So now the flat smells of burning as the heating goes on for the first time since spring. Winter has well and truly arrived. As a season it always seems such a good idea until you actually get there, and then all the snow, and the warm evening spent inside while the rain batters on the window never turn out to be quite as fun as you thought they would.

Hmmm…

I feel absolutely wiped out after last night. I don’t know why. It wasn’t that late, but I did regret not being back in time to get the car before it was locked in at the station (or being in a fit state to drive it) when I was queueing up for a bus in the cold and rain this morning. Hideous way to travel.

Anyhow, early nights are going to have to be in order if I’m going to get back into a gym routine, which has been sadly lacking for the last month … er six weeks almost … and with the amount of edible junk coming into the office at the moment is seriously in order. Either that or not eating the junk, and I’m sure doing the gym is the easier of those two options.

01h00: It’s so cold my ears sting. How did that happen? I turn my back for two weeks and winter arrives. The long walk from the station didn’t help, but I was back in Chelmsford way too late to retrieve the car before it was locked in for the night, and in fairness I wasn’t in a state for driving. Fell up the stairs leaving tonight’s party, then fell over the step of the place we were drinking, then fell on the stairs of the tube. Most undignified.

It’s strange being back at work knowing it’s the start of my last full week on the mag. I’m slowly clearing away my clutter, and with every day that passes my desk looks less like my own. So does my cupboard. By the last day it’ll be just me, meercat and the cat flap postcard on my window sill, and the next day: nothing.

My sneaky plan of making sure I was out of the office on my birthday, and several days on either side of the day itself failed – as it does every year – to ensure it was allowed to quietly slip by. Card and vouchers from the team at half five, which considering I’ll be leaving them in less than 10 days, was very generous.

What a fortnight. London – Paris – St Remy – Avignon – Lyon – Geneva – Milan – Rome – Venice – Paris – London. And a whole load of little places in between. Thousands of miles by train. A fair few by boat on the Venetian canals.

Sleeping on swaying top bunks in communal railway carriages, our backpacks crunched into tiny crevices above our heads. Early morning journeys along the shores of the Swiss mountain lakes as steamers emerge from the mists rising up from the surface of the water. Provencal views of endless olive groves, contrasting sharply with the mad, dangerous, terrifying traffic of Rome where you take your life in your hands every time you step from the kerb.

It has been an extraordinary fortnight, and it is too late to write about it here and now, but I will do. In the meantime, a gallery of seven photos.

So we made it to Rome, eventually. We passed across the border into Italy, accompanied by smiley border police and their guns who checked our passports two times each a day late.

But that’s certainly not a bad thing. By not travelling at night we got to pass through the mountains in daylight, and the views were extraordinary. Lakes that went on for miles. Rocky outcrops that towered high above us, and a strange blue mist that glided across the surface of ever body of water and gave the whole journey a mysterious, etheral air.

Rome is hot. It is also very busy. There is far too much traffic (and far too little in the way of understandable local public transport) for my liking and until today, our last day before we move on to Venice, I would have said without a doubt that I wouldn’t be coming back. I’d seen everything but the Vatican and could quite happily scratch the city off the list of ‘things to be done in a lifetime’.

Today, though, we did the only thing left to do – Vatican City itself. What an extraordinary place. So much wealth squeezed into so small a city. You really don’t know where to look next. Gold leaf on every wall. Chandileers, priceless art, letters from Galilleo and Michaelangelo, and from the top of the dome a view of the city unmatched by any other.

Religious or not, you can’t help but be touched by the place in one way or another. The whole place breathes serene power, and a feeling of calm and assuredness pervades every hall, chapel and coridoor.

We found the Sistine Chapel a disappointment. Probably only because it is always built up so much, but other than that I would defy anyone to come here and not be impressed.

After four days of walking 13 hours a day, though, our legs are tired. Our feet and backs ache and we’re looking forward to four days in Venice being punted around by a burly gondaleer.

Oh, it’s all getting very complicated. We’re stuck on the wrong side of the Swiss border at the moment. Everyone is being very nice, but when euros don’t work here, you arrive without a hotel and no ticket back out things get a bit sticky. We spent hours walking miles last night trying to find somewhere to stay. Probably the biggest mistake was passing through the border controls. Perhaps if we’d stayed on the French side of the fence things would have been easier.

Still, it’s an adventure and after a meet and greet with a friendly man behind the CFF (Swiss railways) information desk it looks as thought we may have found a route out across the mountains to Milano Centrale and on south from there to Rome.

Honestly, I’m starting to feel like the Von Trap Family children making a swift escape.

Last day in the office for a fortnight. Woohoo. I am so glad to be having a break. I know it’s only three weeks since I was last off, but I feel exhausted. We’re working harder than we have for months at the moment and to be honest I feel a bit guilty about leaving everyone there for a fortnight while I’m gone.

Come to that, I feel a bit guilty about leaving permanently in a few weeks. Things are working out fairly well from the look of things and my leaving date is considerably closer than I’d expected, being as I’m on three months’ notice, and as I edge towards it, and discussions on successors are already taking place, I can’t help but feel a pang of… nostalgia, I guess it is. After six years on the same mag you come to think of it as more than a job, I suppose. I’ll certainly miss it. And the people I worked with there.

But then the team has fragmented so much over the last six months. In fact, the whole industry has fragmented. Ben has left the industry for a while, Dave has returned. Mark has switched mags. Leo has gone freelance. Ems has switched mags. I’m switching platforms, mags, publishing houses and publishing cycles. PCW has two new writers. Nigel has departed for several months’ travel.

These things always happen in bunches. One person leaves and it causes a shuffle around, and pretty much every mag in the industry has someone new, although it’s almost always a familiar face, poached from the competition.

But anyway, holiday is what’s first and foremost on my mind. My bag is packed, my valuables stashed with friends, and the alarm clock is set. It’s Saturday, just gone midnight, and that means that in four and a bit hours I’ll be getting up again to catch a train to Paris. What a horrible thought. Still, the net result will be worthwhile. St Remy by tea time and then, in four days, Rome.

I doubt I’ll get onto the net until then, so no updates here for a few days. St Remy is poky and pretty and not known for its Internet cafes. It’s the town in which Nostradamus was born, van Gogh died and dad has lived for the last 10 or so years. A perfect French village at the foot of the mountains, not far from the coast. Round, green, with a great big church and cute little lanes down which you can fit no cars. Around the edge there are olive groves and fields full of sunflowers. In the centre there is a market square and a raft of pretty little cafes.

London will be 500 miles away, perhaps more, but it will feel like more than 1,000.

It’s so late it’s tomorrow already. It’s been like this all week. Three weeks, in fact, since getting back from Wales, in fact, and so September entries on here are looking decidedly spase. Last September I missed not one single day.

Where is the time going? I guess it’s working late every night to make up the numbers while we’re a depleted team, although in fairness I can’t use that excuse tonight – I was home early for an appointment.

That done, around to see mum and Andrew to say goodbyes and make sure their network will stand up to two weeks of unsupervised use. I don’t think I’ll be much good as a technician from the other side of Europe. It involved a trip to PC World, where I got distracted by the shiney wireless networking kit but resisted a splurge.

That kind of cut down on the available packing time, so as things stand the lounge is a cluster of small islands, each one a pile of folded t-shirts, tucked-in socks, or jumpers I doubt I’ll either need or fit in my back-pack.

We shall see.

Played Moonraker in the background, for about the 777th time. My excuse was that it features Venice and so was good ‘research’ for the week after next but I suspect Lonely Planet will be more informative.

So; tickets, money; passport; map. I think I’m ready to go.

No news is good news. If you don’t mind spending your days as a talking head.

I’ve never got the hang of charging my phone, so it’s usually run down and switched off for at least a day before I start to wonder why I’m not getting calls. So plugging it this morning after two days of silence it wasn’t an enormous surprise to find two missed calls from ITN. One left yesterday morning at half seven about online shopping and another from this morning about piracy. Both for radio, and both expired.

Ho-humm. Not that I was particularly in the mood for radio today.

So anyway, an hour later it rings again. Channel 5 this time. Could I could do a pundit spot on a wooden stool that swivels just a bit too much for comfort? No probs. Two thirty, Grays Inn Road? Fine.

So I walked the mile or so to the grey ITN building on Grays Inn Road where I spent every Thursday evening for two and a half years. Not a single thing had changed. Same Big Issue woman on the corner out front. Same fish in the tank. Same smell from the canteen in the atrium. It was interesting to see the inside of Channel 5 News, though, which I’d only ever seen through the glass doors before.

Inside it is a disgusting mess. The guest-greeting couch is a nasty beige/pink monstrosity with a sharp pointed back that digs into your spine, and the set itself is battered and chipped. Around the back of the day-glo pillars that look so good on the telly the paint is peeling off, presumably where they have been knocked by ladders, feet and cameras.

And it’s all so small. I know things look bigger on TV, but the whole newsroom and studio was about the size of my flat. Even the stuff I used to do for Sky looked better behind the scenes, which I found very surprising.

Anyhow, they perched me on the stool in front of a big green backdrop on which they projected an iPod and then fired fifteen minutes of questions. I’m pretty sure it went well, although I never saw it. I was in pilates when it went out, doing all I could to absolve my gym guilt. They seemed happy enough, though, which I guess is a good sign, and as they probably only wanted 15 – 20 seconds tops there must have been something usable somewhere in the middle.

If I’d known, I’d have dressed up smarter, but then Channel 5 is a very jeans-and-t-shirty channel so I guess it looked OK.

Then again, it was immediately followed by At Home with the Eubanks and as we all know, Chris Eubank is, apparently (bizarely enough) Britain’s Best Dressed Man.

I think I let the side down.

It’s like living in a laundry here at the moment. And so hot! The flat is covered in half-dry clothes, trapped in a washing cycle between two weeks away from home cat sitting and two weeks away from home travelling Italy on the trains.

It looks like Pompeii is off the menu now – it’s too far south.

So anyway, it’s slowly working its way through the machine as I’m working my way through a mountain of work at work (nice sentence structure). Things are gearing up for Christmas, I guess, and to prove the point I got my first invite for a Christmas do today. It’s happening on Thursday.

Nice timing. I suspect I’ll not make it.

The office is a strange place at the moment. So many people away or working from home. Or elsewhere, having left. It’s quite quiet and almost a bit lonely. Nobody to lunch with now Mark has gone. It’s just as well K is still around or I’d be tea-running on my own, aswell.

It’s times like this when you need an office pet.

The weekend was fun but busy. Spent Saturday wizzing around picking up the stuff I needed to stock both my fridge and mum’s. She was back from holiday with a bad back and has been bed-bound ever since. Saturday night, dinner with Trevor and Jon and the cats. It felt like ages since we’d all met up, and in fact, thinking back, it was the night of the four hour journey. When you consider we used to meet every weekend – at least – it’s a sorry state of affairs.

So anyway, Jon cooked us spaghetti and we ate it in the conservatory where we couldn’t quite see Mars rising, then decamped for music and mints until it was time for Trevor to head to bed for his shift.

Not that he’s the kind of person whose ‘shift work’ involves use of a bed – merely the hours beforehand.

Five. In the morning. Not the time I wanted to be getting up, yesterday morning, but it had its compensations. The cat thought it was good I was out of bed, and as I drove across the flood plain the fog was hanging low across the damp land like limp fallen clouds.

I missed the train by going home for a decent camera, deciding at the last minute I wanted something better than a pocket snapper. I needn’t have worried: I was still the first at Waterloo. So we decamped to the first class lounge to eat the free ice cream and pick up magazines.

The train crawled through the suburbs and most of Kent. Another damning indictment of the state of the British railways, and by the time we hit the edge of Paris a pile of half-read copies of the Guardian, Time and the Spectator cluttered the gaps on the table between the cups and glasses and breakfast plates.

The weather was fantastic. Paris was bathed in brilliant sunlight and sat smart and pretty below clear blue skies. The streets were full of honking traffic, though, and it took us half an hour to fight our way across town to a hotel with the most impressive toilets. When you flushed them, a little arm popped out, on the end of which was one of those squeegy mops. It plonked it down on the seat and then span the seat around to clean it for the next person. Talk about catering for the paranoid.

Anyway, that’s where we had lunch, after which we were herded into a meeting room for a very short demo of what is perhaps the most impressive bit of technology I have seen in my whole time at PCW.

I thought we were just going to see another Aibo, and we did, but at the other end of the room was Qrio, the cutest humanoid ever invented. He sat there on a chair watching us as we sat watching the presentation and then, as we got up and crowded around him he stood up and waved, said hello and then did a little dance to welcome us to Paris.

The way he moved was extraordinary. He was so smooth and natural, and frighteningly human-like. Try and knock him over and he’ll either compensate by changing his posture or, if he can’t, put out his arms to stop himself hitting the floor, or adopt a position that will save him from harm.

Perhaps most spooky of all, though, is that fact he can talk. No – not talk – chat. With a vocabulary of 60,000 words he will sit and talk to you, listening to what you say, understanding it, and chatting back. Unfortunately he only does this in Japanese at the moment, so there was no chance of any of us sitting down for a friendly chin-wag, but if it works as well as they say I will be truly impressed.

I want one. Sadly, though, that’s unlikely ever to happen, as at the moment the Qrio we saw was one of only 100 in the whole world, and as of yet there aren’t any plans to sell them as consumer products.

Which is a shame.

Anyhow, that was the end of the work for the day so Gordon and I took off in the sunshine and walked down to the Eiffel Tower.

Of course we climbed the steps to the Trocadero so we could take the regular cliched shots of it across the fountains and the river, just like the other 500 tourists around us, then mooched around snapping the statues (or snapping pictures of Gordon snapping the statues, just to gain perspective…)

So, a couple of dozen shots squeezed off we wandered slowly to the foot of the tower then, seeing that the queues were short, bought tickets and rode the lifts to the top.

It must be six or seven years since I last did that, and the weather could not have been more different. The last time around the skies were grey and we were wrapped up in coats and scarves. This time we had the sleeves of our jackets tied around our waists and still we were hot. The sun beat down and warmed the gentle breeze that we could feel at the top, while all around us as far as the eye could see the streets of Paris spread out in their ordered, tidy way.

Through the middle a stream of mercury, dazzling silver in the light of the sun, was the Seine, meandering slowly towards the sea.

It was busy at the top, of course. Full of tourists taking pictures of one another. I suppose Gordon and I should have done that, too, but instead, when I’d exhausted the opportunities afforded by the view, I took pictures of the ground, and looking back on all the shots of the afternoon, it is those, showing the structure of the tower plumetting down towards the ground, that are my favourite.

We didn’t have time to dawdle, unfortunately, and so within two hours of buying our tickets we were back in a taxi, speeding through the mad Parisian traffic towards the hotel, leaving us precisely seven minutes to check in, freshen up, change for dinner and be back down in the lobby in time to meet the others for our trip to the Moulin Rouge.

Now I’d always assumed the Moulin Rouge would be horribly seedy. It’s not in a particularly nice part of Paris, and the last time I was there I’d been grabbed by two prostitutes simultaneously – one on either arm – who had tried to drag me off in opposite directions.

So, I was very surprised by the whole night.

Cameras are forbidden, so we took no pictures, but inside is a large tiered dining room that would happily seat 300, I’d guess. The roof is a striped canopy like you’d see above an oversized market stall. The table cloths are starched white and aside from the small lamps set upon them the whole place is illuminated by dusty old street lamps painted orange, yellow and red.

Red.

It is everywhere. As you enter, you walk along red carpet. You push through the double doors into the dining room and all you see is the dotted terrain of a hundred tiny red lamp shades on the table tops. It has done its branding well.

Better than it does its food. But then that’s not why you go there. You go there for one thing only – the show, notorious for its bare-brested ladies and lavish costumes.

And most certainly there is plenty of that.

Forty, fifty, sixty girls. Hundreds, if not thousands of shoes. Enough feathers to fly you south for the winter. Enough breasts to feed a starving orphanage. And there were guys, too. Cute, with defined, smiling faces, strong manly arms and perfect hair. Their chests were mighty barrels, their stomachs firm and creased along the lines of muscle.

They danced on the stage. On stairways. Hanging from wires suspended above our tables as we drank the €140 bottles of wine. At one point the whole wooden stage drew back and from beneath it rose up a tank, the size of a one-car garage. It was filled to within a foot of the rim with water, and in the water swam six fat pythons. Ten feel long and as thick as a dancer’s leg. One of the females leapt into the tank and danced beneath the water with the snakes, dragging them down from where they lazed on the surface, forcing them to wrap themselves around her before they pulled away and swam back up for air.

Again and again she pulled at the snakes, spinning around with them in her arms and finally lifting one up above her head as the tank gracefully slid down beneath the stage and the Moulin Rouge was plunged into darkness.

The show lasted two hours and not once in all that time did it stop. Even when it was necessary to change the sets it continued, with entertainers keeping us amused, each one more spectacular than the last.

There was the man who could balance on the most precariously stacked barrels. There was the man who could juggle ping pong balls without using his hand – stuffing three into his mouth and then launching them high up into the air before catching them, in his mouth once again, as they came back down. On and on and on he went; surely he mouth and tongue must have got tired.

And then there was the ventriloquist, and cause for me to be glad I had swapped seats with Gordon. Sat on the end of our table, he was ripe for plucking, and so was grabbed by the roving ventriloquist, who had already used a live dog as his dummy. Gordon was made to look as though he was saying the most stupid things in front of us all, but he carried it off with style and confidence and when it was all over and the room was emptying out, those who filed past our table recognised him and congratulated him on his performance.

I had had a lucky escape. I was supposed to have been sitting in that seat, but at the last minute had swapped with Gordon, convinced it was a prime location for being whisked up onto the stage. And I was right.

It was a night of pure spectacle. The campest performance any of us had ever seen, and a clue as to what it might be like if France ever won the Eurovision.

We talked about it all the way back to the hotel, and then for much of the evening as we sat up until two sipping over-priced cocktails in the bar. I was so glad of my bed when I got to it that I fell asleep right away, and slept through until I was woken by the phone at eight. That’s 7am at home.

I ignored it, and the call went to voicemail. Half an hour later, it came again. Chirp-chirp. Chirp-chirp. This time around it was incessant, and so I picked it up. It was ITN. They wanted to know if I could do them an interview. There and then, on the spot.

I agreed. There was no point asking if I could have some time to do a bit of research as I had no computer on which to look things up. And so I stood up in the hope it would make me sound a little more awake and took a sensationalist tack in the knowledge that it would at least give them a lot of useful sound bites even if I wasn’t quite on the right subject.

To be fair, it was as well they rang, as it forced me into the shower and down to breakfast in time to catch the last of the buffet before it was tidied away for the day.

We had nothing scheduled until 11.30, which is always a bonus. Press trips invariably involve late nights, and so late mornings are a welcome counterbalance.

At the appointed time, then, we crossed the road to the Palais du Congres and had our journalistic integrity checked by the clipboard-toting girls at the registration desks.

It was an excellent exhibition. Pretty much everything Sony produces gathered together in one place and overseen by hundreds of clued-up guides. Everything is hands-on, everything is touch-and-play. Nothing is out of bounds and hardly any question will go unanswered. More companies should do that, but few would be able to fill the Palais du Congres on their own.

And so Gordon and I walked from stand to stand and room to room, breaking only once, very briefly, for a drink in the press suite. There was so much to see we were lucky to fit it all in, but made it back to the hotel in time for the bus to the Eurostar happy that we had seen all we needed and plenty more besides.

I could happily have slept all the way home, but Eurostars – nothing more than a repainted TGV – are not built for sleeping. The Thalys is the same. The windows are too far from the seats, and so if you want to rest your head on them you must stretch out your neck across an air-con vent that blows you with a fierce cold draft.

No matter. I amused myself with the gentle French countryside as it pulled by at a startling rate, then turned the pages of Time as we crawled through Kent and south London, embarassed by the contrast.