This page lists offensive stereotypes purportedly held by various European countries about their neighbours. It is not completely accurate.

http://www.exile.ru/transient/151/europeans-chart.html

The South-East European Research Centre in Thessaloniki has just appointed me to their Advisory Board. This is on the basis of two evenings’ brainstorming over pints of Guinness in Sean O’Casey’s round the corner from my office with one of their senior staff. Provided they don’t expect me to do anything much, that seems reasonable.

Meanwhile the European Commission thing trundles along – I see Charlie McCreevy from Ireland likely to get an economic portfolio, similarly Peter Mandelson (who I have always assumed will be the next British Commissioner) so neither likely to bother me much. I hope Potočnik gets the Balkans/wider Europe portfolio. But it’s all in the hands of Mr Barroso, and the 24 other governments besides Portugal…

Well, in an unexpected burst of creativity I’ve updated the results graphs on all my constituency pages: East Belfast, North Belfast, South Belfast, West Belfast, East Antrim, North Antrim, South Antrim, North Down, South Down, Fermanagh and South Tyrone, Foyle, Lagan Valley, East Londonderry, Mid Ulster, Newry and Armagh, Strangford, West Tyrone, and Upper Bann.

I’ve never met Conal Kelly, but he sends me lots of nice graphics for my elections website. I’ve just finished putting up the nice new maps of the 26 local councils that he sent me last week:

Antrim | Ards | Armagh | Ballymena | Ballymoney | Banbridge | Belfast | Carrickfergus | Castlereagh | Coleraine | Cookstown | Craigavon | Derry | Down | Dungannon | Fermanagh | Larne | Limavady | Lisburn | Magherafelt | Moyle | Newry and Mourne | Newtownabbey | North Down | Omagh | Strabane

Very nice.

Try it. I got nine out of ten. (The one I got wrong was “above board”.)

and share 12 interests.
and share 9 interests.
and share 9 interests.
and share 8 interests.
and share 7 interests.
and share 7 interests.
and share 7 interests.
and share 7 interests.
and share 6 interests.
and share 6 interests.

There used to be a tool on lj that let you find whose interests were closest to yours. I guess it absorbed too much bandwidth. I might do a bit more adjusting to my own list based on the above…

Today is the 35th anniversary of the first moon landing.

B was up from 4 am, and U too off and on; and we found it impossible to sleep, so I’m taking the morning off work. Anne’s gone back to bed to try and get a bit more sleep, my turn soon; poor F, whose sleeping patterns were completely normal, is trying to work out why the rest of us are being so crap. Anyway, I’m going to make a herbal tea and go catch up on sleep.

10) J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, by Tom Shippey.

I ordered this from Amazon because I thought I’d picked it up and read the first half last summer at my in-laws’. In fact this must have been Shippey’s other book on Tolkien, The Road to Middle-Earth. Fortuately I’ll be at the in-laws’ again in two weeks so I can make sure.

Even if I bought it by mistake, this is a very good book, well worth the investment. Shippey argues strongly that Tolkien wanted to achieve the same for the relationship of England with the history of English that Lönnrot did with the Kalevala for Finnish, or that the Grimm brothers (philologists as well as compilers of fairy-tales) did for German. He argues even more strongly, backed by empirical evidence of opinion polls and popular votes (and this was before the BBC Big Read) that Tolkien succeeded as well as any author of the 20th century could do.

Middle Earth, according to Shippey, is an attempt to re-create the mythic background of the English language. Where other writers are content to note that Tolkien nicked the names of the dwarves in The Hobbit from the Elder Edda, Shippey believes that Tolkien is trying to get at the nature of dwarves, elves, etc and to bring back a better understanding of their lost history, which the compilers of the Elder Edda may have known but its readers have certainly forgotten. And he succeeded.

He also argues for a central moral message in the Lord of the Rings, that it is worth trying to do good even if you don’t know if you will succeed. Very interesting reflections on the question of whether evil is something that people do (a la Boethius) or has an external objective reality (Manichaeism), which he thinks LOTR debates but leaves unanswered.

There’s a lot of other good stuff here, but the most effective for me was a moving look at Tolkien’s (non-Middle Earth) short story Leaf by Niggle as autobiography. Niggle is “the sort of painter who can paint leaves better than trees”, who is obsessed by the idea of painting one big Tree, so much so that other smaller works get tacked onto the edges of the bigger picture, and he neglects to do the necessary routine work on his own house and garden. It’s straightforward enough to read Niggle as Everyman, but Shippey shows quite convincingly that he is also Tolkien.

Strongly recommended.

Inspired by ‘ recent entry:

Many years ago, I was listening one morning to my Rocky Horror Show tape in the kitchen of the student house I lived in at the time. One of my housemates came into the romm. I said to him, “Richard, I answered that phone call from your father last night and noticed he had quite a strong accent. Where’s he from?” Richard said, “He’s from Transylvania, actually.” Guess what song was playing on the tape at that moment?

As I was taking this in, the phone rang and I went to answer it. It was Dervla Murphy, the travel writer, who I was doing some business with at the time. She was apologising that she couldn’t make it to the next of our scheduled meetings because she was travelling to do research for her next book, Transylvania and Beyond.

I’ve never been to Transylvania myself though I’ve been to both Hungary and Romania a few times.

This inspired by and a vague memory of something seen on usenet a few months back):

Giulio Pignatelli, Prince of Noia, lived from 1587 to 1658.

He married his first wife, Zenobia, in 1601, and their son Fabrizio, duke of Monteleone and Prince of Noia, lived from 1604 to 1664.

Fabrizio Pignatelli in due course married his distant cousin Girolama in 1615 when he would have been 11 and she 14. They had a son, Ettore, also in due course duke of Monteleone and Prince of Noia, five years later in 1620. He lived to 1674.

In 1639, when he was 19, Ettore Pignatelli married his second cousin Giovanna, also known as Juana, heiress of vast conquistador estates in Mexico. They had one son, Andrea Fabrizio, in due course duke of Monteleone, duke of Terranova and Prince of Noia, born in 1640, and three daughters.

Andrea Fabrizio Pignatelli got married to another distant cousin in 1665, aged 25. They had just one child, a daughter, Giovanna, born in 1666.

Going back to Giulio Pignatelli, her great-great-grandfather: what happened to his first wife Zenobia is not recorded, but Giulio married his second wife Beatrice in 1638, when he was 61 and she was 28. Their son Nicola was born in 1648, when his father was 71, his mother 38, his half-brother Fabrizio 44, his nephew Ettore 28, and his great-nephew Andrea Fabrizio 8 years old, with his great-great-niece Giovanna’s birth 18 years in the future.

Andrea Fabrizio Pignatelli died in 1677, aged only 37, with just Giovanna as his heir to the vast estates on both sides of the Atlantic he had inherited. The interesting genealogical oddity is that Giovanna married her great-great-uncle Nicola Pignatelli in 1679, when she was 13 and he 31. They had three children over the next ten years (starting in 1682); she died aged 56 in 1723, and he died age 71 in 1730. Their descendants include the hereditary princes of Liechtenstein, also Sophie von Hohenlohe (assassinated with her husband, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in Sarajevo in 1914), and large chunks of the German and Italian nobility.

On first sight it looks as if Nicola was Giovanna’s guardian as the nearest surviving male relative, and he married her as soon as it was legally possible to do so (possible a little sooner). But the truth may be more complicated. I should like to know more.

http://www.livejournal.com/tools/recent_comments.bml

(Thanks to .)

9) River of Gods, by Ian McDonald. Another one of my review books from infinity plus. Actually the best one so far. That leaves only Beyond Infinity and the zine to read. I’ll have to start writing the reviews soon.

One point I may or may not put in the review: I was amused that Diljit Rana, the name of a well known Belfast businessman who is now now a member of the House of Lords, appeared in this book as the founder of an Indian political dynasty. Of course, the real Diljit Rana is from the Punjab not from Varanasi, but it was a nice touch anyway; I’m sure that McDonald is at least as grateful as I am for the massive contribution Rana has made to Belfast’s restaurant and hotel scene.

8) The Door into Summer, by Robert A. Heinlein.

As a child, I loved Heinlein’s juvenile novels. As a teenager, I read almost all of his adult novels. I remember at a vulnerable age (I must have been 12, looking up the dates) reading the first installment of The Number of the Beast in Omni, my young mind boggling at the idea of nipples going “spung!”. But once I’d found and read the complete novel, it gradually began to occur to me that while Heinlein’s past works were great, his present ones were pretty, well, dire. I have a lingering affection for Job: A Comedy of Justice but the last two I tried, To Sail Beyond the Sunset and The Cat Who Walked Through Walls, well, while I’m glad I borrowed them from someone else and didn’t pay my own money for them, I can never get those wasted hours of my life back.

So I was a bit surprised to discover that there were still a couple of novels from his earlier, good period that I hadn’t read. One was Double Star, which I caught up with last November; the other was The Door Into Summer, of which I knew almost nothing; it cropped up at 79th on Neil Sykes’ list of the top 100 SF novels, now I notice down to 92nd. I put it on my list of books to look out for in London last week, found it, bought it, read it.

And it’s a good sf novel. Written in 1956, set in 1970 and 2000, hero is a bit of an asshole (alas, unintentionally – a hint of things to come), suspended animation takes you forward in time, the mad professor’s time machine takes you back. I kept on recognising bits from films – surely that last was part of the inspiration for Back to the Future? Surely the scene with trying to get the cat into suspended animation is consciously echoed by Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) and Jones (played by himself) in Alien? OK, there are one or two plot holes, and the hero’s relationship with his colleague’s stepdaughter could not possibly be written as an innocent friendship these days, but taken as a novel of its time it’s pretty good. The hero is 30 in 1970, born in 1940, so the book’s key target readership when it was first published would have been able to think of this as their own possible future.

Of course, now that we are four years beyond the year in which the end of the book is set it’s also interesting to read it as futurology (as one can also read, for instance, Bellamy’s Looking Backward: from 2000 to 1887). Heinlein has a mid-1960s nuclear war, and the capital of the USA moving to Denver, which of course didn’t happen; nor was suspended animation commonplace in 1970 or even 2000. But the spread of household appliances (the source of our hero’s wealth) is a good call, even if he got the modalities somewhat wrong; his nearest hit is the engineer’s drawing board, not too far removed from our CAD. He hints (as far as you could in 1956) at a more liberal and liberated sexual culture in the future – indeed, some would argue that Stranger in a Strange Land helped to bring that about – but completely misses the improvement in rights for non-whites as far as I can tell. (Farnham’s Freehold was still eight years in the future.) The English language, thank heavens, has not changed as much in the last thirty years (or fifty) as he predicted.

Anyway, that was worth the £4 or £5 I paid for it. Back to finishing River of Gods now.

Aha, I hadn’t spotted that in fact there is a second half of Neil Sykes’ Top 200 SF books list. They are:

Neil Sykes has revised his Top 100 SF novels listA Mirror for Obervers, which I admit I hadn’t heard of, and slightly more surprisingly Heinlein’s The Past Through Tomorrow, Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, while in come Lem’s Solaris (reasonable), Ellison’s Deathbird stories (haven’t read them), Delany’s Dhalgren (also haven’t read it) and Niven and Pournelle’s Lucifer’s Hammer (oh, for heaven’s sake!). The full list, with those I’ve read bold and those currently on my shelves awaiting my attention in italics, is:

7) The Complete Maus, by Art Spiegelman.

I’m ashamed to say I hadn’t read this before. It really is fantastic. Art Spiegelman persuades his elderly, cranky father to recount the experience of the Holocaust, in a series of graphic novels originally published between 1980 and 1991. The Jews are mice; the Germans are cats; the Poles are pigs; one French character is a frog. Which at first sounds as if he’s going for the worst stereotyping but in fact the moral comes out more as being to stress the shared humanity of all the participants. (At a couple of points Spiegelman interrupts the plot to reflect on the metaphor, but it still works.)

It’s a grim story, of course, enlivened by shafts of unexpected wit and individual moments of heroism. For me one of the grimmest aspects was to reflect that the last issue of Maus was published the year before Milosevic started down precisely the same road in Croatia and Bosnia. Strongly recommended.

This won’t mean much except to those who are at least as obsessed as I am with the US election campaign. But I thought it was amusing.

From Bush’s campaign manager to Kerry’s campaign manager:

Dear Ms. Cahill:

On Thursday your campaign hosted a fundraiser at Radio City Music Hall at which Sen. Kerry said, “Every performer tonight in their own way either verbally through their music through their lyrics have conveyed to you the heart and soul of our country.”

I called on your campaign to release the performance that Sen. Kerry said represented the “heart and soul” of America so that all Americans could see for themselves what John Kerry thinks represents the “heart and soul” of our country.

Do most Americans in their hearts, think that calling the President a “thug” and a “killer” represents the “heart and soul” of our nation? We don’t think so, but we think voters should decide for themselves by watching the celebrities John Kerry said captured the “heart and soul” of America.

Your Senior Advisor Tad Devine said that you believed that releasing musical performances “might violate copyrights and licensing agreements for the entertainers who performed and allow the Bush campaign to use the tape in commercials against Kerry and Edwards”

I have been assured that “fair use” rules of copyright would allow you to release the tapes of these musical performances to the news media under 2 U.S.C. § 107. To allay the other concern you relayed to the news media, Bush-Cheney ’04 pledges to refrain from using audio, video or transcripts of the event for any television, cable, satellite or radio advertising. We look forward to seeing this spirited display.

Sincerely,

Ken Mehlman

To which Kerry’s campaign manager sent a pretty good response:

Dear Ken:

Over the past several months, allies of the President have questioned John Kerry’s patriotism while your staff has criticized his service in Vietnam. Republicans and their allies have gone so far as to launch attacks against his wife and your campaign has run $80 million in negative ads that have been called baseless, misleading and unfair by several independent observers.

Considering that the President has failed to even come close to keeping his promise to change the tone in Washington, we find your outrage over and paparazzi-like obsession with a fund-raising event to be misplaced. The fact is that the nation has a greater interest in seeing several documents made public relating to the President’s performance in office and personal veracity that the White House has steadfastly refused to release. As such, we will not consider your request until the Bush campaign and White House make public the documents/materials listed below:

* Military records: Any copies of the President’s military records that would actually prove he fulfilled the terms of his military service. For that matter, it would be comforting to the American people if the campaign or the White House could produce more than just a single person to verify that the President was in Alabama when said he was there. Many Americans find it odd that only one person out of an entire squadron can recall seeing Mr. Bush.

* Halliburton: All correspondence between the Defense Department and the White House regarding the no-bid contracts that have gone to the Vice-President’s former company. Some material has already been made public. Why not take a campaign issue off the table by making all of these materials public so the voters can see how Halliburton has benefited from Mr. Cheney serving as Vice-President?

* The Cheney Energy Task Force: For an Administration that claims to hate lawsuits, it’s ironic that the Bush White House is taking up the Courts’ time to keep the fact that Ken Lay and Enron wrote its energy policy in secret behind closed doors. Please release the documents so that the country can learn what lobbyists and special interests wrote the White House energy policy.

* Medicare Bill: Please release all White House correspondence between the pharmaceutical industry and the Administration regarding the Medicare Bill, which gave billions to some of the President’s biggest donors. In addition, please provide all written materials that directed the Medicare actuary to withhold information from Congress about the actual cost of the bill.

* Prison Abuse Documents: A few weeks ago, the White House released a selected number of documents regarding the White House’s involvement in laying the legal foundation for the interrogation methods that were used in Iraq. Please release the remaining documents.

We also wanted to wish you a happy anniversary. As we are sure you and the attorneys representing the President, Vice-President and other White House officials are aware, today marks one year since Administration sources leaked the identity of a covert CIA agent to Bob Novak in an effort to retaliate against a critic of the Administration.

In light of the fact that the Administration began gutting the laws protecting the nation’s forests yesterday, we hope you will accept the paper on which this letter is written as an anniversary gift. (The one year anniversary is known as the “paper anniversary.”)

Sincerely,

Mary Beth Cahill
Campaign Manager

I spent a week in Macedonia with Mary Beth Cahill in 1997. She is one tough cookie.

Had a chance to leaf through Dean Godson’s massive biography of David Trimble yesterday. He quotes me extensively on pages 663-7 (for which he duly thanked me). I’m not completely content with the presentation; it’s often “Nicholas Whyte says…” followed by my analysis (accurately reported, in fairness) and then the next sentence is the author’s own intepretation, which I don’t always completely agree with. Oh well, if anyone gets far enough into the book to query it, they know where to find me…

http://www.time.com/time/columnist/arnold/article/0,9565,547796,00.html

The ones I’ve read in bold.

“These 25 must-read books, in alphabetical order, span the last 25 years of graphic novel making. All are still in print, and can be found at online bookstores and well-stocked retail outlets. This is not intended as a “best-of” list, as many excellent books could not be fit into a list of 25. Instead, it is meant as a guide for creating a well-rounded library of adult-level material that reflects the history, diversity and current trends of graphic literature.”

Berlin: City of Stones by Jason Lutes (Drawn & Quarterly; 2000)
Boulevard of Broken Dreams by Kim Deitch (Pantheon; 2002)
Buddha by Osamu Tezuka (Vertical, Inc.; 2003)
A Contract with God by Will Eisner (DC Comics; 1978)
The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller (DC Comics; 1986)
David Boring by Daniel Clowes (Pantheon; 2000)
Epileptic vol. I by David B. (L’Association; 2002)
Flood by Eric Drooker (Dark Horse Comics; 1992)
From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell (Top Shelf; 2000)
The Golem’s Mighty Swing by James Sturm (Drawn & Quarterly; 2002)
Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware (Pantheon: 2000)
Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: The Beauty Supply District by Ben Katchor (Pantheon; 2000)
Louis Riel by Chester Brown (Drawn & Quarterly; 2003)
Maus vols. I + II by Art Spiegelman (Pantheon; 1986)
Nightmare Alley as adapted by Spain (Fantagraphics Books; 2003)
One! Hundred! Demons! by Lynda Barry (Sasquatch Books; 2002)
Our Cancer Year by Harvey Pekar and Joyce Brabner (Four Walls Eight Windows; 1994)
Palomar by Gilbert Hernandez (Fantagraphics Books; 2003)
Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (Pantheon; 2003)
The R. Crumb Coffee Table Art Book by R. Crumb (Little Brown & Co.; 1997)
Safe Area Gorazde by Joe Sacco (Fantagraphics Books; 2000)
Sandman: Season of Mists by Neil Gaiman and various (Vertigo; 1994)
Stuck Rubber Baby by Howard Cruse (DC Comics; 1995)
Summer Blonde by Adrian Tomine (Drawn & Quarterly; 2002)
Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud (Perennial; 1993)

I’m woefully ill-read.

[later edit: since making this post I have read:
Persepolis
A Contract With God
Berlin: City of Stones
David Boring
Safe Area Goražde
Buddha, vol. 1
and enjoyed all apart from Buddha immensely, as indeed I did the five on the list I had originally read.]

Have seen 29, and bits of another 8, I think.

http://www.obeythefist.com/movies/index.php?list=worst

The only one I’ve seen was Highlander II – but boy oh boy, that was a bad film!

…by one of my least favourite paranoid ranters.

I amalgamated all my lists of books and came up with eight that I really want to buy and read by the end of this year, three non-genre classics, five sf classics:

Don Quixote, Cervantes; The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald; Little Women, Alcott; Way Station, Simak; The Demolished Man, Bester; City, Simak; The Door into Summer, Heinlein; Cyteen, Cherryh.

In London tomorrow – shopping!

6) A Narrative About War And Freedom: Dialog with the commander Ramush Haradinaj, by Bardh Hamzaj. This is basically an extended (180-page) interview with KLA leader Ramush Haradinaj, produced in mid-1999 very shortly after the end of the Kosovo conflict. Haradinaj gave me a personally inscribed copy last week, and I read it on the way to work this morning (I’m going to a party this evening so came in by public transport).

Points of interest:

• Haradinaj wanted to be an astronomer when he grew up! but circumstances turned him into a guerilla leader and then politician.
• His significant other is (or was) a Swedish-speaking Finn – they get everywhere!
• Ali Ahmeti appears at an early stage as helping with arms imports into Kosovo, but then drops out of the narrative. (I remember Haradinaj being questioned very closely on this point at a conference we were both at in Paris when Ahmeti emerged again in Macedonia in 2001.)
• KLA got no help at all from Albanian government structures, until late 1998 when the US clearly signalled that it was OK to turn a blind eye to gun-running across the border.
• Haradinaj thinks KLA had basically lost the war in September 1998 when Holbrooke brokered the deal to bring in the OSCE unarmed Kosovo Verification Mission, which gave them enough breathing space to regroup for the spring offensive which as it turned out was also backed by NATO. In fairness the Serbs breached the letter and spirit of the Holbrooke agreement much more egregiously.
• KLA had no central command structure at all. Various individuals were declared to be overall commanders at different times but this had no practical effect. This therefore made it difficult to negotiate even with allies like the Americans, never mind anyone else.
• Haradinaj very keen to stress importance of treating minorities decently – deplores summer 1999 violence against non-Albanians. It would be interesting to check if this is in the Albanian original text.

As with any such biography one wonders what is left out. But in the Balkans it’s unusual to read a story told by one of the key actors in the first person so soon after the events, with such a large amount of circumstantial detail.

I’ve just been invited to speak at a November event on the European constitution; the organisers very kindly write of my “impeccable credentials” and my “expertise on all thongs European.” I’d have thought that anyone with expertise in thongs probably does not have impeccable credentials, but perhaps I am not broad-minded enough.

By request from :

Finland is a more interesting country than you might think. It has a Swedish-speaking minority of around 5.5%, and I’ve got to know several of them through living in Brussels, particularly since the Swedish People’s Party in Finland is a rare example of a political party representing a minority which has decided that it is liberal in political orientation. The only other one I can think of offhand is the party of the ethnic Turks in Bulgaria. (I should explain that I’ve been loosely involved with international liberalism for over ten years.)

Also they seemed to be attracted to the same part of the world that I work on; a good friend who is a Swedish-speaking Finn working in the European Parliament has organised several conferences of Balkan liberals which I got invited to; their MEP takes a strong interest in Romania and a general interest in foreign policy; and one of their more senior members is on the board of trustees of my employers.

I know them well enough to be sensitive to the fact that they are emphatically not an ethnic minority, but a linguistic minority; they consider themselves to be ethnic Finns who happen to speak Swedish. And as someone who is Irish but cannot speak a word of the Irish language, who am I to criticise?

A few months ago, I found myself at a Brussels dinner sitting next to a gentleman who introduced himself as the former Prime Minister of the Åland Islands. I knew this much: that the Åland Islands are an autonomous archipelago between Stockholm and Turku/Åbo, owned by Finland, where the population speaks Swedish. So I shamelessly name-dropped my friends from the Swedish People’s Party of Finland, and finished off the process of (I thought) ingratiating myself by expressing my childhood fascination for that great writer of the Swedish-speaking Finns, Tove Jansson, creator of the Moomins.

The ex-Prime Minister was not impressed. “They,” he said indignantly, “are Swedish-speaking Finns.” He saw my look of consternation, and took pity on me. “We,” he explained (and perhaps not for the first time, I sensed), “are Swedes under Finnish rule.”

(I thought Tove Jansson must be from the Åland Islands, because I knew she had lived on an island. The ex-Prime Minister pointed out kindly to me that there are a lot of other islands much nearer the Finnish coast than the Åland Islands are, and she lived on one of them.)

After that we got on quite well, but it was a shaky start. The moral is: no matter how much you think you know, you probably still don’t know enough. Or put more crisply: don’t be a smartarse when talking to ex-Prime Ministers about their own country.

Well, I’m sitting here listening to the CDs I bought in Kosovo (I’m sure all IPR were respected despite the fact that they cost a euro and a half each, though I didn’t interrogate the nice man in the shop who spoke German with such a very strong Swiss accent on this point), and trying as so often to persuade U to fall asleep on my lap.

Yesterday’s conference was a bit gruelling. As sometimes happens, I was supposed to both chair the session and make a presentation; to make matters more complex, the conference was being run through Serbian, Albanian and English with simultaneous translation via headphones, and also incidentally being broadcast live on TV. Also of course I hadn’t written my own presentation yet. So I asked the bright British diplomat on the panel to speak first, as I’d scanned his notes over dinner the previous night and knew what he was going to say, and then the former Central European foreign minister, who had already told me exactly what he was going to say already, since that would give me time to get my own notes together. Then I was able to listen more fully to the Serbian human rights activist (who spoke in Serbian) and the Kosovo journalist-turned-politician (who spoke in Albanian) and pull together a half-decent presentation myself on comparative situations outside Kosovo – not just the relatively local examples of Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina but also the cases of my birthplace and my current place of residence. I threw in a story about the Åland islands which sadly appeared to leave most of the audience cold (though at least my friends laughed – those who hadn’t heard it before).

So that was OK, and then came what Basil Fawlty would have called “the tricky bit”: moderating a discussion in three languages of which I only speak one. I only had to cut two people off because they were going on too long, one tedious individual who fancied himself an expert on constitutional law, and another who I actually felt really sorry for, an ethnic Turk from one of the small towns of Kosovo who complained that he and his people were getting screwed from all sides, Serbs, Albanians and international community, and he wasn’t even allowed to have his surname – Şahil – spelt properly on his identity card. I’m not at all unfamiliar with the problems of having your surname spelt correctly, and told him so afterwards (again in German, which is the unacknowledged second language of everyone in Kosovo), though I didn’t do so during the open session of the conference as I was afraid it would sound patronising.

Then a rapid dash to Pristina airport, in the company of Dr A, who has attended all three conferences I was at on this trip – Paris on Friday before last, Berlin on Saturday before last, and Kosovo yesterday and the day before. Dr A actually lives in Munich but commutes to Berlin, which must be a pain. We flew together to Budapest. I had the window seat and was thinking to myself that the sun was not where I expected, and there was a very large city much bigger than any city I knew to be north of Kosovo under the plane, when the truth hit me and I said to Dr A, “Are we flying over Skopje???” He confirmed that because of Serbia’s reluctance to recognise anything in Kosovo, flights north out of Pristina actually fly south, over Macedonia, and then turn round and head north over Bulgaria and Rumania, thus adding an extra half hour to the journey time.

So made it home in reasonably good order, and since then have been desultorily updating lj, cooking, playing with children, chat with neighbours (both J and his son have a leg in plaster at the moment) got out of house for a little shopping, read much but not yet all of River of Gods by Ian McDonald. But back to work tomorrow.

As so often, Dave Barry gets it right: “It turns out that an aquarium is a powder keg that can explode in deadly violence at any moment, just like the Middle East, or junior high school.”