fiddle de dee

Sometimes when I'm travelling (like this week) the act of keeping a blog sort of conspires against me. I don't usually spend more than about 10 minutes on a post, but sometimes even for that I'm caught short if the electronics don't work.

I prefer to add a picture if I can, but as my PC flickr loader has crashed I can't add anything from my camera today. And yesterday the network links were rather intermittent in my previous hotel. Its quite embarrassing when the line crashes in the middle of adding comments to someone else's blog, when its not quite what I wanted to say.

I'm guessing this hotel will have better food, though I need to work this evening on a presentation for tomorrow, so It'll be room service again. I did venture out for a few minutes to a nearby coffee shop though in order to have some sense of the people and the place instead of just the white box view of hotels and meeting rooms.

Some of my friends say this is a little like being a spy, travelling around, random hotels and so forth, but I don't think I'll be applying for a job with SIS, even if it could improve the news.

And there certainly seems to be a fair amount around today, Castro resigns, the Bridgend tragedies, Gordon's latest positive thought and even 'our Tone' getting back onto front pages with more talk of the European Union presidency. Now he's being supported by Sarkozy the whole thing may turn out to be a bad idea. According to my friends in France, Nikky is well past the honeymoon stage with the electorate, even if not so with Carla. Allegedly Germany's Angela Merkel is also not so keen along with those that have started a 'Stop Blair' website.

Then there's Vince who cabled his ideas about the rocky northern bank long before the teams of highly paid consultants concluded with the same idea. As its anathema to new Labour to nationalise things again, it will be interesting to see how long dithering Darling survives, or indeed whether Gordon makes a sacrifice of him.

And now that the '125% of property value' mortgages are surfacing and the separate Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) called 'Granite' has been used to hold all of the 'good' money from Northern Rock, it gets kind of interesting to see what is left in the nationalised shell - presumably a much smaller than anticipated number of less than 'rock solid' securities.

Perhaps Westminster, too, has also been caught short in the current situation.