The main debate among gossipers of all stripes last night and this morning was - who leaked the Danish paper, and why? You might have seen this story in the Guardian. Denmark has been leading a process of writing a parallel text for a Global Deal that can be whipped out at that last minute if things get sticky.

Seasoned observers here are pointing out that this is perfectly normal, and it's traditional for COP Presidents to have something up their sleeves, some have also said that the content doesn't deviate much from principles set out recently by the head of UNFCCC. But you wouldn't know that from the news coverage. A few people have mentioned that there is a precedent for a similar paper being leaked at such an early stage, that was in The Hague in 2000 and the talks failed partly (it is said) as a result. An alternative theory is that there is some devilishly clever media management strategy going on.

In other news, I have now seen people dressed up as trees, people dressed up as aliens and many people in colourful national dress of all kinds. Plus lots of "youth" (this is actually the official term, there are "youth delegations" here) wearing t-shirts saying 'How old will you be in 2050?', to which my answer is 'A lady never tells'. Despite the cold, the conference metro station is permanently surrounded by happy devotees of the Grand Master something or other who are promoting veganism and have a poster with a picture of a goat saying, "Don't eat them, they love you."

I would love to give you news of James, but I think I have seen him (awake) for about 1 hour in the last 48.

Well, I found the brochures, the registration queue is 4 hours long and some of my delegates are still in it, and given that we are surely approaching 15,000 delegates registered today the dreaded NGO ticketing system looks likely to be implemented. Boo. On the negotiations side there is a fair bit of gossip flying about regarding progress, much of which doesn't actually need repeating here since it is captured pretty well on this BBC blog. I'm not sure I can compete with that. Not a peep from James, which means that he is up to his eyeballs in meetings.

Hello, this is Kate. I'm with James at Copenhagen (I am co-ordinating the activities of the NGO I work for, which is an official observer to the talks) and since he's not allowed to talk about what's going on I thought I might offer the odd update for interested parties. He has been in meetings all day (UK, EU, EU + others) whereas I have been setting up my organisation's exhibit stand and discovering that all our boxes of brochures are missing in the aether somewhere. Judging by the number of people already in the conference venue today, the official opening tomorrow is going to be carnage with registration queues half way to Sweden. NGO passes are likely to be rationed on a ticketing system where we get less than our total number of delegates, which is going to be quite interesting to co-ordinate (and alas this is my job) as you can bet that the people holding the tickets on any given day will go awol or drop them in a Danish puddle somewhere so that they can't be used by the next people on the next day. The venue holds 15,000 and apparently there are 27,000 who want to get on the list and can't. There are more press than government officials. Etc. James says, "It appears that no-one whatsoever knows what is going to happen."

Somewhere else

Hello

Tomorrow I shall find myself elsewhere. Thankfully, Kate join me elsewhere on Saturday.

Will try to post some impressions on how things are going.

The dream

In 8 days time, I'll be in Copenhagen, working for the UK government as a negotiator, at the most important climate negotiations ... ever? Well, so far.

Right now, this means that I'm sitting at my desk at 19:14 with no sign of going home any time soon, and I never see Kate (who will also be at the negotiations and is also working late) and I'm stressed and tired and grumpy.

But, in the long game, if you'd asked me 5 years ago what my dream job would be, it would probably be this. So there you go.

Following on from an earlier conversation (in the real world)

10 Albums from the last decade better than "Is this it" by The Strokes.

1. "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots" - The Flaming Lips
   
2. "The Decline of British Sea Power" - British Sea Power
   
3. "Elephant" - The White Stripes
   
4. "Rings Around the World" - SFA
5. "Through the windowpane" - Guillemots
6. "Fleet Foxes" - Fleet Foxes
7. "Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!" - Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
8. "Stories from the city, Stories from the sea" - PJ Harvey
9. "Back to Black" - Amy Winehouse
10. "The Magic Numbers" - The Magic Numbers
    

and I didn't even have to mention Franz Ferdinand...

The worst of times, the best of times

Osteopathy is remarkable. I never realised that by freeing the nerves in my neck (with a most alarming crunching sound) the osteopath (Torben) would improve the strength in my forearms. All to do with pressure on nerves, apparantly. The signals don't reach your arms, which reduces your strength.

I found myself being manipulated at the end of an awful 48 hours. The sort of thing you see in the first 5 minutes of a film, whereupon the protaconist will then either have some sort of life affirming recovery and end up married to Jennifer Aniston, or else go postal and kill a lot of people with an increasingly improbable array of hardware. Depends on your taste in films, really.

Spending 2 weeks in Bangkok I didn't sleep properly, found out I failed to get a promotion, which effectively means I'll get demoted shortly, strained a muscle in my neck in an extremely painful way, and, on the way home, threw up repeatedly on the 'plane due to a dodgy burger. Oh, and the negotations were hardly a success. Meanwhile Kate threw her back out in such a way that she can't put socks on.

Which is how we found ourselves at the osteopath. And it was truly remarkable. I feel inches taller (and somewhat poorer!)

Back in London. Spine feels better. Sun is shining. Decent nights sleep. Everything seems a lot lot better.