I stressed out for the rest of the evening. The thing is, a long time ago, when there were still reassuringly blank spaces in my diary, I agreed to give witness to a specialized Section of the French Economic, Social and Environmental Council on a theme completely ‘out of area’ for me – namely, the role of the state in the new institutional context. In the meantime, however, all the blank spaces disappeared and now I suddenly realized that I had no speech just twelve hours before I was due to give evidence for at least 45 minutes to a large group of learned Frenchmen. Oh my gawd! I felt like an undergraduate again, on the eve of a tutorial for which I hadn’t yet written my essay (an all too frequent occurrence, I must confess). Back in those days I would have done an ‘all nighter’ – indeed, I still have fond memories of the college and chapel clocks chiming the hours as available time slowly diminished and my word count and knowledge slowly increased. I don’t have the stamina for all-nighters any more, but I did stay up into the wee small hours, ‘slogging’…
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