Brussels

I've been to Brussels to map it up workwise. Two days of training with mainly interesting lectures, on the Constitution, on Competitiveness and the Lisbon Agenda. A visit to the Parliament just before Ms Merkel arrived. Then a third day of personal meetings in the Commission and the Council - bumped into our minister of Agriculture just as the meeting on sugar finished. It's a completely different thing to be there and to hear the talk, than to browse Europa... and I have no regrets that I wasn't present at the ministerial eGovernment conference in Manchester. If there was a pulse in Tunis last week, I guess it's just the every day life in Brussels. But why is it still so distant from Stockholm although 10 years of membership? A paper column mentioned Sweden as the nation that joined the Union when people long at last realized that the Union actually would not join Sweden...