3GodSaveMe

An all pervasive sense of doom descends as my departure time to Barca draws nearer. The thing about the 3GSM World Mobile Congress that only people who have attended conferences of any type will understand, is that it traps thousands of people with expense accounts under one roof. They are all then obliged, nay forced, to utterly cane it at every turn. Breakfast meetings drag on into boozy lunches, stand duty is foresaken in the interests of a cheeky bottle of rioja. When the horn sounds to indicate the show day has ended, a palpable sense of liberation/libation wafts from exhibition hall to concourse. The evenings really kick off. There are always dozens of parties going on, from intimate little soirees to full-on, z-list celebrity hosted, dancing bear, chicks in cages extravaganzas.

All very well, but crawling back onto the stand at 8am with the breath of reptiles, twelve bore eyeballs, and lips permanently etched with the jezabel stain of cheap red, loses its rebellious appeal after four days. Exhibit hall aircon can suck the moisture from a fossil and shrinks the already dehydrated throat to a needle thin pipe of rust you can barely get a cold glass of chardonnay down. The Fox runs a tight ship, and yes, i do mean we are tight from about 11am until we stagger into our hotels at some dangerously late hour. Her capacity for charding it up is legendary as is her consumption of mints the morning after, though no chemical on earth can combat the lethal combination of three packets of Silk Cut and a crate of Blue Nun. As official company blogger, I'm obliged to send a running report on proceedings back to the web team, for posting on our public site. This may all go horribly wrong, but if you want to read about a career in freefall check out here as of Monday the 13th. Be still my bleating liver.

B