# Posted 5:56 AM by Patrick Belton  

GENEVA AND TONIC: Okay, I'm back. On my summer vacation (and I've drawn a picture, for those of you grown accustomed to powerpoint), I made a few quasi-social-cum-quasi-professional trips to Washington and the continent, spent a bit of time with a mum who was somewhat poorly (actually, my own), and pretentiously reconfigured my Powerbook to speak Irish as an indispensable labour-saving device toward the finishing of my dissertation. (As a transitional measure, OxBlog will remain for now in English.) In the next weeks, I hope to do a fair bit of Germany blogging, centred mostly around the topic of what a somewhat more hawkish, somewhat more pro-U.S., and Ossi chancellor would be likely to do for Nato, the EU, and the transatlantic relationships. With recent visits by PM Singh to Washington and London, I have a series of India posts I'll begin flinging about, mostly as a way of sorting through my own thoughts on U.S.-South Asia relations, and on which I'll be very interested to hear our readers' comments. In light of (to my mind perhaps excessive) comments in the British press that the 7/7 bombings portend a massive breakdown in how Britain deals with immigrant communities and religious communities, I'll try to take a look at scholarship comparing how several European and West Hemisphere countries have addressed those issues, and with what results. Finally, as a new recurring feature in the OxBlog repertory (somewhat analogous to a recurring nightmare, but fewer francophone lobsters), I'll try doing interviews, perhaps once or twice a week or so, with newsmakers or scholars with unusual perspectives on controversies in the headlines at the moment. And though no one could ever fill Josh's Texan-dimensioned shoes, we're also on occasion going to roll out Mystery GuestBlogger (presently sitting in the corner wearing a lone ranger mask from the local Oxford fetishwear store), as well as debuting Eating and Reading Correspondents (who aren't).

Incidentally, having acquired a writing patron (for which less grandly read: 'house-sitting gig'), I will also for the next demiannum be spending roughly half my time in Swiss mountaintop dissertation writing paradise in the alpine town of Wengen, to which I've just arrived, and which is heartbreakingly beautiful, and which all of our readers must, must come to visit straightaways. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion