You may have noticed that this blog has not been updated recently. I haven’t given up on the blog, just on my old hosting provider. The blog is now at www.thursdaybriefing.eu, and the RSS feed remains rss.tredford01.co.uk/thursday. If you haven’t seen a post in the feed titled, “Palin 2: Return From The Frozen Land”, then you’re on the old feed, and should update to the one listed here. Most people should have been automatically migrated though.

I’m annoyed that the COP15 was scheduled for now. Not for any great political reason, but because I have end of semester exams this week, so I can’t really write about the Conference—or do much apart from write about Anglo-European relations in 1950 or attempt to comprehend standard deviation and t-tests—until Friday, when I hope to get plenty of catch-up blogging done. Check back then though, I’m sure the end of the Conference will spark some reaction from my likely weary mind.

Unfortunately my schedule meant that I couldn’t take part in Blog Action Day yesterday (exam revision and travelling), but I’ll try to make up for it once my mid-term exams are over next week. Before that though, I have to get through the rest of the European Green Party’s council meeting in Malmö. There is quite a lot of discussion of our performance in the European Parliament elections earlier this year, and hopefully I can make some of it into an interesting post later on. I’m tweeting stuff as I go along under @tredford01, with the #EGP hashtag that a few others here are using.

This article on the BBC News web-site about a Dutch girl who wants to skip school to sail around the world caught my attention this morning. It isn’t really much to do with politics, but it provoked an instant reaction in my mind, so it must be good blogging material.

Surely, if she’s capable of looking after herself and there is good back-up support for if things should go wrong, then the amount she will learn from the experience of a round the world voyage will outweigh what she loses from missing school? Just think how much it will teach her of looking after herself and of skills such as navigation.

The Dutch do seem to be a little freer with bringing up their children than we are in Britain (I saw two young boys, about 7 or so, rowing along a canal the other day; alone, no parents in sight), but as long as she is well supported on the trip, it sounds like a fantastic idea!

Nothing is for definite, but I think I might be participating in World Have Your Say on the BBC World Service this evening, discussing Libya’s welcome of Al-Megrahi after his compassionate release. It airs at 19h00 BST (20h00 CEST). I don’t really know what to expect, but I know what I think.

Link to play BBC World Service live online.

I’ve just noticed that this blog had it’s first birthday on the 13th. I didn’t really know where this would go when I started it; in fact I mainly started it for an excuse to play around with CSS3. Anyone who began reading this after October last year probably hasn’t the faintest clue where the name comes from—the blog started out as a weekly briefing, though the effort of compiling that soon put a stop to it—but I like it, and it’s distinctive. It’s quite rewarding to keep this blog as well: I’ve had 1,607 visits from 56 countries since I started (I realise this is quite low traffic, but I’m not expecting much from this poorly kept hobby!), written 140 posts, and managed two election night live-blogs. I don’t have any plans to stop, so lets see if it can become as long-lived as my other blog which is now approaching its fourth birthday.

Seeing as I haven’t written anything here for a rather long time, I thought I’d pop up this quick post. I haven’t totally given up on the Thursday Briefing, but I’m in the process of emigrating right now, so consider this blog to be on recess until I’ve managed to get settled into my shiny new Dutch apartment sometime next week. I’m sure I’ll find plenty to write about, especially once the parliamentary recesses are over at the start of September.