Fishing for public attention is the daily business of politicians; therefore it is always a pleasure to witness some original and positive ideas in this respect. One such election project was a Czech MEPs idea to cycle from Prague to Strasbourg and to announce it as a central pre-election promise. “If you vote for me and I get elected, I will pedal all these six hundred forty seven kilometres or so to get to the Strasbourg plenary!” (He told us about his project when he was one of eight new MEPs we interviewed for the website)

Well, he did it! And in order to attract the well-deserved attention, he took a shower, shaved, combed his long hair and instead of slipping into a business suit, he put his cycling gear back on and walked into the plenary chamber for all to see as if he would be saying: “Look, I am a cyclist! In case you wonder why I am dressed like that … I came by bike to the plenary … yes … not just from the hotel, but all the way from my home county … the Czech Republic … this “far away country of which we (you) know little …”.

What a voter-friendly and ecologically inspiring deed! We can sit back in our chair and start daydreaming … “if we all could take our bikes to work, or even to Strasbourg … what a wonderful world this would be …”.   

Now to be honest, I was a bit jealous at first. I like bike tours as well. However, somehow I do not have the luxury to take out twelve days in order to go to work, however … to be honest, neither did he. In the middle of his commuting, on his “way to work”, soaked wet by sudden rain showers somewhere in the Bohemian-Bavarian borderland, reality caught up with him – the next day his presence was required at a political group meeting in Brussels. “How to cover the distance between Nuremberg and Brussels by bike in a day?” might have crossed his mind. Well, the only way is air travel of course and there goes the purity of the ecological commitment … but let’s not be unfair.

The life of a politician is not easy. Especially if one does not live up to election promises made. Our cycling MEP did indisputably live up to his election promise. This is even more impressive because his political profile is not centred on ecological themes, but rather on the reduction of regulation. And being part of a club with a majority of middle-aged men who maybe give the impression that they prefer limousines, for his cycling exploits at least he is destined to stand out during the coming five years. A nice political PR job!

PS: The bike trip eventually turned out to be 871km long and was concluded with a bitter aftertaste. Edvard’s fellow traveller, Czech globe trotter František Šesták, who has cycled tens of thousands of kilometres around the world, was deprived of his bike in Strasbourg. After having served him for more than 32,000 km, it was stolen. Links:

http://www.kozusnik.eu/

http://tinyurl.com/lkrzor – Edvard Kožušník on Facebook

In September the editorial team of the Parliament’s front page website was sent to media training with an experienced pro. He read our texts and than gave us a lashing. Being ripped to pieces is actually less painful, if the text in question does not have your name directly attached to it. It´s like writing with an invisibility cloak. And so we took a theoretical, albeit still masochistic approach, reading our texts critically as if they were written by someone else. 

Driven by the urge to please our readers, to be informative as well as entertaining kept us going. A little hiccup occurred when we were actually asked to say who our readers are. “The general public,” would be a good answer. “But why do we use eurospeak then?,” came as a swift reply. Nobody in “real life” talks about “plenary agendas” and the like. “Really?!?” was my first mental reaction, but I kept it for myself, pondering how much of a homo sapiens europeactus I had already become.

Well, being an editor of an institutional magazine is nevertheless a challenging task. Making a European perspective attractive to people who prefer to think locally is eventually mission impossible and will therefore never seize to demand creative thinking and lots of improvement in writing.

So writing with an invisibility cloak might not bring fame, but perhaps the satisfaction of not being perceived as “institutional” once I get all the abstract ways of thinking out of my texts. And if it should not work straight away … after the training is always before the training …