A KAFKAESQUE MOMENT

Do you ever have one of those moments when you find yourself asking suddenly ‘what am I doing here?’ as if you had just woken up and found yourself at the bottom of some very deep rabbit hole? You do? Well then, let me join you, for I experienced just such a surreal and Kafkaesque moment on Wednesday of this week, an inoffensive sort of a day otherwise, when normally I should have been sitting quietly at this desk bashing out invoices for the labels that had been ordered that day, or sticking stamps on parcels, or just possibly operating our little printer and reeling up labels for some last minute order.

Instead I found myself in seat 451 of the European Parliament in Brussels, part of a great hemi-cycle, and desperately trying to stay awake as I listened to a French Minister droning bravely on about immigration and asylum.

I was surrounded by MPs and MEPs of all nations - regrouped in this chamber for an inter-parliamentary session on just those subjects. It’s a chance for the European Parliament to make friends with members of national parliaments and this particular session was organised by the French Presidency of the European Union as part of its efforts in the direction of Inter-cultural dialogue. All very worthy. And useful, too, in its own way.

But of course I am neither an MP, nor an MEP, though I might indeed have been one at one time had the voters in various places and various times been rather less careless in the placing of their crosses. That is a story that I have yet to tell. So there I was, seated in a row marked ‘Press’ - which wasn’t really helpful either as although I do contribute articles to a European journal, to describe myself as ‘Press,’ seemed not so much as being economical as vastly extravagant with the truth.

Nevertheless, there I was, with a glossy white photographic badge to prove my entitlement while I listened to the slow buzz of amplified and oddly stressed voices coming over the headphones from the interpreters’ cubicles while with my eyes I counted the myriad down lighters recessed into the ceiling. And after becoming bored with counting the lights I started this blog, reasoning that I would at least look as if I were being attentive even if I still felt I had fallen down a rabbit hole into somebody else’s existence - and, like Alice, I started to wonder who might have been the previous occupant whose legislative posterior had warmed the cushions of seat 451.

Of course, I did have a proper reason to be there to do with the communications project that I am working on with a team in Brussels and on which I endeavour to play some small part for the United Kingdom, which being a Big Country in the scale of these things, gives me rather more clout than were I to be representing a Small Country like Malta or Cyprus. I had an hour or two before catching the Eurostar back home and as some colleagues whose speciality was immigration were attending this Parliamentary meeting, they suggested I join them. “Why not,” I replied reasoning that one never knows who one is going to meet at the European Parliament.

Indeed I prefer watching people rather than listening to them and looking at the body language. I like absorbing the atmosphere too. Mostly this is languid and dull, but it quickens every now and then when, occasionally, someone says something original or interesting or even rehearses some tired old cliché with a bit of passion.

Here there is an atmosphere very different indeed to our Parliament in Westminster. It has something to do with the melting pot of languages, something to do with the vast amount of space - you could fit a respectable size tennis court in some of the corridors - so that the place resembles the terminal of an international airport rather than a quiet corner of contemplative deliberation.

Anyway, I soon had to escape my rabbit hole and my counting of downlighters and the immigration and asylum concerns of the various members and sneak back across Brussels, first to the Belgian chocolate shop - an obligatory stop on the way home - and then to Eurostar and so back to London in two hours or so.

I was fortunate that not to be staying an extra day, for had I been twenty-four hours later I could have found myself delayed by the fire that broke out the following day in the Channel Tunnel and was still raging this morning, fortunately hurting no-one. For such small mercies we must be thankful.