Everybody knows that one of the EU’s idiocies is the requirement that the European parliament has homes in Brussels and Strasbourg and is required by treaty law to commute between the two.
Less known is the bizarre requirement that in three months of the year - April, June and October -  all EU ministerial meetings have to take place in Luxembourg.
Thus with a heavy heart, the diplomatic and media circus descended on a corrugated iron shed on a Luxembourg industrial estate for the monthly Ecofin council of finance ministers, braving irregular air connections or the permanent roadworks on the motorway from Brussels.
But this time several things brightened the day. The first - the mist rising like gossamer off the green Ardennes valleys - need not detain readers long, especially if they are hoping for some serious economic analysis.
The second was the magnificent understatement of Hungarian finance minister Janos Veres, who told colleagues that the state of his country’s dire public finances had been "a matter of considerable public debate" in recent days.

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