WEDNESDAY - off to Berlin to see the German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer for a private dinner.

Private, that is, once we'd got to the dining room. What I'd been told would be a simple "grip and grin" (smile and handshake) beforehand turned into an impromptu press conference. I didn't mind. It's important for us to get our case across.

Joschka is both a good guy and a very impressive politician.

The UK and Germany have taken different positions on the need for military action in Iraq; but neither Joschka nor I was in the business of embarrassing the other.

Similar story the next morning in Brussels. I had a lengthy private meeting ("tte--tte" as they say in the trade) with Igor Ivanov, the experienced Foreign Minister of the Russian Federation. I get on well with Igor. As with Joschka, our conversation was trying to identify common approaches for the post-conflict situation in Iraq. The main focus of the day in Brussels was a joint meeting of NATO and EU foreign ministers.

I said that I hoped colleagues from countries not directly involved would appreciate just how different it felt if - like the UK - the government and parliament had put the young men and women on the front line.

I said the Lancashire Evening Telegraph had led recently with the story of the Blackburn wife of Royal Marine Philip Guy, who had been killed in a helicopter crash at the beginning of the war. My constituents needed to know that the loss of life had not been in vain.

But the best speech of the day came from Abdullah Gul, the Turkish Foreign Minister, a Muslim and one of the leaders of Turkey's Islamic Party. He said Saddam was a bad Muslim, who had killed many Islamic religious scholars (and thousands of ordinary Muslims). In the Iran/Iraq war he had tried to wrap himself in Arab nationalism, now he was trying to wrap himself in Islamic nationalism.

I came back to London Thursday night. War Cabinet early Friday morning, then the train to Blackburn, for constituency surgeries and the Mayor's Ball.

Nothing is more serious than military action. There are occasionally lighter moments however - like my struggle to open the windows of my bedroom in the Ambassador's Residence in Berlin at 3am on Thursday. The room was too warm and stuffy. I tried the window lock in the dark, so as not to wake myself up but German window locks are different. Lights on. I finally cracked the locks. Then I couldn't open the window because of high heavy curtains and was balancing on the arms of a chair fighting the drapes. Any minute now, I thought, I'm going to smash the window and fall out. The moral: in strange bedrooms open the windows before you go to sleep.