I have blogged little for a while. I have been driving around Europe in my new car, taking the opportunity of being based in England for a couple of weeks to do by land what I would otherwise do (boringly) by air. Vittoria and I have now journeyed 4,000 miles together. I drove her from the North of England to the IMD Business School in Lausanne, where I had a work meeting. While there, I had the pleasure of taking carefully selected colleagues for a spin around Lac Leman to one of my favourite places to eat.

Then I drove from Lausanne to Nice, via the Grand St Bernard pass.  Up until this point I was alone, but I picked Mrs Paine up at Nice airport so we could spend a weekend together in Provence. We took the opportunity to stay at the place we have booked for our Summer holidays in August (with a view to changing our plans if we didn't like it). It was great and we also discovered (rare now for us) a great new restaurant. As of a few hours ago, I am back in London. I will head up North tomorrow, return on Saturday to take in a day of the Test Match at Lords and then fly back to Moscow (and workaday reality) on Sunday.

All kinds of political excitements have happened in my absence. I have been following them assiduously, but not posting. It's hard not to enjoy the painful public humiliation of Gordon Brown but equally hard to be optimistic as to a future Conservative administration. I was disappointed that Boris's first public act as Mayor of London was to ban alcohol on Tube trains.

It does not matter to me if a government is left or right. If its instinct is to treat citizens like children, then I am going to hate it. I feel cheated of my rightful pleasure at the long-awaited collapse of the NuLab fraud.