Thursday March 29th

TO AUSTRIA
Jamie and I are off to Austria in a couple of weeks, to speak at a conference at Sonntagberg, where a large pilgrimage centre is run by friends of ours. It is always glorious to go there - mountains, friends, wonderful walks, a quite fabulous baroque basilica, and a sense of largeness and hence of life's boundless possibilities. My only worry is that the conference will mostly be in German, and I certainly can't make an adequate speech in that language. I have asked if I can do mine mostly in English, and have a translator on hand. I can do an introductory bit in German, but will then have to ask permission to relapse into my native tongue...when I am speaking German, I can hear not only my strong English accent but also a childlike use of wrong verbal tenses, which makes people smile and when I apologise for the poor grammar, they laugh and say not to worry, they are hugely enjoying it...

....AND TEA IN LONDON

Yesterday, Christiana von Habsburg, whom we met at a recent conference in Rome, came to London and we had a get-together of some like-minded women to learn about the study centre in Rome with which she has become involved.It's the Institute for Studies on Women and is exploring the "new feminism"...there are talks and lectures, and one can even do a full-time study course and get a degree... I got interested in all this some years ago I attended the United Nations conference at Copenhagen which was looking at international development, and where there were concerted attempts by well-financed American and European lobby groups to highjack the thing for an agenda promoting abortion which was not what the poorer nations of the world thought the whole event was meant to be about... I was impressed at the time by the (elegant, and multi-lingual) women representing the Holy See, who gave a good press conference, smoothly run and with intelligent and perceptive contributions to the issues being raised.(It was also great fun meeting people from the wide range of independent groups representing various pro-life and pro-family causes, and the days that we spent together working and lobbying remain in my mind as exciting, exhausting, and with a wonderful sense of teamwork).