Day 3 – Wednesday 15th March 2017
You normally start and finish your day by opening and closing the curtains. We opened and closed the daytime session of MIPIM today by opening and closing with Curtins. (Pathetic Northern gag, but the pace is starting to tell!)
Tim Bingham of Curtins gave an early morning presentation on the complexity of how to build without too much fuss over a plethora of tunnels in a place like Liverpool. The subject matter was extremely interesting and I certainly learned a thing or two that I didn’t know before but I am sure that Tim made light of what is an extremely complex subject. After all, massive respect to anyone who has his own beer mat!
The beer mat was from the “closing Curtins”, which was a wine tasting at a small bar in the main town. Needless to say, the Curtins hospitality was as comprehensive as Tim’s presentation!
You find when you are at these events that you are in a time bubble. Normal meal times seem to pass and you forget you have not eaten, so yesterday, in the middle of the Curtins, Alex and I sampled the local Nice delicacy, and healthy option, of a salad Nicoise. C’est tres bien!
We visited London after lunch and the huge model of Greater London in the centre of their exhibition was incredible.
After lunch we had an excellent meeting with Russell Monro of Pinsent Mason in the lovely afternoon sunshine. However, as Alex is from North of the border and I am not great in the sun, we had to keep moving chairs so that neither of us looked like someone who had seen a UFO in Close Encounters of the Third Kind! (The older readers amongst you will understand!)
The real benefit of an event such as this is the sheer volume and range of people you meet in a very short space of time. The cost and time in arranging such meetings in the normal working environment is nigh on impossible and could prove to be very expensive and inefficient. However, we may need an extra suitcase each for the number of business cards collected!
So how do you finish a day at MIPIM? On the DLA Piper yacht of course! How else?
