Day 7: Sunday, like the Morrissey song, was silent and grey

Sunday, December 13th, 2009 | uncategorized

13 Dec 2009
Leonie Joubert is a science writer, reporting for Independent Newspapers from the United Nations climate negotiations taking place in Copenhagen from 7 to 18 December. This is her blog-on-the-side.

Sunday is one of the few days in the madness of the climate conference where things do trickle to almost nothing in the formal talks. Oh, you can be sure that there’s a lot going on behind the scenes, but nothing is listed on the schedule for the day. No meetings, no press briefing, nothing… so it was a gently quiet day indoors at our digs for most of us. Plenty of side events, but no real political manoeuvring.

I got up slowly, sms’ed a few contacts to get official quotes for a story I had to file for 3pm your side (2pm my side), then curled up in bed again and tried to catch up on some of the sleep I missed out on during the week.

It’s been pretty harrowing, keeping track of everything that’s going on here – listening to the corridor rumour, following negotiation sessions on the monitors in the press room, sitting in on press briefings, going to side events and then still writing up stories in between.

The first week was mostly just the meeting of bureaucrats to thrash out the first final draft of the text that may or may not become international law by the end of the week.

This weekend, the ministers from different countries rolled into town (we’ve got two ministers here: Buyelwa Sonjica from the department of water and environmental affairs, and Mme-Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, from International relations and cooperation) and spent Saturday sifting through this text. But by the end of the week, the heads of state will come in to wrestle over the sticking points – that’s when things will really get interesting.

So I’m grateful for a quiet Sunday. It’s 6:20pm, I’ve just had a dinner of apples and yoghurt because I don’t have the energy to sort out dinner, and I’m going to get into bed… because if week one was demanding, week two’s going to be utter mayhem.

Scorched

Rational Writing by Leonie Joubert