One of my objectives this year is to organise the annual finance conference. I thought this would be a pretty easy box to tick, it’s no more than 50 people and I have been to enough finance conferences in my career to cobble together a decent agenda.

Life, of course, is not that simple. It was mainly, as ever, my own fault. Rather than host the conference in a city where we had an office, I decided that Paris would be a good place to go. There was some logistical sense behind the idea but basically I just like going to Paris. I figured that there would need to be at least one reconnaissance trip before the event to see the hotel that had been booked.