The September-to-December period is always a busy one, here at the Press Office of the French Trade Commission UBIFRANCE in London, and, no doubt, it is also the case for most editors and journalists.

Since you received the September issue of UBIFRANCE UK News, we have successfully organised two press trips for the same client, NFX, the agency in charge of promoting the metropolitan area of Lille and its region, in northern France.

The first one was in the biotechnology field and took place at the end of October (25-27 October). It coincided with Biofit, which is an international event aimed at stimulating and facilitating technology transfers and collaborative projects in the life-sciences sector.

Three journalists from the UK’s specialist biotech press were given the opportunity to attend Biofit, but also to meet various company executives and researchers based in northern France, and to visit local facilities of interest in the biotech field — among them Genfit’s.

The second press trip we organised for NFX was centred on the overall attractiveness of the region, where many British-based companies have set up a range of operations, also in connection with the 2012 Olympic Games. Northern France has excellent transport links to the UK and to the rest of Northern Europe, together with a plentiful supply of affordable land, which makes it an ideal logistical hub for the south of England, more particularly.

Three journalists from the British business press stayed in Lille between 23 and 25 November. As part of the press trip, they also had the opportunity to visit the Calais transport hub. Access to the north of France from London is very easy now, thanks to the Eurostar service, with journey times of about 90 minutes from one city to the other.

Among the companies the press delegation visited was Doublet, founded in France in 1832, which is Europe’s leading designer, manufacturer and installer of flags, banners, and larger tubular structures such as crowd barriers, flagpoles, urban furniture and sporting-events equipment. The company recently took part in the bidding process before the London 2012 Olympic Games Committee.

Culture was also on the menu, with a visit to the locally held Saatchi exhibition: over 60 works from Saatchi’s well-known London-based art collection were on display, as part of an exhibition entitled La Route de la Soie (i.e. The Silk Road). The exhibition was being held at the Tri Postal, one of Lille’s trendiest venues. It was, originally, a sorting office, and is situated between the city’s old railway station and the new Eurostar terminal. The building was converted in 2004, when Lille was European Capital of Culture. The Tri Postal has since hosted a number of exhibitions.

We are fast becoming experts on northern France, here at the Press Bureau, since we have also signed a major contract for the promotion of Ports Normands Associés (PNA), which stands for Ports of Normandy Authority in English — a neat and rare example of abbreviations being made to work nicely across two languages.

PNA owns and manages two French ports on the Normandy coast: Caen-Ouistreham and Cherbourg. The aim of PNA is to raise the international profile of its two ports, while developing trade and transport links with the French hinterland, on the one hand, and with the north of Europe and the south of England, on the other. More particularly, Cherbourg, as a deep-sea port, has considerable potential and could relieve the pressure there is on English Channel ports such as Southampton, which are approaching saturation point.

If you work in the maritime sector, you will have started receiving our press releases sent out on behalf of PNA in recent weeks. There are more to come.

As the selection of stories that follows will illustrate, we continue to cover a wide range of topics and stories, from IT and e-commerce to fashion and design (including web design), and from food & drink and the wine trade to railway technology, wind power and many more. We also continue to support our colleagues at the French Trade Commission UBIFRANCE in London, and you will notice that several of the press releases listed below were issued in connection with French Pavilions at trade shows where UBIFRANCE was the lead organiser of the French presence.

The year 2010 is not finished yet, and we still have much work to do before Christmas, including a few parties along the way, as is de rigueur at this time of year. The Press Office has a completely new team (apart from myself), as I explained in the September issue of UBIFRANCE UK News, and I can honestly say that it has never been so efficient and dynamic, thanks to the contribution of all those involved.

More particularly, Mary-Ann Williams, who joined as the new press officer in August, is now a seasoned attaché de presse, who will soon be able to write detailed reports in French — the ultimate accolade. Many among our readers will have been in contact with Mary-Ann over the past few months, and some of you have met her already.

The weather has been causing a few headaches recently in the UK, as we know, with heavy snowfall bringing the country to a standstill. I live in London’s outer suburbia and found that I was – almost – cut off from civilization, to the same extent that if I had been a resident of Eastern Siberia. (In fact, I suspect residents of Eastern Siberia find that the local transport network copes better with such phenomena than some train operators do, in the UK.)

Let us hope the proverbial white Christmas does not turn into days of risking life and limb while attempting to skate along icy pavements on the way to the railway station, in order to catch an improbable train that may come, one day (or not, as the case may be), as you are not going to be told by the ticket-office staff, since the said ticket office is closed, due to the fact the employees could not make it into work, because the train they intended to take was, well, cancelled, as a result of a shortage of drivers (i.e. drivers “in the right places”), who never made it to the depot because, precisely, trains they intended to travel on had, in fact, been diverted, or cancelled, or had, quite simply and literally, gone missing somewhere or other — missing in action, in a supposedly cataclysmic and allegedly unprecedented snow storm of Arctic proportions that nevertheless carried a troubling sense of déjà vu — and, when asked where those missing trains might be, on the same day, several hours later, by which time the author of these lines had succeeded in reaching another railway station that did have an under-staffed ticket office, which was open but barely functioning, he was told that no one could answer this vexed question since, upon checking one’s computer screen, one could only come to the inescapable conclusion that it was, terminally and effectively —  “frozen”.

After this Proustian flourish, I can announce that the next issue of UBIFRANCE UK News will come out in early February.

The team at the Press Bureau wishes you an enjoyable end-of-year break, a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.