It is now a couple of days since Ms May filed for divorce. And it is still ‘news’, so the esteemed (and other) meeja seem determined to comment on every jot and tittle, nay every molecule of the first exchanges between the combatants. But boredom will soon set in – cf. a ‘nine-day wonder’ – and remember a week is a long time in politics.
Few commentators wish to recognise (at least in public) that there is a standard procedure when any negotiation starts. I recall life in several craft-based industries which reviewed their pay-and-benefits-scales every year. The protagonist stepped up, all mouth and trousers, with a proposal he knew was unacceptable. The antagonist objected with thunderous determination never to accept it. Neither was real life. It took days or sometimes weeks or months to ‘come together’.
So when the UK and EU have marked each other’s cards and the meeja have gone into the extreme boredom mode, the real work will begin. Patience, everyone.
Boadicea's Chariot 
Janus: After 24 September the last major obstacle will be cleared. At the moment Hollande is in no position to commit France to anything and the Huns will have to work out their Bundestag before a Chancellor can commit Hunland to anything. Donald Tusk has already softened the EU’s position and brought it closer to the Delightful Mrs May’s.
And we should never forget that there will be weeks of inactivty occasioned by that great European tradition, the summer vacation. Everybody out, just like the beloved trades unions.
Well of course, Janus, one can’t expect our dedicated Europrats to actually “do” something in August.
I hate to point it out but the UK was just the same until 1914 or so. Nobody who had two pennies to click together stayed in town during August!
War was declared on the 4th August between the UK and Germany, there was the maddest scramble to get back to town. My mother remembered clearly they were staying somewhere on the south coast and she went with her father to the railway station to get tickets, evidently it was a mad house with thousands trying to get back to town, it took over a week evidently to get everybody back and they had every train running back and forth like mad things. Mum and the family had to stay but they got grandpa on a train pretty bloody quickly as he was the personal telegrapher to the Prime Minister amongst other things.
I have no doubt that ‘evacuating’ the cities was a hangover of when the plague struck in earlier times. Pepys refers to it in his diaries leaving to visit friends and relatives in the country immediately plague was declared in the parish.
Only the poor remained behind.
Paris smells bad enough anytime but stay there in August, one would be crazy even today. I hate the place, can’t stand the stench, only went there once and left PDQ, never again! All the industrial area of Northern France is the same, disgusting rathole.
CO: France is a beautiful cesspit. It would be almost perfect if it were not filled with frogs. I’ve had to endure wave after wave of teenage frogs washing in from Lorraine, let’s not start on the Wogs from Wallonia. On grows desperate for a body of water. I fear that a future visit to Paris will only serve to confirm my theory that some places are best seen in photographs.
You guys are so, so….unromantic! 😉
Janus: I don’t believe in romance, I believe in cream tea and toad in the hole.
Sod romance, I just don’t want to catch it! Being a natural hypochondriac is my defense against all wog ridden hell holes (Which begin at Calais as you all know in my pantheon!)