Well, I thought that was above average for a Who Christmas special. The jokes were funny, the whole thing seemed disciplined in its self-indulgence, Bill Bailey got to do his thing, Claire Skinner is excellent, and it fitted well with the Zeitgeist. Good stuff.

Luke 2:14, as it might have been presented by the EU:

[bg] Слава на Бога във висините, И на земята мир между човеците, в които е Неговото благоволение!
[es] Gloria en las alturas a Dios, Y en la tierra paz, y en el hombre buena voluntad!
[cs] Sláva na výsostech Bohu, a na zemi pokoj, lidem dobrá vůle!
[da] Ære være Gud i det højeste! og Fred paa Jorden! i Mennesker Velbehag!
[de] Ehre sei Gott in der Höhe und Frieden auf Erden und den Menschen ein Wohlgefallen!
[et] Au olgu Jumalale kõrges ja rahu maa peal hea tahtega inimestele!
[el] Δόξα ἐν ὑψίστοις θεῷ καὶ ἐπὶ γῆς εἰρήνη ἐν ἀνθρώποις εὐδοκία!
[en] Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will towards men!
[fr] Gloire soit à Dieu dans les lieux très-hauts, que la paix soit sur la terre et la bonne volonté dans les hommes!
[ga] Glóir do Dhía ann sna hárduibh, agus síodhcháin ar an dtalamh, deaghthoil do na dáoinibh!
[it] Gloria a Dio ne’ luoghi altissimi, pace in terra fra gli uomini ch’Egli gradisce!
[lv] Gods Dievam augstībā, un miers virs zemes laba prāta cilvēkiem!
[lt] Šlovė Dievui aukštybėse, o žemėje ramybė ir palankumas žmonėms!
[hu] Dicsõség a magasságos mennyekben az Istennek, és e földön békesség, és az emberekhez jó akarat!
[mt] Glorja lil Alla fl-ogħla tas-smewwiet, u sliem fl-art lill-bnedmin li jogħġbu lilu!
[nl] Ere zij God in de hoogste hemelen, en vrede op aarde, in de mensen een welbehagen!
[pl] Chwała na wysokościach Bogu, a na ziemi pokój, w ludziach dobre upodobanie!
[pt] Glória a Deus nas maiores alturas, e paz na terra entre os homens de boa vontade!
[ro] Slavă lui Dumnezeu în locurile prea înalte, şi pace pe pămînt între oamenii plăcuţi Lui!
[sk] Sláva na výsostiach Bohu a na zemi pokoj ľuďom dobrej vôle!
[sl] Zhaſt bodi Bogu u’viſsokoti, inu myr na Semli, inu v’Zhlovekih dobra vola!
[fi] Kunnia Jumalalle korkeuksissa, ja maassa rauha ihmisten kesken, joita kohtaan hänellä on hyvä tahto!
[sv] Ära vare Gud i höjden, och frid på jorden, bland människor till vilka han har behag!

For Slovenian I took the 1584 translation by Jurij Dalmatin, so the style is a bit archaic (this is even more true of the Greek of course). A more modern Slovenian text would be “Slava Bogu na višavah in na zemlji mir ljudem, ki so mu po volji!” And a modern Greek version, though of course heartily disapproved of by traditionalists, is “Δόξα στον Θεό εν υψίστοις, και επάνω στη γη ειρήνη, σε ανθρώπους ευδοκίας.”

Often by looking at translations one gets a better insight into the nuance (or ambiguity) of the original text, and doing this post has been a case in point. I grew up ‘knowing’ that the angels wish peace to men of goodwill on Earth. But by far the majority of the translations above separate out the three parts of the sentence – i) Glory to God in the highest; and 2) peace on earth; 3) εὐδοκία in humanity – and I must say I find that much more convincing. (Note how the King James Version tries to have it both ways by inserting a sneaky comma.)

That word εὐδοκία is particularly tricky. Most translations go for the local equivalent of ‘good will’, a straight etymological reading, εὖ meaning ‘good’ and δοκέω ‘to think’, no doubt strongly influenced by the Vulgate’s ‘gloria in altissimis Deo et in terra pax in hominibus bonae voluntatis.’ But I find εὐδοκία cropping up more in terms of satisfaction of a desire, rather than benevolence, in its other New Testament uses. Perhaps a better synonym for the purpose would be ‘contentment’.

The Aramaic text, which I suppose is how the shepherds (if they existed) would have perceived the experience, is ܬܫܒܘܚܬܐ ܠܐܠܗܐ ܒܡܪܘܡܐ ܘܥܠ ܐܪܥܐ ܫܠܡܐ ܘܤܒܪܐ ܛܒܐ ܠܒܢܝ ܐܢܫܐ – and this has significant differences; ܠܒܢܝ ܐܢܫܐ  are ‘sons of men’, rather than humanity in general, and ܘܤܒܪܐ ܛܒܐ seems to be ‘good hope’ – though ܘܤܒܪܐ is close to ܣܒܥܘ, which is much closer in meaning to satisfaction and fulfillment, were it not for that tricky ܘ at the start rather than the end of the word. Of course Luke’s Greek is the authentic original text here, and the Aramaic that we have is a much later translation. Or at least that’s what most people think…

That final word in the English version, ‘men’, should be understood as directed at all humanity rather than half of us – ἐν ἀνθρώποις, not ἐν ἀνδράσι (if I have that right). Again I used the King James Version above to illustrate the difficulty, rather than because I particularly like it.

Anyway, I wish ευδοκίας to all, particularly if we interpret it as satisfaction or fulfillment; and peace on Earth if we can manage it too.

Normally I have several books on the go at any given time, reading fifty pages of one before switching to another. Last night I realised that I couldn’t put down The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest, as Lisbeth Salander’s impending trial for the attempted murder of her father unlocks a chain of conspiracy within Sweden’s intelligence services which takes us readers right to the top of the government. Larsson’s story-telling technique is fascinating: he lays out his characters’ knowledge and intentions in great (though not always complete) detail, which makes the intrusion of brutal violence into the narrative all the more vivid. He also paints a compelling and meticulous picture of the political and physical geography of Sweden, reminiscent of Rankin (except that Rankin is less accurate on the politics). But most of all he makes the reader care about the fate of his central character, and in the most effective scene (a courtroom confrontation with a crooked psychiatrist) appeals for the essential humanity of those who have been written out of society for failure to conform. A brilliant conclusion to this superb trilogy.

We had an exciting general strike yesterday in protest at the government’s planned austerity measures, or as a friend of mine put it on Facebook, “it’s like an ant kicking the other ants in the backside on the assumption that the ant-eater will feel the pain”. Certainly it’s difficult to see how the transport strike will seriously inconvenience those with any power, while at the same time it reminds those of us dependent on the lousy service provided by SNCB / NMBS of the grotesque sense of entitlement which the staff of Belgium’s largest employer seem to enjoy.

One enterprising group of passengers proposes a counter protest. From this site you can download a fake ticket to hand over to your conductor next time you travel by train to indicate your disapproval of yesterday’s action. It’s of course rather unfair to take out one’s feelings on the train staff, when the real problem is clearly one of corporate culture overall; I don’t even particularly blame the unions who are just playing the game according to the usual script. But this seems to me a harmless and sane response.

(For a satirical take on the recent public sector strike in another EU state see here.)

…when you get a message with the subject line "hey" and the message consists simply of the hyperlinked phrase "Click here to see the attached photos".

That in itself is enough to set off the warning bells. But when the email comes from the account of the former president of a European republic, who I suspect has never said 'hey' to anyone in his life (and who I also suspect might not know how to set up a hyperlink to connect photographs to the message) then I can be pretty certain that it is bogus!

A prequel to this year's Torchwood: Miracle Day series, which fairly leapt off the online shelves at me when I realised it was by James Goss, whose contributions to the off-screen Whoniverse have been pretty impressive, and that two of the readers – the main two, it turns out, the other four getting only a chapter or so each – are Kai "Rhys Williams" Owen, who did such a good job of Goss's Ghost Train, and Clare Corbett, who likewise did well sharing The Hounds of Artemis and carrying Dead of Winter on her own.

I was not disappointed. Although the plot itself is a pretty straightforward cut-and-paste from The Midwich Cuckoos and Children of the Corn, Goss puts together a very compelling story of creepy children in a village where nothing is quite right, with the added factor of Gwen Cooper and Rhys Williams and their very small baby trying to work out what is going on and also incidentally not get killed. I have been generally enjoying the Torchwood novels, which as a series are some of the hidden gems of Who fiction, but this is one of the best. The audio brings us Kai Owen's voice to do a warm, confused but courageous Rhys, with Clare Corbett doing a convincing interpretation of Eve Myles and carrying her chapters extremely impressively (she is really good at accents). Apart from the basic horror of the story, there's some bleak office humour about the bureaucracy of atrocity, and some tough teenagers who are central to the story. Very strongly recommended.

Last year I read The Aïda Protocol, the second in a series of earnest graphic novels about the work of Liberal MEPs in the European Parliament; Operation Red Dragon is the first of them, published in 2006, in which our hero Elisa Correr busts open illegal arms dealing with the government of a very large Asian country and incidentally liberates her lover from captivity as a result of getting a resolution passed in the plenary session. So there is a certain amount of wishful thinking (and also an awful lot of info-dumping). But I did like the artists’ faithfulness to the European Parliament’s architecture, both in Brussels and Strasbourg, and the idea of MEPs blocking an economic deal on the grounds of human rights concerns seems a little less improbable to me after last week.

Little to add to what I wrote when I first read these, except to add that in the context of the Eight Doctor Adventures as a series the story seemed slightly more rambling than taken on its own.

Clare College – 2012 Alumnus of the Year announced
Alice Welbourn, who has spent her career working to raise the profile of HIV positive women.

Paul Cornell: Social Networking.
I love the internet. I live here. You know at parties how people, if the conversation tends towards the online, will say 'oh, I prefer real human interaction to all this Twitter nonsense'? I stare at them in horror and go 'are you *insane*?! Twitter *is* real human interaction, turned up to the maximum!

The hunt for Britain's ghost trains – This Britain – UK – The Independent
The 11.36 from Paddington to Gerrards Cross is designed to be as inconvenient for passengers as possible. Why?

Regarding Christopher | The Nation
So far, most of the eulogies of Christopher have come from men, and there’s a reason for that. He moved in a masculine world, and for someone who prided himself on his wide-ranging interests, he had virtually no interest in women’s writing or women’s lives or perspectives.

Life in the UK Test website
How much do you know about the British way of life????

Zombie Borders – NYTimes.com
June 13th, 1990, was a historic day for weather forecasting in Germany. For the very first time, the weather map on the Tagesschau showed the newly reunited country’s international borders.

Transdniestrian Leader Out Of Presidential Runoff
…and another one bites the dust, as Smirnov comes third in his bid for election; Moscow having dumped him rather publicly.

Last Dictator Standing
Mugabe, Gaddafi and Kim Jong-Il together at last!

NYT: In Kim Jong-il Death, an Extensive Intelligence Failure
Kim Jong-il, the enigmatic North Korean leader, died on a train at 8:30 a.m. Saturday in his country. Forty-eight hours later, officials in South Korea still did not know anything about it – to say nothing of Washington…

Final exam — Crooked Timber
I stopped giving in-class final exams a few years ago. It was a light-bulb moment, brought on by a student who needed a disability accommodation… I asked myself why I was offering in-class final exams in the first place.

Seasonal flame bait – Charlie's Diary
1. The USA is already a functional oligarchy.
2. It's impossible to be elected to high office without so much money that anyone in high office is, by definition, part of the 0.1%
3. Public austerity is a great cover for the expropriation of wealth by the rich
4. Starving poor people with guns and nothing to lose scare the rich
5. Worse, the poor have smartphones.
6. The oligarchs are therefore pre-empting the pre-revolutionary situation by militarizing the police
7. Modern communications technologies (including the internet) provide people with a limitless channel for self-expression
8. So I infer that the purpose of SOPA is to close the loop, and allow the oligarchy to shut down hostile coordinating sites as and when the anticipated revolution kicks off.

No Country for Innocent Men | Mother Jones
There is no formal legal means in Texas to confess to a crime for which someone else has been convicted. "I guess you can contact whatever law enforcement agency handled the case," says Lubbock District Attorney Matt Powell. That, of course, is precisely what Johnson did when he copied his petition to the district attorney in 1995.
"Here you've got a guilty guy saying, 'I did this crime,'" says Jeff Blackburn, chief counsel for the Innocence Project of Texas. "All the ears went deaf and all the eyes went blind."

In the Wake of Protest: One Woman's Attempt to Unionize Amazon – Vanessa Veselka
"to make the case that Amazon is anti-union barely approaches relevance. Most companies are anti-union, that's not important right now. What made Amazon unique was the way in which it was."

Ciaran Barnes, the Boston College Blackguard Outed as Internet Troll | The Broken Elbow
More detail on dubious journalistic practice in Belfast.

Ciaran Barnes: ‘journalistic ethics on a par…’
Journalist trolls popular Northern Ireland political website.

Belgian beer: Brewed force | The Economist
On Belgian beers: "1,131 at the last count. Apart from six Trappist ales and other abbey beers, it churns out lagers such as Stella Artois and its stablemate Jupiler, the more popular brew in Belgium. Tipplers can also choose from an array of wheat beers, brown ales, red beers from West Flanders, golden ales, saison beers based on old farmhouse recipes, and any number of regional brews. Oddest are the austere, naturally fermented lambic beers of Brussels and the nearby Senne valley, a throwback to the days before yeast was tamed. These anachronisms have survived only in Belgium."

The UK and Europe: how much damage did Cameron's veto do? | openDemocracy
Kirsty Hughes, again: "Rather than playing a major influential role to stop a euro-meltdown, or being in a position to lead through the crisis if the euro did implode, Cameron has relegated the UK to the sidelines whichever way the euro crisis plays out. It is a deeply unimpressive result for a country and a government that likes to assert it is still a global player. And it is no way to defend the UK's interests."

More Action, Better Service: How to Strengthen the European External Action Service
"Roughly one year after its establishment, the EEAS still suffers from a number of design flaws. It has an insufficient resource base and there is a lack of genuine buy-in on the parts of both the member states and the European Commission." And one other big problem not named but shown in the picture. Informed but slightly wishful analysis by an insider who I very much respect.

The European Council on Foreign Relations | How to stop the demilitarisation of Europe
European publics feel safe from armed attack; have become disillusioned with the doctrine of liberal interventionism; and are unconvinced by attempts to conjure ‘new threats’ to justify defence spending. Nick Witney suggests that such reactions are understandable, but dangerously short-sighted. <- Excellent piece including some reflections on what armies are actually for.

Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg as promoter of Internet freedom
It was barely a year ago that a web-based collaboration of scientists and citizens demonstrated that Mr zu Guttenberg's doctoral thesis was shamelessly plagiarised from over 130 different sources… Commissioner Kroes justified her choice of consultant saying she wanted "talent, not saints". Yet surely the fact that Mr zu Guttenberg's doctoral thesis is barren of original thought shows that the one thing he lacks is talent… Ultimately, when the commodity you are trading in is trust, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg is the last person you want fighting your corner.

Doctor Who News: Big Finish: Jago and Litefoot reunited with the Doctor!
Christopher Benjamin and Trevor Baxter will once again reprise the Victorian investigative duo alongside Tom Baker as The Doctor and Mary Tamm as Romana in The Justice of Jalxar. The adventure is written by John Dorney and will form part of the second season of The Fourth Doctor Adventures, to be released in 2013.

Doctor Who Timeline
Lovely graphic of DW history! (though with some inaccuracies)

Living History (Part One) « Ardent Reader
How to make me feel old: "I wasn’t even a year old when Bill Clinton became the 42nd President of the United States, and I was nine when he left office."

What makes us better people? I’m starting to think it’s mostly not our character…
"I am spending a lot of time thinking about what characterises systems that set people up to do well, and systems that set people up to do less well. My current showcase system is single queuing. People behave better when there is a single queuing system in place, and they are much more relaxed. In parallel queues, they twitch in case the other queue is moving more quickly or someone jumps in or they are in the wrong place and will miss their turn. Their behaviour is more defensive and less kind."

BBC News – Morocco's fish fight: High stakes over Western Sahara
MEPs rejected the deal in its current form by 326 votes to 296 on Wednesday, which will lead to its immediate suspension. They voted instead for a new protocol that is economically, ecologically and socially sustainable, and that fully respects international law.
Back in Laayoune, Ismaili Mohamed Barek, 34, had been hoping for such an outcome. He did a six months of work experience on a fishing boat, but said that he and his fellow Sahrawis were offered nothing at the end of it. "Fishing is dominated almost 100% by Moroccans," he said. "Because of this we want to see the pillaging of Sahrawi wealth stop, and we want an end to the agreement with the EU."
euwesternsahara

Interview: Russell T Davies on shelving US projects, his partner’s cancer diagnosis and coming home
RTD tells all to the Pink Paper.

An intimate look at ancient Rome
When you visit sites of ancient Roman civilization, it's hard to know where to look first: Temples, markets, brothels and baths all draw the eye and the imagination. But if you really want to know what it was like to live in ancient Rome, you may want to consider the humble toilet.

Last time I watched The Romans, just over two years ago, it left me rather cold. On F’s suggestion we watched the first two episodes last night and the other two this evening, and I found I loved it (and so did he). Last time round I was watching while waking up early and jetlagged on a particularly arduous field trip; shows how the mood you are in can make a difference to your appreciation of, well, anything.

A survey of the history of Rome from 1300 to 1590, which covers the history of Rienzi (which I knew nothing about), the Great Schism (which I did know something about) and the government of Rome once the Popes had returned. See also notes on how silly it is to have a poet laureate, the Pope as temporal prince, the Great Schism, how power transforms people, the influence of holy women, and who was right in the end.

One more chapter to go!

Somehow I have fallen behind with logging my progress with the latest Big Finish audios, so here are three, in continuity order (which is coincidentally also release order).

In The First Wave, the story of Steven and audio-only companion Oliver, and their travels with the First Doctor, comes to an end. It’s a story which features the Vardans, which is a stroke of genius – they really belong much more to Season 3 than to the colour era, and somehow the sense of the story fits rather well to the era in which it was set, with Peter Purves and Tom Allen bleakly sparking off each other as death and destruction rage around them. I felt though looking back on it that there wasn’t quite enough plot to sustain a full hour of audio.

The Five Companions is consciously a Christmas romp for us diehard fans, with Peter Purves again opening the story being chased by a Dalek. He finds other people here as well – his old acquaintance Ian Chesterton, Sara Kingdom back from the dead, a woman called Polly, another called Nyssa, and a young fair-haired man with a pleasant open face who claims to be the Doctor… also Sontarans, Daleks, and other nasties. It didn’t make a lot of sense to be honest but I loved it anyway. I particularly noted the audible chemistry between William Russell and Sarah Sutton, who had played against each other previously in an earlier Big Finish story in the main sequence.

Finally, Army of Death brings the Eighth Doctor and Mary Shelley to a future planet equipped with complex politics, scientists playing with artificial life, and (until recently) two major cities. Mary Shelley is now far from her own background but comes over more as Leela than Victoria, with of course the obligatory subplot of her falling in love with the Doctor. It’s well enough done, I felt stronger than the previous run in this series, and I was glad that the ending seemed to leave the path clear for more Eight/Shelley adventures.

In summary, I think all of these would require some knowledge of their particular branches of Who mythology to appreciate properly, with possibly Army of Death the least impenetrable to non-fans, and The Five Companions likely to end up as the most memorable.

I was not surprised that a week passed after my correspondence with Belgian rail without my hearing anything from them. So I sent the deputy spokesman another message on Thursday, regretting that their colleagues in customer service did not seem to share my understanding of "urgency" and "rapid treatment".

Ten minutes later I got a phone call from a bright young woman who said that they would ask their colleagues in Leuven to hold the Oud-Heverlee train for the Brussels connection, but adding rather pessimistically that they had no guarantee that their colleagues in Leuven would actually do this. Of course, she did not give me any contact details in case I might need to get in touch again.

And later on Thursday I got an email from Mr Marc Maes, head of the customer service department, though originating from one of his underlings. It was addressed to “Nicholas Crols”, but with my email address; Crols is the surname of the company spokesman. Mr Maes tells me:

Monsieur,

Nous avons bien reçu votre mail du 8 décembre 2011 qui a retenu toute notre attention.

Nous vous prions tout d’abord de bien vouloir nous excuser pour la réponse tardive.

Nous regrettons le déroulement des événements comme décrit dans votre courrier et vous présentons les excuses de la SNCB pour les désagréments rencontrés.

Nous comprenons qu’il est désagréable de voir partir un train juste devant soi.

La régularité des trains étant tributaire de nombreux paramètres dont le côté technique n’est pas le moins important, il peut malheureusement arriver que certains incidents perturbent les horaires établis. Ces incidents ponctuels sont évidemment très regrettables, mais comme tous les autres moyens de transport (route, air, métro), des impondérables peuvent toujours surgir et perturber le trafic. Nous pouvons vous assurer que tous les moyens sont mis en oeuvre par les services de régulation du trafic afin de limiter les conséquences de tels incidents.

Lors de l’établissement des horaires, un certain nombre de correspondances ont été établies, en tenant compte des courants de circulation les plus importants. Cependant, il est impossible d’assurer des correspondances dans chaque gare et entre chaque train. En outre, il faut prendre également en considération, aussi bien les souhaits de la clientèle que les impératifs liés à la régularité des circulations. Ces 2 priorités ne sont cependant pas faciles à concilier. Dans certains cas, des délais d’attente au-delà de l’heure de départ prévue peuvent être octroyés.

Ces délais d’attente sont attribués en fonction de l’offre et du nombre potentiel de voyageurs en correspondance.

Ce principe est également appliqué dans les gares intermédiaires et/ou terminus en fonction du temps de réutilisation du matériel dans cette dernière gare. Ils sont limités afin d’éviter que les retards accumulés sur une ligne se répercutent sur l’ensemble du réseau. Le non-respect de la régularité peut en effet porter à son tour préjudice à d’autres clients (ceux qui attendent dans le train ainsi que dans les gares intermédiaires) et donner lieu à des plaintes.

Durant les heures creuses, un plus grand délai d’attente peut être accordé étant donné que moins de trains circulent.

Nous vous prions d’agréer, Monsieur, l’expression de nos sentiments les meilleurs.

Mark Maes
Chef de bureau

This basically tells me nothing I did not already know. Notably, there is no commitment to revise the timetable to actually make it more usable by passengers, and also rather notably, the only incoming correspondence from me that is mentioned is my email to the deputy press spokesman on 8 December – not my email to his boss on 7 December, let alone my complaints submitted by the website which were obviously just diverted to the bit-bucket.

I must admit, however, that when on Thursday evening the train from Brussels was again running late, I spoke to the conductor who called ahead and got the connecting train to wait for me in Leuven. As I said in my previous post, I feel bad about doing this because, as Mr Maes puts it, it “peut en effet porter à son tour préjudice à d’autres clients (ceux qui attendent dans le train ainsi que dans les gares intermédiaires) et donner lieu à des plaintes”. But I was actually advised to do it by the first railway employee I spoke to last week, and I suppose the more I do it the more the inadequacy of the existing timetable will be made apparent within the rail company.

Long long ago I came across a listing for The Orchard, by Sheikh Musharrif ud-din Sadi, in the Norwegian Book Clubs' list of the top 100 books of all time. Less long ago, someone in Iran spotted it on my Bookmooch list and kindly sent me a very nice edition with a nineteenth-century English translation facing the original Persian, not only of Būstān [بستان, The Orchard] but also of Gulistān [گلستان , The Rose Garden], the two great works by the thirteenth century Persian poet normally known in English as Saʿdī or Saadi, but referred to in my edition as spelt in my subject line above. He was an exact contemporary of Rūmī, whose work I had greatly enjoyed earlier this year, and my expectations were consequently high.

I'm sorry to say that they were not met. Unlike Rūmī, comfortable in his literate and fairly sessile urban merchant lifestyle, Saadi is obsessed by the micropolitics of the court and the caravan. The two books are somewhat different in style – Gulistān mainly very short incidents and reflections, while Būstān is generally longer pieces, in both cases gathered together in chapters on various themes of life as an upper-class medieval man. Often there is an intriguing bit of autobiographical reflection at the start of each piece, followed by some vaguely relevant philosophical rambling and a final poetic quote which may have been a real zinger in the original Persian but is lost in the English. I found Saadi's political philosophy rather unattractive, with no real ethical compass as far as I could tell other than the need to stay alive under a despotic ruler and if possible preserve one's self-respect; like Machiavelli without the humour, or indeed like Confucianism without the sense of tradition.

Oddly the one area where I did feel moved by Saadi's prose was in his occasional reflections on love, quite explicitly his own love for cute young men; there is a passionate chapter in Būstān where he imagines himself as a beggar captivated by a young prince which I found really evocative of the passion of erotic attraction, and that was simply the best of several passages. In general, lust for young men is not my own usual preference, but Saadi took me into his own world very effectively. The flip side is, sadly, that women are annoying distractions and irrelevant to the business of being manly in Saadi's world.

One other thing I did enjoy was trying to spot the rhyming schemes in the poetry. Usually it is rhyming couplets:

But sometimes there are more complex rhyming schemes. It's quite fun to try and spot these things in a language where I barely know any of the letters.

Anyway, the fault may lie with the translation – I think that Rūmī has been very well served by Coleman Banks, and perhaps Saadi simply hasn't been discovered by an English writer with the right sympathy for him yet. But I fear I would need some persuasion to try again.

I spent most of this week in Strasbourg, trying to persuade the European Parliament to reject the latest extension of the fisheries agreement between the EU and Morocco. Under the agreement, EU ships have been exploiting the rich fish stocks off the coast of Western Sahara, which was annexed by Morocco in 1975; officially no other country recognises the Western Sahara as part of Morocco, and the Polisario Front, who are the government-in-exile of the region (and recognised as such by most African countries), have never had any benefit from Morocco's use of their territory's resources.

We knew this was a tough fight. We had tried in September to get the European Parliament to refer the Agreement to the European Court of Justice for an advisory opinion on whether it was legal or not. We lost that vote by 221 to 301, with the fisheries lobby insisting that fishing must continue no matter what the legality or environmental cost, and with the French government lobbying very hard for the Moroccans, who are basically a French client state. Also the September vote was the first use of a new and peculiar procedure, which only came about because I happened to know the MEP who had drafted the relevant paragraph of the Lisbon Treaty (an old friend from Cambridge days).

Now we had another chance, using the normal parliamentary procedures. Three committees get to give their views on the Agreement before it comes to plenary for the final vote. To our delight, the first two (but less important) committees, on Development and Budgets, voted by big margins to reject the Agreement. The key vote was the Fisheries Committee, where the rapporteur, a young Swedish-speaking Finn, Carl Haglund, had also recommended rejecting it. But the rest of the Fisheries Committee, in the pockets of the fishing lobby as they are, voted to reverse his recommendation and approve the agreement by 12 to 8.

It's not unknown for the plenary session of Parliament to reverse the recommendation of the relevant committee. (One other case this week was the plenary's approval of the new Irish nominee to the European Court of Auditors, Kevin Cardiff, although the Budget Committee had rejected him.) But the odds are not great. So I bedded in for three days in Strasbourg, with colleagues S from the Western Sahara Resource Watch organisation, and with J (or I should really say  ج) from the Western Sahara itself. Unfortunately the Polisario were in the middle of their biennial congress, so none of the senior leadership could be spared, and while ج is a good speaker, his English is very poor, and his French not terribly confident (he and I communicated in German, and his Spanish is pretty good too).

Strasbourg is a nice city – excellent public transport system – but the European Parliament is a horrible environment, endless corridors, no decent food, and lifts that do not really connect with reality. There's also the problem of shortage of hotel rooms once you find you have to go there at short notice – my first two nights I was far out in Lingolsheim, and then for Tuesday I managed to find an extortionately expensive place with S in the city centre. At one point it looked as if we might have to stay Wednesday night as well, with all the logistical hassle that would have entailed, but luckily the vote was restored to the Wednesday morning agenda.

I got very few meetings with MEPs in Strasbourg – partly that they claim to be very busy in that mad week (and they are); partly that as a mere lobbyist, without a senior Polisario person present, I don't rate high on the list of people they want to meet with. (In fairness, ج, who actually did have standing as a Polisario official, was working the German and Austrian members pretty efficiently on his own.) Instead, S and I concentrated on distributing information – I had managed to get a leaflet translated into most European languages before we left Brussels, and we put that in members' pigeon-holes. On Tuesday morning I produced another multilingual leaflet, and S, ج and I took the radical step of putting that around the doors of MEPs' offices, mostly in the grand tower which encircles the entrance atrium of the Strasbourg building, but with the Liberals and a few other dissidents in a winding corridor the other side of the river. On Wednesday morning I produced a final leaflet, this time in all 21 languages (you can find how to do this if you know where to look) and again we put it in members' pigeonholes, while the friendly assistant of a friendly Catalan MEP emailed it also to each linguistic group in turn.

Procedurally, the formal plenary debate had been on the Monday night, and it was mildly encouraging. By my count 13 MEPs spoke on our side, including a right-wing Romanian and a left-wing Austrian who I had not heard of (a good sign as it meant we were pulling in new names), with 8 on the other side, all known quantities. However, it was not all that well attended. As we continued leafletting over the next two days, MEPs were debating furiously by email among themselves – and mostly in English, much to the annoyance of the two French members (Alain Cadec and Gilles Pargneaux) who were effectively spokesmen for the Moroccans. The Moroccans themselves were much in evidence; they had brought two senior diplomats to Strasbourg and were trying the old trick of meeting with senior MEPs in the hope that their influence would sort out the foot-soldiers, in contrast to our bottom-up approach. One Liberal from Slovenia complained that it was inappropriate to have foreign agents pursuing him in the corridors like that. I was glad we were not too aggressive.

The vote was called on Wednesday morning. I was now fairly sure we would do better than the 80-vote margin that we had lost by in September. The far left and the Greens were all with us, since they actually sympathise with Polisario; we had also got a majority of the far right and Eurosceptics who oppose all EU treaties and were happy to do the same with this one. We were fortunate that both my friend who had pushed the September vote and Carl Haglund, the rapporteur this time, are Liberals, so knew we would get most of that group. But that still left the two biggest groups, the Socialists and the European People's Party, where it seemed probable that the majority opposed us in both cases (a combination of French and Spanish interests, and the fisheries lobby).

Haglund was called to speak by the chair of the session, and (in English, so as to minimise any risk of confusion via translation) explained the slightly odd procedure – due to the vote in the Fisheries Committee, MEPs who wanted to support his original conclusion and reject the Agreement must now vote against his report; MEPs who disagreed with his original conclusion and want to keep the Agreement must vote for the report. He sat down, and from the gallery we could see members fiddling with the electronic voting apparatus. I wondered how close we would get. Losing by 80 again would be just about acceptable, but I hoped we would at least get the margin down to less than 20 or so, as a decent springboard for the next time we had to campaign on this. At least this time the vote was on Wednesday not Thursday, so the Eurosceptics etc would still be around.

And the figures flashed up: Yes, 296: No: 326. We had won, by thirty votes.

I didn't take in much else for a while.

It turned out later on that there were 58 abstentions, quite a high number; we had a clean sweep of the GUE [far left] and Green groups; we got 88% of those voting one way or the other in the European Conservative and Reformist group, 82% of the Liberals, 75% of the non-inscrits (members not in any group), and 65% of the [Eurosceptic] EFD. We lost the vote in the two biggest groups, getting only 42% of the Socialists and 24% of the [Christian Democrat] EPP. This is itself a pretty extraordinary outcome; we managed to pull together the radicals of left and right, plugged in the Liberals (it helps that Haglund is one of their own) and sufficiently split the big two groups to the point where they were not able to exercise their usual dominance. It is very unusual for the majority of both EPP and S&D to be on the losing side.

Among member states, we again got a clean sweep of Sweden and Estonia (as in September) and also Denmark (the one Dane who voted against us in September changed her mind). We got majorities in the UK, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Ireland and Austria. On the other hand, once again we got no support at all from the Maltese, and lost the votes in Spain, Poland, Greece, Romania, Luxembourg, Italy, Latvia, Portugal, France, Lithuania, Hungary, Belgium, Slovakia, Slovenia and Bulgaria. (Cyprus, again, was evenly split. Appropriately enough.) We won two countries which we lost in September (the Czech Republic and Germany) and another two which were evenly split then (Austria and Ireland), but we lost Slovenia to the other side (purely because of differential turnout; nobody actually switched sides).

47 MEPs who voted our way in September voted the other way or did not vote this time (20 switched sides, 12 abstained, 15 were absent). But we gained 152 new votes (57 who had voted against the ECJ referral, 12 who abstained, 75 who were not present and 8 of the new MEPs). The other side lost 110 of those who opposed the ECJ referral (57 switched to us, 32 abstained and 21 were absent) but almost made up the difference by gaining 105 (20 had voted for the ECJ referral, 12 had abstained, 65 were absent and they too got 8 of the new MEPs.) Among the groups our biggest gains were in the ECR and EPP, with more modest gains among the S&D and ALDE groups. We lost ground with the EFD.

Our biggest net gains by country were in Germany, the UK and the Czech Republic; but we slipped back quite significantly in Italy. Taking the size of the country into account, we also gained more than elsewhere in Slovakia, Ireland, Austria, Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary and Greece. But we lost ground in Latvia, the Netherlands and Slovenia. Drilling down to national party level, ج's work with the German Christian Democrats clearly paid off as 20 of them came over to our side; also, from the ECR group, big numbers from the Czech ODS and the UK Conservatives (the Tories had split 7-7 in September with many absentees, but this time went for us 20-3). We gained also 4 German SPD who voted against the ECJ referral and another 4 who had abstained. But we lost 6 of the Italian Lega Nord MEPs (in the EFD group) to the other side. We got all the Irish MEPs on our side except Fine Gael (with whom I had had a most unsatisfactory meeting two weeks earlier). Apart from a couple of Scots and their best friends we got most of the British as well.

In parallel, the Parliament passed a resolution urging for any new agreement with Morocco to be economically, ecologically and socially sustainable and fully respecting international law and benefiting the local populations. (Our lefty friends voted against this because it did not go far enough, and the Euroscpetics opposed it out of general opposition, but the usual comfortable consensus was restored.) My bet is that these conditions are too restrictive for the Moroccans to accept, and that there will therefore be no new EU agreement to fish either in Moroccan or in Western Saharan waters. It is also the first time that a plenary session of the European Parliament has voted against a fisheries agreement. Interesting times.

List everywhere you have spent a night away from home this year. Mark anywhere you went for non-consecutive nights with an asterisk.

Chişinău, Moldova*
Geneva, Switzerland
Belfast, Northern Ireland*
London, England*
New York, NY*
Washington, DC
Manchester, England
Loughbrickland, Northern Ireland*
Strasbourg, France*
Brussels, Belgium (!)
Pristina, Kosovo

Less hectic this year than most. Also two overnight transatlantic flights, and numerous other countries visited to change planes or drive through. (My one night in Brussels? Having dinner with friends and realised I had missed the last train home.)

See previously: 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007 and 2006.

For some strange reason Nina Caspersen’s publishers decided to send me a copy of this newly published book, and I duly took the hint, read it and am now reviewing it. It comes with blurb by Charles King, Stefan Wolff and Sumantra Bose, three scholars for whom I have the greatest respect, and the cover also features a rather good design of imaginary frontiers resolving as question marks, so it made a good impression even before I opened it. The acknowledgement pages feature numerous familiar names including two who used to work for me. I was pretty certain this was going to be my kind of book. (Good call sending it to me, Polity Press!)

To get the negative point out of the way first: I wish that the book had been longer and had covered more cases of unrecognised states in greater depth. She concentrates on the classic Eurasian frozen conflicts (the Caucasus Three, Transnistria and Northern Cyprus), the classic partial recognition cases of Kosovo and Taiwan, and also looks at Somaliland and the failed cases of the Republika Srpska Krajina and Tamil Eelam, which went down to defeat by Croatia and Sri Lanka respectively in 1995 and 2009. I wished she had found more space for the Bosnian Republika Srpska, which is the only one of these territories I myself have lived in, and I thought also that she missed the interesting interval in the early 1990s when Macedonia, despite fulfilling all the criteria required of it by international law, was none the less not recognised by the majority of international players, a situation that lasted shamefully longer than some like to remember. She also mentions the similar cases of Montenegro, Bangladesh and Eritrea in passing, and I would have liked more detail. Essentially my biggest criticism is that I liked it so much I wanted there to be more. But I appreciate that for the author, enough is sometimes enough.

Caspersen makes the important point that the problem of unrecognised states has arisen only in the last sixty years or so. Before the second world war, it was sufficient to win your war of independence, hold your territory, and then send out your ambassadors in the reasonable expectation that they would be received. Since then, however, the international system has become wedded to the doctrine of inviolability of frontiers, which I think demonstrably has reduced the number of casus belli in the last half century, but which doesn’t offer an easy get-out for when recognised states break down and fail to discharge their obligations to their citizens. Unrecognised states nestle in the grey zone between self-determination and change of borders. International organisations, which are really where you get to go to prove you are playing with the big kids, formally are groupings of states which all recognise each other and are therefore unlikely to make speculative recognition of someone whose territory is claimed by someone else within the system. Postmodern idealists like to mumble about how shared sovereignty or partial sovereignty could be an answer, but really this is too subtle a concept to be usefully deployed in most cases; you’re either recognised as sovereign or you’re not, in most policy-makers’ minds and therefore in most people’s reality. (Where these concepts work, and this is a point Caspersen misses, it is because the autonomous region is given large autonomy not only in areas of coercion, ie control of their own security forces, but also in areas of culture, meaning use of languages, flags, symbols and names of government institutions.)

The real strength of this book is that, rather than treating unrecognised states as untidy and problematic bits of international relations which the grownups need to clear up, Caspersen takes them on their own merits as subjects in their own right – sure, they are often beholden to powerful external patrons, but that doesn’t mean that the patron calls all the shots (and in fact I can’t think of a single example of a totally subject puppet state, since South Ossetia has twitched into life and the Russians are trying to ditch the Transnistrian leadership); sure, they are sometimes institutionally weak and badly governed, but that is often equally true of recognised states (indeed, in the case of Somaliland, the parent state is functionally non-existent and it is the unrecognised seceders who have actually built a viable polity). Caspersen has some very interesting analysis of why the more successful unrecognised states have adopted internal democratisation as a means of adding legitimacy to a government which is denied legitimacy by external actors.

Caspersen’s key point relates to engagement with the government and citizens of the unrecognised state, particularly by the “parent state” from which the unrecognised state has seceded. Isolation is easy, and of course if the strategic circumstances turn out right can be a good precursor to the military defeat which is the most frequently encountered fate of unrecognised states, with all its awful human costs. Economic and person-to-person engagement carries risks for the parent state, in that it may appear to recognise the status quo of the separation and to legitimate the social structures (and by implication the political structures of the seceding state. But it carries even more risks for the seceding government, an essential part of whose narrative must be that life with the former parent state is impossible; as far as I can see, it is very much worth the parent state’s while to engage in that way (and I would observe that the cases where I see conflict as least likely – Taiwan, Transnistria and Northern Cyprus – are precisely the cases where despite the conflict strong economic links have been fostered by both sides). If a peaceful settlement one way or the other is the preferred goal in a particular situation, serious engagement across the boundary without prejudice to future status is a key stepping stone in that direction. It’s an argument that almost shouldn’t have to be made, but Caspersen provides a great deal of evidence for it.

Apparently two long-lost episodes of Doctor Who have come to light – “Airlock”, the third episode of Galaxy 4 from 1965, and the second episode of the 1967 story The Underwater Menace. The latter becomes the earliest known surviving episode of Patrick Troughton’s Second Doctor. I don’t have further details – am rather bizarrely following this on Twitter in a Portuguese bistro in Luxembourg, on my way to attend next week’s plenary session of the European Parliament in Strasbourg – but I imagine it will be all over the news pretty soon for those of us who care. Looking forward to discovering if the earlier ep is as good as I hope, and the latter as bad as I fear…

Just in case you are actually interested in seeing how the EU summit appears to commentators who have not swallowed the Downing Street version of events as readily as most media, here are a fee links that caught my eye. (Apologies if you have already seen me post them on Facebook or Twitter.)

The Economist‘s David Rennie brutally skewers any claims of British diplomatic success:

In my version of the English language, when one member of a club uses his veto, he blocks something from happening. Mr Cameron did not stop France, Germany and the other 15 members of the euro zone from going ahead with what they are proposing. He asked for safeguards for financial services and—as had been well trailed in advance—France and Germany said no. That’s not wielding a veto, that’s called losing.

Jon Worth summarises the discussion between Merkel, Sarkozy and Cameron.

The Economist‘s David Rennie, again, with a scoop explaining how exactly Cameron screwed up at the summit.

Jason O’Mahoney reflects on British Eurosceptics.

Kosmopolit dissects Cameron’s diplomatic failure.

Faisal Islam concludes that “it appears the PM claimed to have vetoed something that wasn’t there”.

And finally, my colleague Carne Ross makes the point that there will be little popular consultation in the next few months.

After a long night of fractious negotiations which saw the UK write itself out of future European economic integration, there was a tangible shift of mood in Brussels this morning as Croatia signed its accession treaty with the European Union. It will become the 28th EU member state on 1 July 2013, just over ten years since lodging its membership application, and almost eight years after the negotiating process started.

It is a dramatic achievement for Croatia, which when I lived there in 1998 was still recovering from conflict and getting to grips with the social and economic changes needed to transform it into a modern European state. The EU’s enlargement rules were changed after the 2004-07 enlargement to make this probably the toughest process that any candidate country has ever successfully gone through. I’m very glad to have assisted Croatia’s Chief Negotiator, Vladimir Drobnjak, during the process.

There was an audible intake of breath when the Croatian prime minister, Jadranka Kosor, went up to sign the treaty this morning – neither at the beginning nor the end of the process, but in the middle, Hrvatska coming between France and Italy. She is on borrowed time, having lost last weekend’s election, but it was a moment when local divisions, whether in Zagreb or Brussels, were put aside and the EU for once remembered the big picture of unity across the continent.

The EU leaders then went back to resolve other issues such as Serbia’s troubled European aspirations, setting a date for Montenegro to begin membership negotiations, energy policy and admitting Romania and Bulgaria to Schengen. But from today on, Croatian officials will sit in all EU meetings along with the 27 current member states. I hope it won’t be too long before other countries in their neighbourhood join them.

I have posted a list of those attending the EU summits at the end of each of the last three semesters (here, here and here). Unfortunately I made a fairly serious mistake in all three posts, in that I had Romania and Lithuania represented by their prime ministers rather than by their presidents. I may go back and change the earlier entries, but not right now.

Today's list is as follows:

Jean-Claude Juncker (born 1954), Prime Minister of Luxembourg since 20 January 1995 (EPP)
José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (born 1960) Prime Minister of Spain since 17 April 2004 (PES) 
Lawrence Gonzi (born 1953) Prime Minister of Malta since 1 May 2004 (EPP) 
José Manuel Barroso (Portuguese, born 1956) President of the European Commission  since 23 November 2004 (EPP)
Andrus Ansip (born 1956) Prime Minister of Estonia since 12 April 2005 (ELDR)
Angela Merkel (born 1954) Chancellor of Germany since 22 November 2005 (EPP)
Fredrik Reinfeldt (born 1965) Prime Minister of Sweden since 6 October 2006 (EPP)
Traian Băsescu (born 1951) President of Romania (which joined EU on 1 January 2007) since 20 December 2004 (EPP)
Nicolas Sarkozy (born 1955) President of France since 16 May 2007 (EPP)
Donald Tusk (born 1957) Prime Minister of Poland since 16 November 2007 (EPP) 
Dimitris Christofias (born 1946) President of [Greek] Cyprus since 28 February 2008 (PEL)
Borut Pahor (born 1963) Prime Minister of Slovenia since 21 November 2008 (PES) 
Werner Faymann (born 1960) Chancellor of Austria since 02 December 2008 (PES) 
Valdis Dombrovskis (born 1971) Prime Minister of Latvia since 12 March 2009 (EPP) 
Jerzy Buzek (Polish, born 1940) President of the European Parliament since 14 July 2009 (EPP)
Dalia Grybauskaitė (born 1956) President of Lithuania since 12 July 2009 (EPP)
Boyko Borisov (born 1959) Prime Minister of Bulgaria since 27 July 2009 (EPP) 
Herman van Rompuy (Belgian, born 1947) President of the European Council since 01 December 2009  (EPP)
David Cameron (born 1966) Prime Minister of United Kingdom since 11 May 2010 (ECR) 
Viktor Orbán (born 1963) Prime Minister of Hungary since 29 May 2010 (EPP) – previously PM 1998-2002, before Hungary joined the EU
Iveta Radičová (born 1956) Prime Minister of Slovakia since 8 July 2010 (ECR)
Petr Nečas (born 1964) Prime Minister of the Czech Republic since 13 July 2010 (EPP)
Mark Rutte (born 1967) Prime Minister of the Netherlands since 14 October 2010 (ELDR)
Enda Kenny (born 1951) Taoiseach since 09 March 2011 (EPP)
Pedro Passos Coelho (born 1964) Prime Minister of Portugal since 21 June 2011 (EPP)
Jyrki Katainen (born 1971) Prime Minister of Finland since 22 June 2011 (EPP)
Helle Thorning-Schmidt (born 1966) Prime Minister of Denmark since 3 October 2011 (PES)
Lucas Papademos (born 1947) Prime Minister of Greece since 11 November 2011 (Ind)
Mario Monti (born 1943) Prime Minster of Italy since 16 November 2011 (Ind)
Elio Di Rupo (born 1951) Prime Minister of Belgium since 06 December 2011 (PES)
Jadranka Kosor (born 1953) Prime Minister of Croatia (which will join EU on 1 July 2013) since 6 July 2009 (EPP) 

There have been four changes since the June 2011 summit (Denmark, Greece, Italy, and at long last Belgium), with Zapatero, Pahor, Radičová and Kosor all on borrowed time thanks to recent elections in Spain, Slovenia and Croatia and imminent elections in Slovakia. This is also Buzek's last appearance as his term comes to an end in January.

The EPP have lost Italy and Belgium but gained Croatia (whose leaders will sit in all EU council meetings from now on, even though they don't actually join for another year and a half) for a total of 16 of 28 heads of state and government plus the presidents of all three EU institutions. The PES have lost Greece but gained Denmark and Belgium, putting them on 5; the Liberals lose Denmark and go down to level pegging with the ECR on 2 each; the others are 1 Communist and 2 Independents.

There are five women, the German Chancellor, the Lithuanian President, and the Prime Ministers of Denmark, Slovakia and Croatia (the last two of these being on borrowed time). 

On average they have been in office for 3 years and 5 months, Dalia Grybauskaitė being more or less exactly on the average as well as median points of the leaders of EU27 (if you include the other four, she is still on the median but Kosor, who took office the previous week, is closer to the average).

I make the average year of birth 1957, but the median 1956 (the birth year of Grybauskaitė, Barroso, Ansip and Radičová). Buzek is the oldest; Van Rompuy is older than any national leaders except Monti and Christofias.

I am still younger than all of them except the Latvian and Finnish prime ministers. The Danish prime minster's husband was two years below me at Cambridge, but she is a bit older than I am.

The EU summit is mostly over. A seven-page statement by the leaders of the countries using the euro outlines the solution: there will be a new treaty involving all the EU member states except the UK and Hungary, with the Poles and Czechs going away to think about it. Participating states will enshrine a commitment to balance their budgets at “constitutional or equivalent” level. This will certainly mean a referendum on Ireland, which could be simply on balanced budgets but much more likely on the deal as a whole. This will all take some time (though the conclusions optimistically speak of signing the new treaty “in March or at an earlier date”). In the short term more money is to be made available to the existing and planned bailout mechanisms. It’s pretty much what Chancellor Merkkel and President Sarkozy were looking for; we will see in the course of the day if the markets are convinced (though the form is that immediate reaction to these things tends to be positive before buyer’s remorse sets in).

It’s a lousy outcome for the British, who are now locked outside the doors of the next stage of European integration. It’s not quite equivalent to 1955, when the UK walking out of the Messina conference which set up the EU thus ensuring that the structures would be set up without Britain. But Anton La Guardia had a point when he said on Twitter that “at least Cameron cannot be accused of being Chamberlain. He has no piece of paper to bring home”.

On 18 November Cameron met with Merkel in Berlin, and set out his price for signing up to a new treaty: i) Britain should be allowed to revert to its opt-out from the social chapter (as the previous Conservative government did), ii) unanimity should be brought back for decisions concerning financial services, and iii) any new system should include an “emergency brake” which non Euro Area member states could apply if and when they felt that decisions by the Euro Area threatened the integrity of the EU as such. There was never any chance of getting Germany (or indeed most other EU member states) to agree to these: the first two walked back previous British commitments, and the third potentially allowed states outside the euro to control the behaviour of states using the euro. So the other states went ahead without Cameron, joined in sulking outside by Orbán with Nečas and Tusk making up their minds.

I do wonder if Cameron deliberately set an unrealistic negotiating position in the certain knowledge that he would therefore return home with no treaty to sign, and thus avoid the embarrassment of either debating whether or not to have a referendum on the new treaty (or indeed holding the referendum and losing it). British journalists will no doubt concentrate on regurgitating the spin both from Cameron and the eurosceptics, but they are all marginal to the real process now. It is not so much a two-speed Europe as a one-speed Europe with stragglers, Britain being the largest of the later category.

Meanwhile, almost ten thousand kilometres away, the EU, the Alliance of Small Island States, and the Least Developed Countries are pushing in Durban for a new climate deal to include continuation of the Kyoto Protocol, more money to deal with climate change, and an agreed mandate to negotiate very quickly a new legally-binding agreement on carbon emissions by all the big players. They have another day to negotiate. This is where the action really is, in a sense; the euro crisis is only about money, while the Durban talks are about saving the world.

When we first moved to the village where we live, train connections were rather good – from our local station, there were two trains every hour both to and from Leuven, arriving there just before the half-hour mark and departing just after it. This worked particularly well for connecting trains to Brussels, which usually leave Leuven on or just after each half-hour.

But a couple of years ago, the local timetable was changed; the trains now leave Leuven just before the half-hour at 28 mins past, and arrive just after at 33 mins past (and in the evening they drop in frequency to hourly rather than half-hourly). For my morning commute this is just about OK as the Brussels train leaves at 35 mins past and is usually a bit behind, so normally one can belt across to the right platform. But for the evening return journey, when the local train service is down to one an hour at the 28 minute mark, it is disastrous. The Brussels train is scheduled to arrive in Leuven at 25 past; if you chance to be at the wrong end of it, and it is on time, you may well not be able to get to the local train's platform; if the train from Brussels is delayed by even a hair's breadth, you arrive to see the local train merrily puffing away into the distance.

Normally I take the trains that arrive in Leuven just before the top of the hour, in order to get the bus home which leaves at 7 minutes past and also stops much closer to my house. But as luck would have it, I happened to be on the later trains on both Monday and Tuesday this week; and on both Monday and Tuesday I arrived in Leuven to see my connection disappear.

I had had enough at this point. Since I had involuntarily acquired time to spare, I went to the Leuven ticket office and asked what I could do to urge the NMBS / SNCB to restore the previous, more sensible timetable, or at least to shift the departure southwards by that crucial couple of minutes. They suggested that I fill in the complaints form on their website. I said that I had already done so, in February and in September, but had had no response and was not convinced that any human being had looked at it. Who could I talk to at NMBS / SNCB headquarters to be certain that the top brass are aware of my concerns? The ticket office guy looked blank and suggested that I talk to the deputy stationmaster.

I found the deputy stationmaster's office, ignored the 'staff only' sign and outlined the situation to the deputy stationmaster and her colleagues. Who could I talk to in Brussels? She flatly refused to give me any information about NMBS / SNCB headquarters, or any ideas as to who else I might talk to. Her colleague, cynically lounging by his computer screen, said that there was absolutely nothing that could be done.

I went back to the ticket office guy and told him that his advice to see the deputy stationmaster had not in fact proved a fruitful line to take. He gave me a phone number to try the next day – 070 797979 – and also made the interesting suggestion that if my Brussels train is running late I should ask the conductor to call ahead to Leuven to see if they can hold the connection for me. This is actually rather a good idea, fully in keeping with the Belgian tradition of on s'arrange, but does not help with the systemic problem of the train timetable simply being wrong, and also of course will inconvenience other travellers on the local line if their train is made late for my benefit.

I got home (by bus) and filled in the NMBS / SNCB web form anyway, including a request for a human being to acknowledge receipt of that message. Needless to say, no such message has arrived.

Next day I tried 070 797979. No answer. Poking around the website I found another number to try – 02 5282828 – and actually got through to a human being. He pootered around with the online records and confirmed that my trains had indeed arrived too late in Leuven to catch my connection, which was all very well, but I already knew that. Who could I speak to at NMBS / SNCB headquarters? He did not know, but gave me another number to try – 02 224 5111. I asked if my conversation with him would at least be reported to his chain of command. He said that the usual procedure would be followed, which did not fill me with confidence.

So I wrote up an account of all of this and emailed it to the NMBS / SNCB press spokesman, whose email address at least is public, including again a request for acknowledgement that a human being had actually received the message. No reply as yet, but I suppose it is early days.

I should add that once again, my train home was delayed yesterday, but this time I was taking the slightly longer way route via Ottignies (because I had been at the European parliament all afternoon and was leaving from Place Luxembourg), and asked the conductor if the train going north could be held until we had had a chance to get on it; and he duly did so, and I got home rather earlier than I had on Monday and Tuesday. I was clearly not the only passenger rushing from one train to the other.

Ironically, NMBS / SNCB claims that pragmatism and passion are two of its core values. (The third is modernity.) It doesn't seem terribly pragmatic to schedule trains in such a way that people miss their connections, unless of course the agenda is really to scrap passenger trains on our line altogether and turn it over completely to the more lucrative freight business. And I have to say that I did not really sense much passion from the NMBS / SNCB staff I spoke to.

Clearly NMBS / SNCB is pretty dysfunctional when it comes to customer communication. I imagine that this is partly because it is split into three different companies, Infrabel, which manages the infrastructure, NMBS / SNCB, which manages (if that is the word) freight and passenger services, and NMBS / SNCB-Holding, which owns the other two. Altogether NMBS / SNCB is the largest single employer in Belgium, with all the baggage of institutional culture that brings, especially in a country which was designed by bureaucrats for bureaucrats.

Anyway, I shall update as and when.

Edited to add: As advised by the bloke I spoke to on 02 5282828, I called 02 224 5111 again this morning and got through twice. The first time, the operator denied that they had a customer service department and put the phone down. The second time, a different operator, obviously by mistake, put me through to the customer service department. They told me that I must speak to the call centre and then put the phone down without giving me the call centre’s number.

Further edited to add: Got a response from the spokesman’s office!

After reading your email to our press office, I can only confirm that you have called the correct number of our customer service. If indeed you were treated in the way you describe, this would not be professional on their behalf.

But as you can surely understand, treating a customers complaint is not the role of our press officer. In the meantime, we forwarded your complaints to the customer service manager and we insisted on the sense of urgency of your demand. They confirmed us a rappid treatment of your complaints and they will get back to you within a few days, after having made the nessecary enqueries.

I would like to appologise on behalf of our company for all inconvenience you have encountered.

Well, we’ll see what happens…

The latest of the Big Finish “Lost Stories”, based on a storyline by Peter Ling and Hazel Adair, and turned into an audio drama by Paul Finch. Given that Ling wrote the amazing Second Doctor story “The Mind Robber” back in 1968, and that Finch wrote Leviathan, the best of the series of Sixth Doctor lost stories produced by Big Finish a couple of years ago, my expectations were high. And I am glad to say that they were largely met; the Doctor, Tegan and Nyssa, finding that an old friend of Tegan’s (played by Toby Hadoke) has been abducted by aliens, pursue him to a planet off Proxima Centauri which is ruled by a mysterious and slightly insectile queen, played by none other than Jacqueline “Servalan” Pearce. ‘Orrible things are going on beneath the surface, and the plot largely successfully balances the politics of the queen’s court with the insects’ master plan, giving both Tegan and Nyssa some romantic tension along the way. I think for once it is a play that would be entirely accessible to listeners outside the core constituency.

I winced a bit, though I was not especially shocked, at the Independent's exposé of Bell Pottinger's desperate pitch for business with Uzbekistan. The most telling line is actually the quotation in the second last paragraph:

A spokeswoman for the Prime Minister said: "It is simply not true that Bell Pottinger or indeed any other lobbying company has any influence on government policy."

Oh yeah?

One point that jumps out at me was the fact that there is no serious system of registration of lobbyists in the UK. There is an industry run voluntary register, which appears almost completely useless. But there appear to be no moves towards setting up anything with teeth.

The USA, for all its faults in regulating the lobbying efforts of domestic actors, has a pretty rigid system of monitoring those who represent foreign interests. The Department of Justice has a searchable database so that you can see who is representing your favourite dictatorship; there are serious penalties for non-compliance and a stipulation that "informational materials (formerly propaganda) be labeled with a conspicuous statement that the information is disseminated by the agents on behalf of the foreign principal. The agent must provide copies of such materials to the Attorney General." However, the FARA law was passed in 1938 and hasn't really kept pace with the times.

In Brussels, the EU has just recently introduced a new Transparency Register combined with a code of conduct, covering all lobbyists and interest groups working on EU policy, not just those of us who are working for the furriners. (My entry is here.) You will note that they have gone for as broad an approach as possible, with registrants including not only lobbying firms but NGOs like my own employers, and academic institutions and thinktanks. There is also no requirement to record more than the bare bones of activity, or more than headline figures about funding. There is no penalty for not signing up, but there is a tangible benefit from doing so, which is that you can't get an access badge for the European Parliament without being on the register – and that is a pretty strong incentive to comply.

The British Conservative MEPs published a "full list" of their contacts with lobbyists in the second half of 2010. (If, hypothetically, one had personal knowledge of a meeting or meetings that had taken place between Conservative MEPs and lobbyists during that time period which mysteriously failed to make that list, what action might one take? Just asking.) I note that this initiative has not been repeated since, probably in part because of the interesting revelation that Sir Robert Atkins and Dan Hannan met with nobody at all; presumably they get all the information they need just by looking into their own hearts, like De Valera with the Irish people. I don't think there is any harm, though, in asking elected representatives to do this, and I am a bit surprised that it doesn't feature more strongly in the various calls for transparency that we get.

Incidentally, Tim Collins, the Bell Pottinger exec exposed by the Independent, is well known to be a Doctor Who fan. I bet he woke up this morning wishing he could dematerialise.

F borrowed this from the local library out of curiosity, and we both read it pretty quickly. It is just as bad as I feared: the Africans encountered here are stupid, illiterate, desperately aping civilisation and pathetically grateful for rule by white men; by the end of the book they are worshipping idols of Tintin and Snowy. Even more startling is Tintin’s casual slaughter of large amounts of African wildlife, often as the punchline of a joke. The book’s most effective single frame is a huge and enraged elephant pursuing our heroes; unfortunately the elephant gets killed off on the next page. The plot, such as it is, is supplied by a rather inefficient hitman sent after Tintin by none other than Al Capone (who appears in person in the next book). One can see the elements here that Hergé would use for his much better future work – the deadpan humour, the ligne claire style, even the bearded naval personnel – but it comes with some very unpleasant baggage here. Aren’t you glad I’ve read it, so you don’t have to?

When I first read this three years ago, I wrote:

A fairly standard New Adventure, introducing the sinister character of Irving Braxiatel, renegade Time Lord and cultural collector, with lots of fun archaeology for Benny and combat for Ace. The actual plot is a rather ludicrous Sekrit Plan involving the overthow of a warmongering dictatorial regime by means of an electronic theatre and a long-lost play, so it makes as much sense as many Who stories.

Having decided to include those New Adventures (and EDAs) which I had already read in my sequence, I have now reached a stage where the next few will be rereads. Theatre of War is a little deeper than I gave it credit for at the time, with some interrogation of how we know things to be true, and the politics surrounding the Sekrit Plan quite well depicted. There’s also some material for my planned mini-project on Doctor Who and Shakespeare. But the Sekrit Plan itself remains ludicrous.