Breakfast at the Ibis Cannes La Bocca is basic, but very French with the usual array of meats, breads and coffee though extremely welcome ahead of what was to be a long day.
The first rather pleasurable task of the day was to visit the wonderful villa of Hugh and Cathy Frost, where Hill Dickinson had again arranged a fabulous lunch as they had in 2017. It was a good opportunity to meet some new people as we did, and also to catch up with Kevin Lee, Alex McCann and the team from Hill Dickinson. Whilst at this particular function I met one of the long-time supporters of the Mason Owen practice, Peter Johnson, whose properties we have insured for many years, but I have never had the pleasure of meeting him. Needless to say it was a great pleasure to finally do so.
We also bumped into our first insurer of the day as Mark Dennis from Dual, was also a guest, as Dual have provided some good solutions to our clients for a long time now and are a firm that we do also work with on the general insurance side.
After lunch it was back down into town and onto what was the first of 3 beach appointments. After Day 1 and hearing about the floods in the Manchester Stand on Sunday evening, the organisers had taken steps to prevent a similar occurrence as the sea was quite choppy yesterday. As you can see from the photograph, building a temporary flood barrier along the beach to protect the stands has proven to be quite effective! The photograph also shows the venue for the MODA Living and Apache Capital reception where we were able to catch up with Richard Jackson and his team from Apache. Conveniently however, the next reception we were due to attend was that of TFT, which was in the adjoining marquee, so it was not too far a distance to go. On the way is where perhaps the most surreal photograph of MIPIM 2018 was taken where Alex decided to be pictured with the 2 spacemen that were promoting the MODA Living brand. I am not sure any further comment is necessary?!
Next, further down the beach to Gowlings and the opportunity to meet another good friend of the Mason Owen practice, Alistair Lowe and his son Jamie who was formally a colleague at Mason Owen. It also gave us the chance to catch up with some of the people from Gowlings Solicitors for whom we do quite a bit of business and provided a second opportunity of the day to meet one of our insurers, CLS Risk Solutions.
As the sun set on day 2, that was nowhere near the end of our day. We did however split out teams as Alex attended a dinner with Bond Dickinson and Sam and I headed to dinner with our good friends from First Title, which also involved the obligatory trip to Café Roma for “prinks”. In MIPIM context however, prinks was around 8:30pm ahead of the 10:30pm impromptu dinner reservation that was made during prinks. Our original reservation for 4 quickly became 5 and then 6 but regardless of the hour, the food was excellent and gave us a good opportunity to talk with First Title about some of the deals that we have on the go with them at the moment.
The one consistent feature of the day was however a certain type of Rose wine that was first recommended to me by our Chairman Barry Owen. Almost all of the venues were serving Minuty and perhaps in tribute or as a toast to our Chairman, who last week celebrated the 50th Anniversary of Mason Owen & Partners at a gathering in Liverpool, the MOFS team had the opportunity to toast the success of the firm over the 50 years along with some people who attended that party, but this time in Cannes.
