A friend of mine likes telling the story of the following oblivious encounter. One afternoon she negotiated the labyrinth of parliamentary corridors in Brussels looking for a colleague of hers who had invited her to a venue where some beautiful part of Europe boasting rich local traditions, displayed its architectural gems, lured passers-by with the picturesquesness of its landscape and tempted them with mouth-watering local cuisine. This is called a “presentation of the region”.

 Since May 2006, when our communication services have been cloistered or maybe garrisoned (it is a civil service though) a good furlong away from the political epicentre marked with a ASP/PHS* crossroads, we hardly have a chance to nab a bite of this tasteful cultural richness of our continent. Fortunately my colleagues go home and come back bringing bagfuls of local delicacies, going some considerable way to compensate.

 Anyway, my friend navigated her way, using those mysterious hieroglyphs** drawn upon the walls of the Brussels temple of democracy: a tree (the Tree of Knowledge??), a steam car (Thomas!!!?) a challenge worth if not Champollion, then at least Young Indiana Jones.

 So she took another desperate turn and suddenly she came across a tall, white headed man in his sixties. You know the feeling very well: “crumbs! I am sure I met this guy before, I know him quite well, right, he must be one of my dad’s friends from the Ministry…” So she sent him a polite smile, asked “How are you?”, and when he acknowledged her back, they went on friendly small-talk for a while and wished one another a good evening.

 The man walked away and she noticed her colleague who has watched the whole scene. “Wow, he said, I am surprised you and Mr Prime Minister know each other so well”. The nice “dad’s friend” was Jerzy Buzek, now the President of the European Parliament.

 This time we knew exactly whom we are meeting. If you can measure the importance of the person with time you have to wait for the interview, over three months after the elections there was no doubt I went to talk with the head of the Parliament.

In fact, the new Cabinet just wished to wait until after the inaugural speech of Mr Buzek on September plenary. And then we had all that jazz about Lisbon. It is hard to ask questions with your breath held. And even harder to answer them, I presume.

 The Irish said yes on Saturday, then on Wednesday, we could see Mr Buzek on TV when Polish President eventually signed the Treaty with a biro because his fountain pen broke up in front of the cams; next Saturday he was in Prague, to find out, that Vaclav Klaus find another excuse not to do it… and then on Monday our photographer and the author walked in President’s office on the eleventh floor to talk.

 ”This is a properly working pen”, said Mr Buzek in jest pointing at the silver nib on top of the pile of the documents on his desk when we sat around with a dictaphone and a camera. Then he went on talking about the long-awaited signature in Warsaw…

Now a little quiz: what question did I ask Mr Buzek first?

You can read the interview on our website.