Well, managed to find the new printing of Christopher Priest's The Separation in the American bookshop, so not a complete waste of time...

Actually that's a bit unfair. I'd given up on this conference last night, but this morning's session on the EU was very good. I asked in German wheher the panellists agreed with me that English was becoming the dominant language in EU foreign policy, and if so how important it was. One of them told me over lunch a hair-raising story from Bosnia where lives had been endangered because the helicopter pilots didn't speak English.

And a jolly pleasant dinner last night with three Macedonians. Good stuff.