The Mighty Quins

I had my first taste of season-ticket-holding Rugby League this weekend, when I headed to the Twickenham Stoop to watch Harlequins absolutely walk all over Warrington Wolves – 60-8 was the final score and 4 of those came from a try that was an individual run longer than the length of the pitch. Good stuff. [...]

Nothing else matters

Like I think pretty much everyone in the whole wolrd except Michael O’Leary, I couldn’t believe the reports that Ryanair are thinking about charging for use of in-flight bogs. Is that actually legal? But there is a good side – the endless creativity and humour that people can bring to bear to these kind of [...]

The Sound of Silence

I’ve been very remiss about writing the blog recently, but as I pointed out previously, there’s a fine balance between being busy enough to have something to write about, and being too busy to find the time. We’re missing several members of staff at the moment, for a variety of reasons, so its been mayhem [...]

Local hero(es)

I attended an interesting meeting this morning at the Westminster Media Forum, on the future of local media. I missed the beginning, and am not sure what the rules it was done under, so won’t go into too much detail about who said what. But it was extremely interesting. It focused on issues of delivery [...]

Christmas is coming…

Isn’t it just. I suppose now that it is actually December it’s allowed, but it does seem to have snuck up a bit – where did November go?! Anyway, here’s a little bit of Christmas cheer from the London rep:  showcasing the best in young film talent from around the EU, an interactive advent calendar.
I [...]

These are crazy crazy crazy crazy nights

Sorry it’s been so long, but the last few days have been a bit mad. On Thursday and Friday I was up in the North-East, representing the European Commission at an event for local authorities, universities and businesses in that region, to highlight possible sources of European funding and where to fgo for assistance and advice [...]

The sound of silence

Sorry, have been very negligent in my blog-writing duties. It’s not even that we’ve been totally swamped with work. It’s been quite busy, but in a very bitty way, doing a lot of admin and financial procedures for the various events that we have coming up before the end of the year and doing a [...]

The financial storm

Reading this blog recently, you might wonder whether I’m even aware of what’s going on in the world at the moment. Naturally, the answer is “of course I am”. It’s just that it hasn’t had a very direct impact on us. These things are going on at a different level to an office like ours. [...]

Back in the hotseat

Sorry it has been quiet for a bit. I was in Brussels Monday and Tuesday of last week for a meeting of the people who do my job in all our reps across Europe. It was great to meet them at last – most of them have been just voices across the ether or very [...]

Straight back down to earth

Back in the real world after the heady political junkie-ism of Manchester. My appearance on BBC News 24 got bounced to much later in the evening due to Gordon’s speech running over time, so I first went to the reception given by the Irish Ambassador. Met some interesting people there. That was really the point [...]