If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Five. In the morning. Not the time I wanted to be getting up, yesterday morning, but it had its compensations. The cat thought it was good I was out of bed, and as I drove across the flood plain the fog was hanging low across the damp land like limp fallen clouds.

I missed the train by going home for a decent camera, deciding at the last minute I wanted something better than a pocket snapper. I needn’t have worried: I was still the first at Waterloo. So we decamped to the first class lounge to eat the free ice cream and pick up magazines.

The train crawled through the suburbs and most of Kent. Another damning indictment of the state of the British railways, and by the time we hit the edge of Paris a pile of half-read copies of the Guardian, Time and the Spectator cluttered the gaps on the table between the cups and glasses and breakfast plates.

The weather was fantastic. Paris was bathed in brilliant sunlight and sat smart and pretty below clear blue skies. The streets were full of honking traffic, though, and it took us half an hour to fight our way across town to a hotel with the most impressive toilets. When you flushed them, a little arm popped out, on the end of which was one of those squeegy mops. It plonked it down on the seat and then span the seat around to clean it for the next person. Talk about catering for the paranoid.

Anyway, that’s where we had lunch, after which we were herded into a meeting room for a very short demo of what is perhaps the most impressive bit of technology I have seen in my whole time at PCW.

I thought we were just going to see another Aibo, and we did, but at the other end of the room was Qrio, the cutest humanoid ever invented. He sat there on a chair watching us as we sat watching the presentation and then, as we got up and crowded around him he stood up and waved, said hello and then did a little dance to welcome us to Paris.

The way he moved was extraordinary. He was so smooth and natural, and frighteningly human-like. Try and knock him over and he’ll either compensate by changing his posture or, if he can’t, put out his arms to stop himself hitting the floor, or adopt a position that will save him from harm.

Perhaps most spooky of all, though, is that fact he can talk. No - not talk - chat. With a vocabulary of 60,000 words he will sit and talk to you, listening to what you say, understanding it, and chatting back. Unfortunately he only does this in Japanese at the moment, so there was no chance of any of us sitting down for a friendly chin-wag, but if it works as well as they say I will be truly impressed.

I want one. Sadly, though, that’s unlikely ever to happen, as at the moment the Qrio we saw was one of only 100 in the whole world, and as of yet there aren’t any plans to sell them as consumer products.

Which is a shame.

Anyhow, that was the end of the work for the day so Gordon and I took off in the sunshine and walked down to the Eiffel Tower.

Of course we climbed the steps to the Trocadero so we could take the regular cliched shots of it across the fountains and the river, just like the other 500 tourists around us, then mooched around snapping the statues (or snapping pictures of Gordon snapping the statues, just to gain perspective…)

So, a couple of dozen shots squeezed off we wandered slowly to the foot of the tower then, seeing that the queues were short, bought tickets and rode the lifts to the top.

It must be six or seven years since I last did that, and the weather could not have been more different. The last time around the skies were grey and we were wrapped up in coats and scarves. This time we had the sleeves of our jackets tied around our waists and still we were hot. The sun beat down and warmed the gentle breeze that we could feel at the top, while all around us as far as the eye could see the streets of Paris spread out in their ordered, tidy way.

Through the middle a stream of mercury, dazzling silver in the light of the sun, was the Seine, meandering slowly towards the sea.

It was busy at the top, of course. Full of tourists taking pictures of one another. I suppose Gordon and I should have done that, too, but instead, when I’d exhausted the opportunities afforded by the view, I took pictures of the ground, and looking back on all the shots of the afternoon, it is those, showing the structure of the tower plumetting down towards the ground, that are my favourite.

We didn’t have time to dawdle, unfortunately, and so within two hours of buying our tickets we were back in a taxi, speeding through the mad Parisian traffic towards the hotel, leaving us precisely seven minutes to check in, freshen up, change for dinner and be back down in the lobby in time to meet the others for our trip to the Moulin Rouge.

Now I’d always assumed the Moulin Rouge would be horribly seedy. It’s not in a particularly nice part of Paris, and the last time I was there I’d been grabbed by two prostitutes simultaneously - one on either arm - who had tried to drag me off in opposite directions.

So, I was very surprised by the whole night.

Cameras are forbidden, so we took no pictures, but inside is a large tiered dining room that would happily seat 300, I’d guess. The roof is a striped canopy like you’d see above an oversized market stall. The table cloths are starched white and aside from the small lamps set upon them the whole place is illuminated by dusty old street lamps painted orange, yellow and red.

Red.

It is everywhere. As you enter, you walk along red carpet. You push through the double doors into the dining room and all you see is the dotted terrain of a hundred tiny red lamp shades on the table tops. It has done its branding well.

Better than it does its food. But then that’s not why you go there. You go there for one thing only - the show, notorious for its bare-brested ladies and lavish costumes.

And most certainly there is plenty of that.

Forty, fifty, sixty girls. Hundreds, if not thousands of shoes. Enough feathers to fly you south for the winter. Enough breasts to feed a starving orphanage. And there were guys, too. Cute, with defined, smiling faces, strong manly arms and perfect hair. Their chests were mighty barrels, their stomachs firm and creased along the lines of muscle.

They danced on the stage. On stairways. Hanging from wires suspended above our tables as we drank the €140 bottles of wine. At one point the whole wooden stage drew back and from beneath it rose up a tank, the size of a one-car garage. It was filled to within a foot of the rim with water, and in the water swam six fat pythons. Ten feel long and as thick as a dancer’s leg. One of the females leapt into the tank and danced beneath the water with the snakes, dragging them down from where they lazed on the surface, forcing them to wrap themselves around her before they pulled away and swam back up for air.

Again and again she pulled at the snakes, spinning around with them in her arms and finally lifting one up above her head as the tank gracefully slid down beneath the stage and the Moulin Rouge was plunged into darkness.

The show lasted two hours and not once in all that time did it stop. Even when it was necessary to change the sets it continued, with entertainers keeping us amused, each one more spectacular than the last.

There was the man who could balance on the most precariously stacked barrels. There was the man who could juggle ping pong balls without using his hand - stuffing three into his mouth and then launching them high up into the air before catching them, in his mouth once again, as they came back down. On and on and on he went; surely he mouth and tongue must have got tired.

And then there was the ventriloquist, and cause for me to be glad I had swapped seats with Gordon. Sat on the end of our table, he was ripe for plucking, and so was grabbed by the roving ventriloquist, who had already used a live dog as his dummy. Gordon was made to look as though he was saying the most stupid things in front of us all, but he carried it off with style and confidence and when it was all over and the room was emptying out, those who filed past our table recognised him and congratulated him on his performance.

I had had a lucky escape. I was supposed to have been sitting in that seat, but at the last minute had swapped with Gordon, convinced it was a prime location for being whisked up onto the stage. And I was right.

It was a night of pure spectacle. The campest performance any of us had ever seen, and a clue as to what it might be like if France ever won the Eurovision.

We talked about it all the way back to the hotel, and then for much of the evening as we sat up until two sipping over-priced cocktails in the bar. I was so glad of my bed when I got to it that I fell asleep right away, and slept through until I was woken by the phone at eight. That’s 7am at home.

I ignored it, and the call went to voicemail. Half an hour later, it came again. Chirp-chirp. Chirp-chirp. This time around it was incessant, and so I picked it up. It was ITN. They wanted to know if I could do them an interview. There and then, on the spot.

I agreed. There was no point asking if I could have some time to do a bit of research as I had no computer on which to look things up. And so I stood up in the hope it would make me sound a little more awake and took a sensationalist tack in the knowledge that it would at least give them a lot of useful sound bites even if I wasn’t quite on the right subject.

To be fair, it was as well they rang, as it forced me into the shower and down to breakfast in time to catch the last of the buffet before it was tidied away for the day.

We had nothing scheduled until 11.30, which is always a bonus. Press trips invariably involve late nights, and so late mornings are a welcome counterbalance.

At the appointed time, then, we crossed the road to the Palais du Congres and had our journalistic integrity checked by the clipboard-toting girls at the registration desks.

It was an excellent exhibition. Pretty much everything Sony produces gathered together in one place and overseen by hundreds of clued-up guides. Everything is hands-on, everything is touch-and-play. Nothing is out of bounds and hardly any question will go unanswered. More companies should do that, but few would be able to fill the Palais du Congres on their own.

And so Gordon and I walked from stand to stand and room to room, breaking only once, very briefly, for a drink in the press suite. There was so much to see we were lucky to fit it all in, but made it back to the hotel in time for the bus to the Eurostar happy that we had seen all we needed and plenty more besides.

I could happily have slept all the way home, but Eurostars - nothing more than a repainted TGV - are not built for sleeping. The Thalys is the same. The windows are too far from the seats, and so if you want to rest your head on them you must stretch out your neck across an air-con vent that blows you with a fierce cold draft.

No matter. I amused myself with the gentle French countryside as it pulled by at a startling rate, then turned the pages of Time as we crawled through Kent and south London, embarassed by the contrast.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 5th, 2003 at 11:52 pm and is filed under Journal, Picture story, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.