MONDAY morning - very early - off to Brussels for another EU meeting. In a masochistic sort of way I enjoy this work, and I positively like my EU Foreign Minister colleagues, who are a stimulating and very varied group.

But the building where we meet ("Justus Lipsius Building - named after a Belgian humanist and dean from the province of Brabant) is one of those soulless office complexes with as much humanity or architectural merit as the Lord Square end of Blackburn Shopping Centre. (I know that architects complain that they are much misunderstood, and only follow their briefs - but what gets into them to design such buildings?)

So as I contemplated the day ahead, I knew that when I got back to the Commons later that evening to vote, none of my colleagues would be ribbing me for a day out on a "jolly".

Brussels is in fact a very fine city, provided however that you got nowhere near the EU's headquarters area.

The Foreign Ministers' Council in Brussels is called - rather a mouthful this - the "General Affairs and External Relations Council", but that well describes the not one but two functions we have.

One is obvious, to seek to set and then co-ordinate common foreign policy for the EU (though in case anyone is worried, we do this by unanimity - i.e. the UK like all other member states has a veto).

The second function may, however, be a less obvious one for Foreign Ministers. This is to co-ordinate the work of the other Ministerial councils - which cover a wide range of issues from the economy to agriculture, trade to asylum, and prepare for the quarterly meetings of the "European Council", the confusing name for the EU Summits attended by Heads of Government and Foreign Ministers.

So first off we dealt with the draft conclusions for the late March Summit, and the "Financial Perspectives", a euphemism for the draft budget for the six years from 2007-2013. This latter is really important. As I mentioned last week the EU Commission have proposed that we set this above 1.25% of the national incomes; we want it fixed at 1%. This will run and run.

Then, on foreign policy we moved on to India and Pakistan - both my French counterpart Dominique de Villepin and I have just been to India, and we are both separately about to go to Pakistan - then the Balkans, Cyprus, the Middle East, Iran and Russia, and the EU's eastern and southern neighbours. And we endorsed a renewal and strengthening of sanctions on Zimbabwe, a good example of how the EU working together can achieve much more than we can alone.

Just after the working lunch there was a poignant ceremony as one of the meeting rooms in the building was named in memory of Anna Lindh, the Swedish Foreign Minister and a good personal friend, who was murdered last summer whilst shopping in Stockholm.

The value of these meetings however is not just the business that can be done around the table, but all that can be done informally as well.

Top of this informal agenda for me was to talk to my Foreign Minister colleagues from the eight eastern European states about to join the EU, like Estonia, Poland, Slovakia, about the measures which the Home Secretary, David Blunkett, was to announce later in the afternoon to Parliament on the free movement of workers in the EU after May 1.

The rules on benefits were to be tightened I told them (but in a way which would apply to all EU nationals), and we would be introducing a "Worker Registration Scheme" for two years for their citizens who want to come here to work. The message is "Yes to work, no to benefits". All the Foreign Ministers I spoke to thought this was fair enough, which it is. We do have labour shortages in many areas and trades. We all benefit if the economy is doing well, as it is. But we are going to protect the British taxpayer as well. Not a bad day. Then back to the Commons.