Now I lorded above this billowy sea, along with myriad mountaintops – like VIPs in a secret realm.
The press were there and all sorts of VIPs.
Picture the scene: perhaps in the secret back room of a nightclub, reserved for VIPs, or perhaps in a humble lavatory cubicle, we find three legendary libertine pleasure-seekers, eyes wild, in the midst of a night of crazed, hang-the-consequences gratification, lines of cocaine chopped out before them.
The day's surreal highlight was an act by an acrobatics troupe, which did flik flaks down the red carpet towards the VIPs, causing a momentary fracas among the president's security detail.
So who decides which passengers are VIPs and which are not?
To attract high-spending VIPs, they have had to rely on the help of "junket" operators—shadowy, independent middlemen who typically take a 30% cut of any revenues.
It was attended by VIPs from the Islamic world and by the leaders of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hizbullah.At the conference, Mr Khatami himself proposed only that there should be a "referendum" to decide Palestine's future.
His £3.5 billion ($5.2 billion) budget and 50,000 staff are devoted partly to national matters: mainly countering terrorism, but also specialist jobs such as fighting fraud and protecting VIPs.
Some speculated that tickets reserved for sponsors and VIPs might be going unused in preliminary or qualifying rounds as officials with a claim to them wait for the finals.
Instead, I suspect it's the poor allocation of ticket blocks to VIPs and workers who might not have been that interested in the events in the first place.Communism, you say!
A car-rental firm that says it caters for VIPs offers a V8 with driver "while you work in comfort on the small details of your pending contract".
