1 september 2010, still on holiday

A week back and I am still daydreaming holiday, finding it quite hard to return to the urgency of drafting that needs to be done yesterday, frameworks that must be managed over human obstacle courses, menus for grand dinners and manic preparations for having 30 mad kids run wild around the house in what is quaintly known as a "birthday party". I guess I can't complain though, as whilst my 30-odd days holiday a year compare poorly to the average french 38, they are a good notch above the uk average 26 and mile and a half ahead of the average american 13. This matters, because whichever way you cut the statistics, europeans work less than americans (and indeed most), and that single fact more or less explains why 280 million americans are more productive than 450 million europeans. I for one though am not yet ready to give up my hard-earned leisurely european lifestyle. Jeremy rifkin got it right in his now rather-dated the european dream: how europe's vision of the future is quietly eclipsing the american dream - while americans live to work, europeans work to live.