At lunchtime today we celebrated the birthdays of two young colleagues in the Secretary General’s secretariat, Laura (Italian, on the left) and Frida (Swedish, on the right), and once again my waistline was seriously threatened by the generous onslaught of various goodies from various EU member states. I am blessed with a great team of gifted colleagues who work very hard and such moments are precious time-outs and excellent restoratives. Over the lunch we were regaled (if that’s the right word) with stories from Bernard (Belgium), an aviation expert, about the very special plumbing challenges that engineers had to overcome when designing and building the Airbus A-380. You can hear all about it (complete with attrocious puns and word plays) here. A big job indeed.