Best. Press trip. Ever.

Not particularly because of the location (which was nonetheless nice), and certainly not because of the freebies (there were none), but just because I had a rollicking good time.

I managed to avoid the courtesy screening of the England v Switzerland (or Ang v Sui, since we were in France) game by sitting on the balcony of the hotel guzzling Rosé and chatting/bitching to esteemed colleagues about less esteemed colleagues.

Actually, guzzling booze was pretty much the theme for the trip, and I drank steadily if sparely throughout Thursday; the whole event did feature a prodigious free bar. The alcohol pace was stepped up a bit in the evening, with a visit to the massive money-spinner that is Pierre Cardin's fibreglass mansion in the hills. The whole place was pretty tacky, but there were some genuinely spectacular views which engendered in me feelings akin to envy. Actually, dammit, they were envy feelings.

We were ferried back to the hotel just after 1, and continued the drinking in the hotel bar. In a last-ditch attempt at getting people to pay attention to him, one of my less-than-esteemed colleagues jumped in a closed swimming pool three times, despite having been told politely on each occasion that he shouldn't.

Far classier to do what I and a select group of colleagues did, which was decide, sometime around 3am, to take a dip in the Med.

One chap did misjudge the mood of the evening, and did actually get stark-bollock nikkid. Put it this way; the water seemed remarkably warm, but that's a relative term. We stayed in for ages, despite the rather alarming guard prowling up and down the beach complete with outsized Dobermann.

We exited the water, pulled on our clothes (at least in part) and stumbled back to the hotel. Trailing water, sand, and dressed mainly only in underwear, we wandered back through the foyer of a really very swank hotel, attracting looks of disgust from the French staff – admittedly not hard to do, since we're British.

We repaired to the room of the company's PR – he could claim the minibar raid back on expenses – and did more chatting/bitching about less esteemed colleagues.

All very enjoyable, but we made the tactical error of deciding to go to bed somewhere around 5:30, rather than going for a stroll, drinking some coffee, and just batting on to the next day without a break. This meant less than two hours in bed, and I woke feeling like a very lightly poached egg the next morning. I felt distinctly proud of myself, though, for making it through the Friday's briefings with no stronger a crutch than a glass of water permanently screwed into my gently shaking hand.

Got back to Blighty mid-afternoon on Friday, was back in Jenny's loving arms by 7, fell asleep at 8, and didn't wake until 11 this morning. Feel much more human, but have inexplicable bruise on my arse, and feel uncharacteristically stiff.

Best quote of the trip came from one of the hotel's employees, who, upon being asked, in badly accented French, by Macworld's editor-in-chief "Où est la salle de Léger?", replied "I'm sorry, I don't speak Engleesh".

Some bigger photos can be found here.