Roxburgh's Europe: January diary

Angus Roxburgh resumes his diary - a wry and personal view from Brussels on events in the EU.

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Readers may be acquainted with Europe Direct - the EU call centre that answers all your queries about EU matters, in 11 languages (soon in 19), five days a week.

All you have to do, in any member state, is dial 00800 6789 10 11, and a multilingual EU-Know-It-All will solve your problem.

Most queries, they say, are answered immediately, trickier ones can take up to three days.

Well my mind has been exercised of late by the details of the EU fisheries deal struck last December, so I rang Europe Direct to see if they could explain exactly what haddock quotas Scottish fishermen had, and whether they really were being outrageously discriminated against, as they claim.

My EU expert asked if I had access to the internet and gave the address of the webpage for the fisheries directorate general.

If you don't find the answer to your question there, he said, click on "contact" and send your question to the directorate general. "They'll have the answer."

Hmm. I knew it was too good to be true.

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Fat is a Belgian issue

Driving through almost any Belgian town or village in the evening can be a mouth-watering experience.

The wafting odours of the local friterie (frituur in Flanders) entice you to stop and buy Belgium's great speciality - chips, aka French fries, aka frites - with or without mayonnaise depending on just how Belgian you feel.

But do we really want the entire country to be enveloped in the stink of sizzling fat?

That would seem to be what the country's environment minister, Freya Van den Bossche, is planning.

She wants to convert the nation's cars to run on "bio-diesel", a blend of vegetable oil and fossil fuels.

Great for the environment, I'm sure, but, you know... you just can't get the smell out of your hair...

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For the record...

Mr Berlusconi: Before and after

Italy's EU presidency website is the perfect record of six of the EU's most disastrous months. July-December 2003, RIP.

It even includes an album of 120 photographs, starting with one of the 10-euro coins specially minted to celebrate the Italian presidency.

There are two of President Silvio Berlusconi addressing the European Parliament, though neither shows the German MEP he compared to a Nazi prison camp guard.

There are lots of others of Mr Berlusconi with this or that foreign dignitary.

The December EU summit, which ingloriously ended in disarray and failure to agree a constitution, is represented by three pictures of Mr Berlusconi, but no "family photo" because, well, the children just wouldn't sit still, and most of the adults were grimacing, for some reason, as if they had knives in their backs.

The record ends abruptly with Mr Berlusconi meeting the long-forgotten American politician James Baker the somethingth, once secretary of state, on 17 December.

Surely something important happened after that?

Oh yes, Mr Berlusconi had to repair the damage done by the six-month presidency... to his face.

Maybe the Italians are still planning to update their site with the pictures said to demonstrate his "facelift" - before and after, please.

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Image conscious

Star-spangled: The Irish (left) and Italian logos

Always interesting to see what logos countries come up with for their six-month stint at the helm.

The Italians had a strange-looking thing with a backwards capital E and a kind of twisted carpet-runner, half in the Italian colours, half with the inevitable blue background and 12 yellow stars.

Before them, the Greeks had a white swallow soaring across the blue flag with yellow stars.

The Danes had the audacity to have no stars at all, but a series of slightly warped concentric circles on a red background - top marks for Danish design.

Belgium contrived to fashion its EU-stars motif into a Magritte-style bowler hat, in subtle homage to its most famous artist.

The latest holder of the presidency, Ireland, alive to the marketing opportunities, makes scant reference to the EU (three blue and white stars) but includes the logos of two of its most famous exports - Guinness (the traditional Irish harp symbol) and Ryanair.

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No stone unturned

And while we're on the subject of flags and designs and things, why do big organisations like the EU feel obliged to produce meaningless posters such as the anti-smoking ones I spotted recently in a commission building.

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with anti-smoking posters. Or with EU efforts to combat tobacco use.

But what purpose exactly is served by a poster showing an ashtray containing 15 squashed cigarette stubs, each decorated with an EU state's flag?

Another one shows 15 stick-like figures (it's always 15 in an EU poster, though that, I suppose, will soon change to 25) pushing a big cigarette out of the way.

Rejoice, that the continent's good health is being ensured in such a way.