Happy Christmas!
Apologies for the lack of posting...since I was last seen in Tartu, posting from the Hiie Maja's (see my next post, "I can't go back there again...") complimentary computer, I disappeared into no-man's-land, or as I call it, Latvia. The provision of internet cafes was sadly inadequate for keeping a travel diary, and to be honest I might well have ended up spending more time blogging than actually enjoying my holiday. Since then - I got back on 8th December - I have been relaxing and deciding what to do with the next stage of my life, given that just getting on the return flight was hard enough after such a great trip. Far from being disappointed with an EU-standard cepeliniai (far from being banned for being far too fattening for human consumption, they are now even bigger than they used to be) I am still suffering withdrawal symptoms three weeks after leaving Lithuania, and am thinking of biding my time between now and the inevitable demise of yet another Tory leadership going out there to learn the language and continue the grand taste test (I still haven't exhausted the range of pelmeni served at the Pelmeni XL buffet in Riga station) at my own leisure.
I have a store of stories about my trip which were only really writeable after I got back. Given that the Tories' poll trajectory continues downwards (despite a few blips, they are now below the magic 40% needed for any sort of overall majority), that Brown's bounce is still being analysed, dissected and studied intensely by the media (evidently it is some kind of scientific phenomenon as yet unseen with the naked eye, thereby warranting such spillage of ink as we've seen over the last three months), and that nothing that makes sense to any normal human being comes out of Westminster except perhaps via Damien Green's pet mole, I will expand this blog's remit slightly into analysis of other situations, travel-writing (well, the 72 bus service from Aldershot to Reading can be a journey to rival any of Michael Palin's even on good days) and writing on various "spiritual" topics. They will mostly have a political slant, but since this seems to be what I've been put here to do, I hope to be able to be able to bring the politics of an obscure and neglected region to the readers of my blog, most of whom are no doubt British.
However, I must say a big HI to Jimmy from Denmark, who I met on a trip to Vienna with the Young European Federalists in 2000. Sadly I must admit that my stance on Europe has gone from pro- to largely "Euro-agnostic" in the past few years, on the basis that since Michael Howard the Tories no longer debate it with such a passion, so I feel no obligation to be anti-Europe and yet a member of the Conservative Party. My opinion of the Federalists was that they didn't really understand that most European peoples do not see the EU in terms of an aspiration to greater union but as a giant cash-cow dispensing money which suddenly dries up when someone poorer than they joins up. However, saying that, I am not in favour of Britain leaving the Union so much as the Union leaving Britain - at some point, the complexity of trying to install a whole new President of Europe on top of the teetering bureaucracy is going to become irreconcilable with the basic principles of democracy. I would rather chose my own president rather than having Nicolas Sarkozy do it for me, particularly because Sarko seems to have got it into his head that Tony Blair would be a good candidate. What happened to our vote? Did they conveniently forget that if they are going to have a President of Europe, that they should be elected? This is probably the subject of an article in itself, but having seen the damage the EU is doing in the Baltic States, closer integration will need to be accompanied by greater public participation in European elections before the president could really claim to represent the diverse peoples coming under the umbrella at present.
All this and I have a new laptop computer now too, so no more big bills for Quarks internet cafe in Reading. Windows is badgering me to reset so it can install new files, so I will close and post this now without further ado.
Merry Christmas and a happy New Year to all our readers!
P.S. I boobed - Vara Vike-Freiburga is no longer President of Latvia - her term ran out two years ago.
