Daily Diary

Lord of the non-flyers

Posted 5/09/2007 by The Daily Diary

With firms (including Simmons & Simmons) increasingly bragging about their carbon-neutral status, The Diary is impressed with those partners shunning the overseas sun and refusing to clock up the air-miles by taking their break in places like Devon or Cornwall. Not that they’ve all clocked up good karma for their troubles.

This column has previously reported on the holiday misfortunes of O’Melveny & Myers City capo Chris Ashworth – who came in for something of a culture shock upon joining the LA galacticos from Ashurst and was forced to cancel annual leave for the first time in 20 years.

Eighteen months later, his leisure-time luck has not improved. Despite being among those taking an environmentally-friendly, non-flying break in the West Country this year, Ashworth found himself on the receiving end of nature’s wrath this summer.

With torrential rain confining the conscientious corporate king to his austere chalet for the first week of his trip, Ashworth subsequently found himself besieged by a plague of flies of near-biblical proportions. So miserable were conditions that poor Chris cut short his hols at the halfway stage and returned to the office, where – as longtime Diary readers may remember – Ashworth is on the record as saying he “prefers it” anyway. No wonder.