The world carries on...

Pineta, originally uploaded by CharlesFred.

It was the Eurovision, but the world carries on. Tony has told us that he is going to leave on June 27th and Nicolas Sarkozy has become installed as the President of France. Hundreds have probably died in Iraq whilst, for the moment, there seems to be a lull in the fighting in Somalia.

And now, it is almost dinner time, so I will go upstairs. We will have a tortilla type thing when we will eat all the scraps left in the fridge before we go to stay with friends near Nijmegen for the coming two days. Fred has a couple of days off, it being Ascension Day tomorrow.

I am afraid that Eurovision is not quite over because Marija Serfovic will be visiting Holland on Saturday and I hope to catch her in Almere in the afternoon, as we will nto be back from Nijmegen early enough to catch her in Amsterdam in the morning.

I am waiting to hear the results of my job interviews from earlier in the week and may hear something by Friday, fingers crossed.

In the meantime, while all the discussions are going on about the voting in the Eurovision Song Contest, with MPs from various countries raising questions, there are discussions going on about the European Union constitution. I mean the way the European Union votes only affects all our lives in Europe and how much attention does it get? The Dutch voted against the constitution and it now seems that the Dutch government is happy to have found support from UK, France, Poland and Czech Republic to avoid a new consitution and go for a mini one which can be sneaked through as a treaty and therefore avoid the dreaded referendum. How awful it would be to have to ask the voters again what they want!

This is also a theme running through many threads of discussion about Eurovision... it is all the fault of the televotes... bring back juries, let them decide for us and maybe 'we' will do better (if we can buy them off, intimidate them, dominate them and so on). It seems that democracy is only to be trusted if it gives those in power the result they want.

As it happens, with Eurovision, they have re-cast the votes, using differing geographical areas and it shows that the Western countries voted more for the Eastern European countries than the Eastern European countries themselves and that whichever way you look at it Serbia would have won!