Wednesday 25th January
Why is Davos in Davos? I can see there are certain inherent advantages to the place. It is pretty remote – three hours' drive from Zurich airport and halfway up a mountain. This serves to discourage interlopers; the anti-globalisation crowd seem to have more or less thrown in the towel this year. It's also beautiful – if your tastes run to Alpine peaks. And it is reasonably compact; most of the hotels are within trudging distance of the congress centre. But it is incredibly cold. The weather gauge outside my hotel read -11 degrees when I arrived last night. Call me a wimp, but this makes me slightly less willing to rush from party to party. In fact I'm already beginning to resent the people from Cisco, who have fixed a meeting with me for tomorrow afternoon on the other side of town – what is wrong with the café in the congress centre?
Davos is always in search of "big themes" – and this year sport is big. On the first afternoon, I find myself at a lunch on the role of sport in society, and sitting next to none other than Sepp Blatter, president of Fifa – the body that runs international football. I am about to introduce myself as the author of the Economist's survey of world football – a landmark article published in 2002 – when I remember that I had used the article to accuse Fifa of corruption, and to call for Blatter's resignation. Fortunately, the words die in my mouth and a grotesque faux pas is avoided. Since I have to confine myself to pleasantries and bland inquiries, I find it curiously difficult to make conversation with the man. The only thing he says that is vaguely interesting is that he is not worried about the impact of English football hooligans at this year's world cup; in fact he has absolutely no worries about Germany 2006 – and seems already to be obsessed by staging the cup in South Africa in 2010. Oh, and he reckons Brazil are the favourites to get the cup in 2014. Jacques Rogge, the head of the International Olympic Committee, is also at the launch, and we all get to pass the Olympic torch around the table. It is a huge blue plastic thing, so unlike the classical image of a torch that my neighbour initially mistakes it for a pepper grinder. The whole lunch ends with one of those ridiculous celebrity stunts, where Blatter, Rogge, Kofi Annan (who has also dropped by) and Klaus Schawab, who runs Davos, all lob mini-footballs into the crowd of diners. Annan manages to hit his wife on his head.
I have quickly fallen victim to a common malady – the Davos twitch. There is so much going on here that you are in a constant state of vague anxiety that you are missing something, have gone to the wrong session, not been invited to the right party or have forgotten an appointment. One of the things people seem to do at Davos – other than spend a lot of time fiddling with their free electronic organisers – is try to get into the fashionable sessions and dinners. India seems to be hot this year. As soon as you arrive at Zurich airport, you are confronted with big posters lauding the success of modern India – its dynamic growth rate and the fact that it is a "free market democracy," unlike you know where. In Davos itself, there are street signs proclaiming "India everywhere" and inviting you to art shows and dinners, as well a variety of conference sessions. The Chinese are considerably lower profile. This may be partly because the Indians are loquacious English-speakers – and the Chinese are not. It may also be that professional conference-goers are now a little bored of talking about the rise of China – which has, after all, been the constant theme for more than a decade. It may also have something to do with the fact that next weekend is Chinese new year; and so plenty of eminent Chinese may have preferred to stay at home rather than head to a freezing ski resort on the other side of the world. Of course, there are still plenty of Chinese faces, and lots of opportunities to discuss the Middle Kingdom (I have signed up for a session on Chinese-Japanese rivalry tomorrow). But when I tried to get into an India session this morning, I found it full. I didn't fancy the session on Chinese banks next door. So instead I trooped off to a colloquium on "Jobs of the future." Ben Verwaayen of BT waxed eloquent on the need not to downplay the importance of outsourcing, and its impact on employment in the west. He also came out with what is simultaneously the most arresting and disgusting soundbite I have yet heard at Davos. "At BT," he announced to the audience, "we eat our own dogfood." I am so dumbstruck by this that I stop listening for a moment and so cannot tell you what he meant. Either it is some form of weird new management jargon, or a metaphor that has not translated well from the original Dutch.
