It’s the week of the Cannes advertising festival, the Academy awards equivalent of the industry, and from all over the world winners, losers, schmoozers and boozers are gathering to catch up with old mates, attend parties, drink overpriced lager in the Gutter Bar (7 euros for a small one) and occasionally do some work. An elite cadre is in attendance from W+K, for various reasons, including an advertising ‘masterclass’ that Tony and Neil gave in the Hotel Majestic (above). This seemed to go OK despite our misgivings about client attendees expecting ‘masters’ and getting us two.

Our home for festival week is more homely than the Majestic and the other grand hotels lining the promenade. It’s a villa not far from the sea front with a little pool and the delighfully scatty and very welcoming hostess and owner Liz.

This is it:

Some of the pundits are predicting that our ‘Grrr’ film for Honda diesel engines will do well in the awards judging. But they said that about our Honda ‘Cog’ film two years ago, and we were pipped to the Grand Prix by an ad for Ikea from the US, so we’re not counting any chickens. As usual, we prepare to embrace failure. As Mr Honda said, it’s 90% of sucess.

M & C Saatchi took over Golden Square the other night for a birthday celebration where the champagne flowed and the limousines waited in the street. W+K also knows how to celebrate in style. We went out last night for an agency curry to commemorate our recent string of awards and, in particular the 2 black pencils and umpteen yellow pencils we got at D&AD for work on Honda and Nike. We tend not to set too much store by creative awards but, as these things go, D&AD is regarded as highly prestigious and the coveted BLACK PENCIL is rarely awarded to an advert. So to get two is worthy of a bit of a do.

Having just moved into our new offices down the road from Brick Lane, famed for its curry houses, it seemed only fitting that we should book a table for 50 (well, a few tables) at the noted Preem restaurant.

I think the food was pretty good but that was hardly the point. Many lagers were drunk, a few samosas were thrown at Tony Wallace’s head, Mick Bailey amazed us with his mastery of magic and Rebecca demonstrated that she could smoke a fag with her foot.

Many thanks to the staff at Preem for putting up with us and apologies to anyone else who was eating there last night.

Champagne? Limousines? Who needs ’em?