The centrist Straight Banana, a European politics blog, posts a enjoyable recap of great Euromyths of our time: those barmy EU regulations of British newspaper lore apparently drawn up to ban the most cherished parts of our national life.
The thing is that they are seldom true. A 2001 Sun report that chippies would be forced to sell fish by their Latin names turned out to be a red herring (that's Clupea harengus) and, for now at least, it is not a criminal offence to sell shandy by the pint – despite a October 1999 cut-off date for the legal sale of such measures, published by the Times.
But it is a link further down the page that most caught our attention, a website that puts the "barmy" into "barmy Brussels bureaucrats". The event is now over but visitors to Brussels' Bibliothèque Solvay at the end of November would have been treated to the site of the 25 new commissioners – the chief bureaucrats - sculpted by leading Belgian Lego artist Dirk Denoyelle. You can see the photos here - and, yes, we did just write "Lego artist".
Multi-talented Denoyelle does not just stop with the plastic bricks. He is also one of Belgium's leading comedians (yes, he's all the famous Belgians) and something of a linguist - he harbours ambitions to be the first true European comedian. He certainly had us laughing.
