BuzekIt’s very nearly ten this Wednesday evening and I’m still with my files in the office and with one engagement still to go this evening but, nevertheless, a number of those ‘planes’ I wrote about in the previous post have come in smoothly and on time.  The enlarged Presidency and the Bureau meetings yesterday went very well. Happily, the Bureau confirmed the appointment of one of two Deputy Secretaries General, Wolfgang Jungk. This is excellent news all round.  It means that I can start doing some serious delegating and concentrating on the more strategic stuff. And today’s plenary session, despite a very heavy agenda, was a great success. One of the highlights was the visit of the European Parliament’s new President, Jerzy Buzek (a former Polish Prime Minister). His speech (in part about EESC-EP relations but mainly about climate change) and reply was full of witty observations. For example, when the President of our Various Interests Group, Staffan Nilsson, pointed out that Sweden and Poland had shared the same king (Sigismund III Vasa) for a while (1592-1599), Buzek jocularly recalled that in the seventeenth century it had been possible to travel by horse from Gdansk to Stockholm across a frozen Baltic sea. Not possible now, he speculated, because of … global warming. I’ll write some separate posts on the substance of the debates but I’d better run now.