We’ve been in Paris, testing advertising concepts.

Sad to leave this beautiful city we boarded the Eurostar for the short journey back to London.

Little did we realise the events that awaited us.

We found ourselves sitting across the aisle from four people: two quiet men who appeared not to know each other and two women who definitely did. They were in fine spirits, chatting about celebrities and their plans for future social events.

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L’Hotel. Venue of our stay in Paris. Considerably more refined than our travelling companions!

It soon became clear that the two women worked in the marketing world, one being the Marketing Director of their employer, a retailler.

This alerted the attention of one of the quiet men sitting next to them, who it transpired worked for Omnicom.

Whether he did it for networking reasons, or just out of shared interest we don’t know, but he started to talk to them about their similar working lives.

By now it had become clear that our two Marketing colleagues might have had a bit to drink. The Omnicom representative discussed his role in Media and our Marketing Director said she had a media agency, but she couldn’t remember their name. Following a few suggestions, she recalled one of the biggest media agencies in the world.

Shortly afterwards the Marketing Director cheerfully predicted that she might be sick later. This was because she and her colleague had been in Paris to visit some comparative stores, but had simply walked from the Gare du Nord to a restaurant, spent the next six hours there and then returned to the station, without visiting any stores.

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St Pancras Eurostar terminal. Scene of the dance.

To the relief of our media man, midway through conversation our Marketing Director fell asleep. If that is the right way to describe someone slumping forward across a table halfway through a sentence and remaining motionless for 30 minutes.

However, it is to her credit that despite being drunk she could still foretell the future. She had been right earlier: when she woke up with a start, she was sick. Only partially over our media colleague.

A moments embarrassment ensued until the Market Director’s colleague came to the rescue with a large cloth and mineral water, to somewhat aleviate the situation. A trip to the toilet helped further.

On arrival at St Pancras our media man beat a hasty retreat and we last saw our Marketing colleagues taking pictures of each other doing Can Can girl poses on the platform, infront of the Eurostar logo on the train.

As we witnessed this chain of events, we recalled all those articles about “Why doesn’t Marketing have a seat at the top table?”