5 things we learned this week
1
Colonel Muammar Gaddafi hated Switzerland. After his son Hannibal was arrested in Geneva in 2008 for beating servants, the late Libyan leader unsuccessfully proposed, at the following year’s G8 summit, ‘to have Switzerland partitioned between Italy, France and Germany’. He also banned Swiss watches from Libya’s capital, Tripoli.
2
Nearly half of Britain’s Prime Ministers – 25 out of the 55 who have held office since 1721 – lost a parent as a child. Tony Blair, whose father had a crippling stroke when his son was ten, and whose mother died when he was at university, says most successful people have had a painful ‘spur’ early in life that sharpens their ambition and makes them ‘break into a gallop’.
3
The record for the longest time working at a single company is 84 years. Walter Orthmann, from the Brazilian city of Brusque, joined the textile firm ReneauxView in 1938 when he was just 15 years old. Now 100, the sales manager insists the office is still his favourite place to be. ‘When we do what we like,’ he says, ‘we don’t see the time go by.’
4
There’s big money in queuing. New Yorker Robert Samuel, 46, gets paid to wait in line for iPhones, theatre tickets, limited-edition hoodies and more. His clients sometimes pay him thousands of dollars. Before the pandemic he was earning $80,000 (about £65,000) a year. Getting tickets for the musical Hamilton was his toughest challenge. The inside of the tent he used once frosted over while he was waiting.
5
Karl Lagerfeld owned more than 500 iPods. The Chanel fashion icon, who died in 2019, kept different devices for different types of music, or individual artists. He apparently used to refer to himself as ‘king of the iPods’.
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