British institution will pass into history.
What's their problem? Multiple. Flat economy in the UK, uncertainty in the eurozone, instability in the Middle East putting off sun-seekers, floods in Thailand affecting tourism to Asia. But underlying all the short-term nightmares is the Big One: no one wants to use high-street travel agents any more; we either book direct or use faceless internet operators run by unfathomable algorithms.
Boo-hoo, boo … Oh do be quiet. It's called progress. We no longer have to go into a travel agent to thumb through some glossy but incomprehensible holiday brochure while a dreary woman in spectacles tells us where to go in the Algarve.
We're FREE. The internet has liberated us. Sure, if you prefer poundshops to bookshops and mice to men.
"The old order changeth, yielding place to new," as that well-known digital pioneer Tennyson put it. I think I need a holiday.
Do say: "Don't just book it. Thomas Cook it."
Don't say: "I wonder if I can get a cheap deal on lastminute.com."
