Like many of you, yesterday I was woken from a planned lie-in by a storm.
At first I thought that I had left the lights on or that there was some problem with the intelligent key system in my room - then the radiance flickered and the tell-tale growl of the thunder made it all too clear what was happening. Then there was an ear-splitting clap and a bang, and I was awake.
The experience is an excellent reminder that whatever anyone may say, this business is still very often driven by events that are beyond its control, be they naturally occurring - as with the storm - or manmade.
The best laid plans have to be hastily re-laid. For instance, that lunch on the terrace, which seemed so perfect on paper three months in the past and a thousand kilometres to the north, suddenly seemed less appealing. The business plan had a reality check - protections and contingency plans suddenly come into their own.
Before my first Rendez-Vous, a veteran advised me to bring a folding umbrella because late summer storms are pretty common on the Med. I took his advice and then spent the next five years carrying it around from meeting to meeting in glorious sunshine and heat. Then finally it happened - the storm came and my prudent cat planning had finally paid off!
And here's the next lesson. I smugly removed my brolly and offered to share it with my unprotected companion as we strolled to our next meeting. Needless to say it wasn't big enough and one of us soaked our left shoulder while the other soaked the right. The violence of the rain made it splash up off the pavement and drenched our legs up to the knee, while our feet were soaked by the mini-lakes and rivers that had formed everywhere.
I got to my next meeting but my new partner hadn't made it - I should have stayed indoors. The year after, another storm caught me out on a terrace. I was under an awning and thought I was clear and, with a certain amount of schadenfreude, watched as those around me in the open air scattered in chaos.
The rain came down and the meeting went on. Suddenly, a loud groan came from the awning - it was bowing under the weight of half a ton of water. It creaked again, this time more shrill, and we moved just in time to avoid serious injury as its metal struts sheared in two like twigs and jagged spars crashed to the ground.
Our flimsy protections were almost useless - we had collectively gone right over the top of our cat programmes.
This market is a bit like me on my sixth Monte Carlo - loaded up with sun cream and hats when with hindsight gumboots were the order of the day.
Today, missing an alfresco lunch because of a shower might be deemed a natural catastrophe, and forgetting to bring the right electrical adaptor for one's laptop a manmade one, but it only takes a run of real disasters to bring back risk aversion and genuine fear to those that have not experienced them before.
And do remember the sun will be out later - the factor 30 and shades still need to be in your bag.
To read the second of our Monte Carlo dailies, please click here
Mark Geoghegan,
Editor-in-Chief,
The Insurance Insider