Luke Chess’ Cannes Diary: Day Two

Luke Chess, creative director at Clemenger BBDO, Sydney is Australia’s representative on the Cannes Outdoor Lions jury. Chess, along with most of the Australian and NZ jurors, will of course be reporting exclusively for CB.

I Should Get Outdoors More.

It’s a little known fact that I was born in England. Sevenoaks, Kent, to be precise.

However, I was only three months old when we upped and moved to Oz, and half the O positive running around inside me is actually Russian anyway (thanks Dad). This is, I hope, enough to exclude me from the blanket generalisation I’m about to type next.

English people and great travel experiences go together like custard and gravy.

Now don’t get me wrong. Some of my best friends are English. But something goes wrong when you put them in or near aircraft.

The basis on which I make this observation is twofold. Firstly, following the excellent service and attention I received from my good friends (and, coincidentally, clients) aboard a swish Virgin airliner, I was compelled to change at Heathrow for a connection to Nice. And secondly, flying amidst a bunch of predominantly English passengers is all that I’ve done for the last 30 hours.

With respect to that first point–a poster in Arrivals informed me that Heathrow Terminal 5 has been voted the best airport terminal IN THE WORLD.

I say, who else entered? Given that all T5 provided me was an hour’s wait before they’d accept my baggage, a ham and cheese croissant toasted so flat it looked like roadkill, and a ‘cappuccino’ that tasted like a scalding blend of brackish water and pencil shavings, I assume the group voting it up weren’t passengers. Maybe they were pencil-shaving suppliers?

With respect to the second point–I’d like to give a special shout out to the plummy-accepted chap who asked if I’d swap my window-seat for a cramped middle-seat further back so that he could sit next to his wife. That didn’t seem such a good deal to me, 25 hours into a long-haul flight, so I politely declined. His response–‘oh, you like looking out of the window do you, like a child?’–drew audible gasps from passengers around him. My retort–‘I’m so sorry you can’t sit next to Mummy on the plane’–would have been way cooler had I thought of it then instead of just now. Perhaps I’ll see him around over the next week.

Upon arriving at Nice though, I saw about a dozen exceptionally glamorous continental women, and a super-cool sunglasses-brandishing Latino chappie dressed all in black.

The ladies, alas, were off to a convention in Monaco. The Latino guy turned out to be a fellow judge though, and I’m now heading off to dinner with him and the rest of the jury.

Which means I should have something much more interesting, and far less discriminatory, to write about tomorrow.