Well, so we won't be joining the € after all. Hardly a shocker - after the weeks of tiresome spin dickering, perhaps we need a new word for an announcement that declares nothing new. A claptrap, perhaps. The scary bit was this morning's BBC Radio 5 phone in, riddled with oddsters and the terminally scared. Like the surreally camp bloke horribly concerned by "Shipping all our gold and convertible currency reserves to Germany". So - if we joined the euro, what would we want with reserves? To defend the value of a pound that didn't exist? The other curious thing was his apparent belief that somehow the money would be spent, instead of mouldering in vaults. In fact, through the workings of the European System of Central Banks, the reserves are mostly held in the national central banks - just the name on them changes. A typical pity, though, this 50s-ish virility contest about symbols. A reporter at the joint Blair-Brown news conference was very concerned that the government might "try to fudge the question in a referendum by muddling it with continued membership of the EU" - that the government would do something so risky in the face of the frog bashing Murdoch press shags the imagination.

BTW, hope you like the clock...the "mad Kiwi" is the fella who is building a cruise missile in his garage. The site is a tech newsletter he edits - lots of interesting stuff including jet-propelled go karts.