I got tickets for the Blur gig in July – yippee! One of the benefits of being an O2 customer – you get priority bookings for gigs at the O2, or ones they are involved in. It’s how I got Metallica tickets for March, which I’m going to with my brother – ROCK!
I had my first ever OU tutorial last night, as part of my Spanish course. It was a little chaotic, but certainly good to be with others, and getting feedback on accent, pronunciation and so on. Afterwards I went for a beer (or two ahem) with one of the other students – great to get out with new people and spread my social wings, so to speak.
A colleague introduced me to Google Reader today. A little slow to catch on I know, but a very useful tool. One of the reasons I was recruited to this position (I think) was for my interest in “new media”, and we will be working on improving our services to journalists and the public through web-based media, as well as continuing our support to papers, TV and radio. But as so many of the articles I linked to yesterday said (or implied), the boundaries are getting increasingly blurred. So we in the Commission need to address that more directly. Anyway, if anyone has any decent blogs to suggest, send me the link!
Brussels is the focus of the day, with the summit going on, so it’s quite quiet here. We did have an announcement today about clawing back around £80 million of agriculture money that has been mis-spent by the UK authorities, mainly for not meeting farm payment deadlines. Are we going to see parity between the euro and the pound? That’d be all very well for friends visiting me here, but it’s terrible news for the many retired British people living in Spain, France and elsewhere in the EU (and I’ll declare an interest – that includes my parents), whose pensions are paid in pounds and are seeing it slip away. What with the low interest rate, the problems in financial markets and now this, it does seem as if past financial prudence (saving, investing in pension funds and all those things we were told we should do) is being punished. Hardly the message we should be sending out, I would say.