Hels has received an offer on her flat which she has accepted. My flat is in today’s newspaper, so hopefully there will be lots of viewings this weekend and I’ll get an offer soon.
Month: April 2004
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Busy busy buzzzzzz
As is often the case, I’m far too busy to create interesting content here today. If you’re lucky (?), there may be something later, possibly this evening. I was going to do a round-up of coverage of the UK EU constitution referendum from other English-language newspapers around the world, but I’ve not had time yet.
In the meantime, I’ve got a German coming to visit later today, at some indeterminate time. Just don’t mention the war.
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Beer with…
Lord Percy, Clive, Matt, Ted, Vick and Paul F, with sightings of Sally, Viv, Ted, Dave, Gary, Terry and other picture postcards. I also saw Bill, who is a client. Thankfully, he was more pissed than I was. So that worked out ok.
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Eurofile
There’s nothing like a heated argument about the EU constitution to set you up for the afternoon.
On the Today programme yesterday morning, I heard Michael Howard say that the EU didn’t need a constitution because nations had constitutions and the EU was not a nation. He didn’t say this just once. He repeated it. His campaign seems to be based on the premise that no constitution is required for the running of an organisation like the EU.
Clearly stuff and nonsense. Corporations have constitutions. Charities have constitutions. All sorts of organisations have constitutions. A robust and transparent framework for the running and operation of an organisation is a fundamental requirement. The greatest shame about all this is that it shows how deficient the founders of the EU were in not creating a constitution at the outset.If the Tories can not come up with a stronger and more believable argument for voting down the constitution (and I can’t believe that even if the British vote "no" and everyone else that has a referendum votes "yes" that the constitution will be torn up anyway), then I think they will lose the vote and lose heavily.
Unless they play the xenophobia card, of course. And they wouldn’t do that, would they?Either way, I don’t believe that the proposed treaty needed a referendum anyway. I think that HMG, or, more precisely, the PM, has given into external pressure unnecessarily. The Maastricht Treaty didn’t need a referendum and nor did the Single European Treaty, both of which gave many more powers to the EU than the reforms in the current draft treaty. Even when we joined the EU/EEC, we didn’t have a referendum – it was only afterwards that Labour called a referendum, and that was convincing in its result.
But we know that Mr Murdoch doesn’t have that sort of influence really. After all, he hasn’t spoken to the PM on the subject "recently".BBC handy notes:
EU constitution FAQ.
What the draft constitution says, including, usefully, what it doesn’t say. -
Not very exciting
Well, BT are going to replace my modem. Which is nice.
I’ve also talked to the NatWest this morning, who had seemed to be incapable of returning telephone calls.
And generally, I’ve been busy sorting out odds and ends, not getting much of anything done, but feeling quite productive in the process of doing it.
Which isn’t very exciting for you. -
Oh joy
I’ve worked out what is wrong with my broadband connection – it’s the modem. This morning, I brought in my modem from home and plugged it in, and now the connection works fine. So I’ll have to get on to BT and cancel this afternoon’s engineer visit, establish who owns the modem (I have a horrible feeling that it is me, not BT) and sort out a replacement.
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Talking of pants…
BT have finally figured out that they can not solve my work broadband problem by sending pings down the wire to the modem. The modem will send back reports saying that it’s fine. Then, when my connection drops, the modem doesn’t receive the pings. SHOCK!
So, after nearly a week of trying to resolve the problem remotely, they are finally sending an engineer out to test the equipment and attempt to resolve the problem in situ. Far more sensible. He won’t be here until tomorrow afternoon though. -
Pants analogy
Russia is taking off its last pair of pants, while the United States and Japan are cutting down their budgets. This cannot last long.Sergei Gorbunov messes with journalistic minds. Full report here.