I posted a few days ago my excitement of “nearly” going to MacWorld. It transpires that the European live link of the Apple announcement was in BBC Television Centre (the artist known as “A Bloody Big Room” in my last blog), and that I’d been invited. Excellent. I filed in there on Tuesday afternoon, and we ended up in a small TV studio. No chairs, but big white sheets hung from the wall. Apple juice for everyone. Oh, I thought, well, that’s this then. And we waited for a bit.

And then we were ushered into the proper studio. Studio audience banked chairing all around the studio; a bank for press at the front, and for ‘Guests’ at the back. I was a guest, so took my rightful position in the slightly more rubbish seats.

The lights went down. A man with a comedy French accent started speaking, and I quickly realised that he must have been Pascal Cagni, who is essentially the European Steve Jobs, and therefore doesn’t have a comedy French accent, just a French accent. He spoke eloquently about a few of the European things that Apple have been doing: amazingly, the iPod has a 60% share of the MP3 player market in the UK, which is quite cool. He notably didn’t say how well the iPhone had been doing, but did show some pictures of people queueing up to buy them on the first day. He wasn’t wearing a black turtleneck. We listened politely. Then we clapped when he went offstage. And then we watched as the doors were open in the Moscone Centre in San Francisco and lots of people came in, really excited to be there.

The Jobster took to the stage and did a good turn. The 60-second version is in the embedded video above (more excellent Mahalo stuff); then he stupidly announced Randy Newman, who appeared on-stage I gathered my coat. “I’ve just been to Europe,” he said. “They don’t like us very much,” he added. I’ve heard enough, I thought, and made for the exit.

The press got to play with stuff. We didn’t - we ended up in the little studio; but a small transformation had taken place during the Steve Jobs speech - the apple juice had gone, and there was some wine and some Freedom Lager (well, it’ll have to do). I drank some.

Some lovely food came out. I ate really quite a lot of that.

When the drink had nearly disappeared, and the food had turned into pudding (orange chocolate truffles, mmm), I decided to stop being an Apple guest, sling my BBC badge back on, and went in search of the BBC Club to enjoy some proper beer. And a bit more beer once we found some friends in there.

Which is why yesterday there was precious little blogging activity as I held my gently throbbing head.

My verdict, for what it’s worth:
The MacBook Air is too big (13.3″ screen) and way too expensive. I’d have been happier with a 10-inch screen and a tiddly keyboard. And a smaller price. Bah.
The iPhone firmware (I upgraded within a few hours of the announcement) is nice, though I have a feeling it’s added some oddity with the email.
The Time Capsule thing: well, I use Amazon S3 and Jungledisk, so no interest there.
And the Apple TV actually looks almost good; though I’ll continue to use the much forgotten-about Mac Mini, please.

It’s Steve Jobs’s big keynote of the year. Last year, he introduced - boom! - the iPhone. This year, he’s introducing - here’s my guess - a new thinner MacBook, called the MacBook Air, which’ll have something clever apart from being thinner; a raft of updates to the iPhone… a bigger model, new firmware for everyone with new features, an SDK to enable people to produce apps for the iPhone (but which will fall far short of what developers want)… and movie rentals.

Given I’ve pieced all the things together anyway, you might wonder why I’m still looking forward to it. But I am: the black turtlenecked one is a master in presentations, and I enjoy watching and learning.

If you’re a posh journalist in the UK, you get to be invited to a special relay of the event in a Bloody Big Room somewhere. Excitingly, I’ve managed to snaffle myself a ticket.

I’ll not be live-blogging it; I doubt the Bloody Big Room has internet access, and even if it does, there’ll be others doing that. But I’m hoping it’ll be an interesting and exciting end to the day tomorrow, and that I’ll learn something about presentation skills and watch one of the best PR companies strutting their stuff.

And I’ll then rush out and buy myself a MacBook Air. Damn you, Jobs.

Photo: David Liu. Used under licence