The problem being that there – as across the world – bridges are cheap places to route water pipes from place to place.

All of which makes sense, until you get a foot of rain in 24 hours.

Then of course, you have no bridge anymore and no water mains either. So it is that many Cumbrians tonight are hunkering down by candle light with no water listening to the rains that are still coming down.

Let’s hope they’ve plenty of their first class beer laid in. It tastes fine and you can probably bath in it too.

In town like Cockermouth another deluge today as all manner of rescue services mill about with one common problem: there is nobody to rescue. You have to question whether there might have been a bit of a overreaction.

Last night I had a kind offer to go up in a coast guard helicopter today. They were flown down all the way from the Western Isles. This morning I was told they’d flown back. That wasn’t cheap.

And in Cockermouth itself we have volunteers of all manner of rescue services and churches. This enticing little town has its fair share of churches of course.

But now they have Church of Scientology volunteers padding the streets in high vis rigout on the off chance that lost souls might still need saving from the rain or flood that some have called biblical.

I’m not sure – maybe the precipitation is getting to me too.

There would have been few political career trajectories to match it! But that could turn out to be the story of Baroness (Cathy) Ashton, former Labour Leader in the Lords, if things pan out as some hope tonight.

Gordon Brown appears to have dropped the Blair candidacy for president in return for a Brit in the foreign affairs job. And what a job.

A paper from the Swedes who hold the EU Presidency issued yesterday made it clear that they thought the foreign affairs rep would have THE single voice on foreign affairs for the EU.

Cathy Ashton succeeded Peter Mandelson as trade commissioner – his influence is everywhere! – and has, it is said, hugely impressed the EU Commission President Manuel Barroso.

She is, it is worth mentioning, a woman, and the EU has been woefully short of them in top offices for some time. This could all change… there are other pieces of the jigsaw that must fit in with it.

Van Rompuy could, I hear, make way for Balkenende. But Cathy Ashton is now the nominee for the high rep job of the socialist group and stands a good chance.

Tony Blair’s hopes of a job are officially dead but by staying a (non) candidate this long he may have helped the UK secure this other job.

Related: Will you be the President of Europe, Gordon?
Carving up the top EU jobs – should you care?

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The only way to move around – given the universal ban on private vehicles that has successfully staved off the predictable attack by the Taliban – was on foot. The traffic that usually blocks the city vanished.

We found ourselves learning that routes between places we normally travel actually take 20 minutes on foot, rather than an hour by car in the gridlocked streets.

The emptiness just added to the surreality of the occasion. Behind high walls, with foreign dignitaries, an almost virtual president of a virtual government was taking office for another five years.

I may be being too harsh, but there are times when President Karzai’s writ seems almost non-existent.

Granted, he has power: but it is power over power and its assets (the police, army, ministries, government business), not power over a country.

So much of Afghanistan is outside of Nato and the Afghan government’s reach that today’s target of handing over the worse areas to Afghan security forces seems remote at best, vacuously rhetorical at worst.

The ceremony that took place under high security was the ugly end to months of electoral chaos in which democracy here began to look like a cycle of backroom dealings and arm-twisting, quite removed from the Afghan people’s mandate.

Perhaps it was a fitting climax to an electoral process whose second round was cancelled as the only opponent dropped out, fearing it would be too fraudulent to even partake in.

Still, we have walked around empty streets and almost run to the British Embassy to hear David Miliband do his best to explain why he believes President Karzai’s statements of intent this time.

Today does not feel like the beginning of something new – Karzai’s second term, for instance – but the end of the period in which Western countries could pretend they would leave behind an Afghanistan fashioned in their image.

I hear that the Spanish Prime Minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, last week asked Gordon Brown if HE would be the new President of Europe (do you think Charles Clarke put him up to it?). Anyway, Mr Brown said no thanks.

It gives you an idea how very fluid this whole thing has been and still is.I hear the Dutch are furious with the Germans for backing a Belgian but as of this moment there is a blocking minority against the Belgian PM, Mr Van Rompuy though it’s not quite clear whether the UK is part of that blocking majority.

(My thanks to diligent – idle? – colleagues at Channel 4 News who tell me that Mr Van Rompuy hasn’t even made it on to the 263-strong list on the Famous Belgians website.)

There have been requests for Tony Blair to consider the Foreign Affairs High Rep job – no word yet on whether he has definitely turned that down but it’s hard to imagine him cheerfully serving as second fiddle to a Belgian PM.

The Dutch are furious with the Germans for backing a Belgian – or so I am told.

And to add to all the mist the EU Commission President Manuel Barroso, whose Commission jobs may hold the key to brokering the deal on the Presidency and High Rep jobs, is said to be not playing ball and refusing to show his cards on who he wants where in the Commission.

Related: Carving up the EU top jobs – should you care?
A 50-50 chance Blair’s EU bid folds before Thursday

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Protective of the national sovereignty of member states, the interests of the citizens of those states have always been represented by their heads of government.

The problem with this way of doing business is that it has all the appearance of hole-in-the-corner anti-democratic activity.

The European Parliament has never been vested with the power to represent the interests of the people who elect it – the very same citizens of those member states.

Indeed the European Parliament, itself long suspected of being a hotbed of expenses abuse and largesse, gives all the appearance of being as unrepresentative as the heads of government when they meet as the Council of Ministers – this despite the fact that we elect it.

In some ways it is remarkable that the European Union is as effective as it is. But one senses that in trying to fix a president and a foreign minister for Europe, the European ideal has hit a new low.

The choice is a mess…at its extremes it’s a choice between a man who started a war that divided Europe itself, and someone with zero international profile from a divided neo-ungovernable member state.

That choice will be made during the foie gras tonight. When the dust settles, the rest of us probably won’t give a damn anyway.

Europe is a compromise, so its president will be, together with its foreign high representative. That’s because we cannot agree, as Europeans, whether we want a convenient trading bloc or a United States of Europe.

The trouble is that because Britain, perhaps understandably, wants to stand slightly to one side of Europe, the UK has almost no influence over the way the EU evolves and gets dragged along within it.

It isn’t a happy situation. One can’t help thinking that those who have opposed the development of Europe, have backed its rapid growth of members precisely to ensure that it never works. Tonight around that Brussels dinner table they will score another victory for their cause.

Word last night from the Blair camp was that their man has pretty much given up on getting the presidency of the European Council.

Word from Paris and Berlin that they see the job as an internal affairs post dealing with issues like the EU budget makes it easier to handle – that was never the job TB was interested in.

So after 5pm, 27 of, by definition, the most power-crazed and crafty individuals in all Europe will begin an arduous multi-handed game of multi-dimensional chess.

They want to dish out the president and foreign policy jobs plus the new Commission. There will be some reserve card surprise names in some leaders’ back pockets, but if the leaders don’t see the presidency as anything more than a chairing role should you care?

The French and the Germans have made it clear they do not want this to drag on beyond this summit and add a final sorry chapter to the history of a treaty that has been years in the making and unmaking.

The UK is after a major economic portfolio in the Commission and can be expected to wave that as a diplomatic triumph when all this concludes.

But the effect of society’s choices over family size is undoubtedly worth considering in terms of the effect on climate change.

Some close to the Copenhagen negotiations feel that its the elephant in the room.

Certainly population growth is a vital determinant of how much humanity consumes, but not on the official agenda for those urgent talks to limit global carbon emissions.

So a delicate issue, yet today, for the first time the United Nations issued a report linking demographic pressures to climate change.

Thoraya Ahmed Obaid, executive director of the UN Population Fund told me today that ‘this is the first time we are clearly speaking about the link between population growth and climate change’.

In 1994 in Cairo the UN did say that population was linked to environment, but this is the first time the body has linked it specifically to climate change.

The report quotes an intriguing study which says that putting the world into a low population growth path, leading to 8 billion rather than 9 billion people on the planet by 2050, would save 2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions.

But it’s not just that: there’s a huge wedge of the world’s population soon to come to child-bearing age … so is the answer for those rapidly growing countries to adopt coercive Chinese-style single child policies?

No, says the UN, this is not about forced population control, but enabling women to decide for themselves to have less children.

Education, empowerment of women, and contraception can all help mitigate climate change, says the report.

Of course almost all the likely growth in world population is happening in developing countries who emit far less Carbon than for example a child in Europe or America.

It’s the process of development that will see that population growth be increasingly carbon intensive.

The middle class in the world – earning at least $8000 a year stands at around 800 million now but is forecast to grow rapidly in the next two decades to 2 billion by 2030.

That’s two billion people who want to fly in planes, drive cars and eat lots of carbon intensive meat.

But that development will also naturally limit population growth as people become richer. so it’s a complex picture.

For now this is a new direction for the UN – the suggestion that condoms aswell as low carbon cars, can limit climate change. But it won’t be discussed in Copenhagen.

An independent panel, the US Preventive Service Task Force, has recommended against routine screening for breast cancer for women under 50.

They say there is insufficient evidence to suggest it’s worth screening women in their 40s unless they have a family history of the disease or other risk factors.

It sounds exactly like the kind of debate over healthcare we are very used to hearing in the UK. Except that here the cost of the treatment is apparently not the issue.

There is no equivalent of NICE in the US. In fact the British National Institute of Clinical Excellence, which evaluates the cost effectiveness of various NHS treatments, is the example Republicans use when they are talking about “death panels” in America.

Instead the breast cancer debate is being driven by arguments over whether women are being given so much treatment it’s bad for them – that it is not a good idea to subject women to unnecessary biopsies, stress and, most importantly, the radiation from the mammograms which many women are given every year after age 40.

Any Brit who starts to use the American healthcare system, assuming they have good health insurance coverage, is immediately shocked by the amount of treatments and diagnostic procedures they are prescribed.

A full MRI is performed, it seems, if you complain of the slightest discomfort, and it’s impossible for any non-doctor to know whether this contrast shows how few of these procedures the NHS is able to offer or whether a privatised system inevitably produces unnecessary but highly profitable treatments.

There has been a huge outcry here from women who are used to getting screening from 40, and experts say they have been trying to change the advice to testing from age 50 since 1997 but haven’t been able to because of the political uproar such a suggestion causes.

My own reaction to this confusing debate has been a very personal one. Just last week I received a very joyous email from a good friend in America who was able to announce to the world that after a successful mammogram she was now completely breast cancer-free because the disease had been caught early enough.

But she pointed out that if she had been living in the UK the outcome might have been very different, as routine screening does not start in Britain until age 50.

Many doctors here say they intend to ignore the new advice and keep screening women in their 40s, which means I will probably have to soon decide whether I want to join in myself.

The degree of choice offered within American healthcare can be deeply perplexing for someone born and brought up under the NHS.

With the homecomings through Wootton Bassett and the now ever-present cameras and crowds, these are events rarely seen before outside world war.

I was at Brize Norton once for the homecoming of a British soldier killed in Basra. Only the family, someone from his regiment and the lord lieutenant of Oxfordshire were present. Not any more, these days.

One senses that these very public markings of each death in Afghanistan are exerting there own dynamic on the government – hence the prime minister’s remarks at the Guildhall in London on Monday night and David Miliband to Nato meeting in Scotland yesterday. This is not a “war without end” said Mr Miliband.

Yet today is the very day that the battle of the Somme ended in 1916, not even 100 years ago. It was the very middle of the first world war. The battle had raged for just four months and shed a staggering, utterly shocking number of lives, in excess of one million.

The government continued to send hundreds of thousands of young men to die on the poppy fields of Flanders and beyond for a further two years.

My grandfather was at the Somme. General Sir Thomas D’Oyly Snow lost 4,000 men from his regiment this day alone. One general losing 40 times the UK’s loss this year in Afghanistan, in one day.

In 93 years our tolerance of death on the battlefield has experienced a welcome revolution. Does it mean then that our tolerance of war itself has dwindled? Is a direct assault on our own land now the only cause for which most of us would agree to lay down our lives?

Perhaps for once we should thank the media. Had the slaughter on the western front received even one per cent of that accorded to deaths in Afghanistan, would the great war’s carnage ever have been stomached?

For how much longer then, with this degree of focus, will another war in a foreign field be stomached? Intriguingly I suspect, quite long.

The conflict in Northern Ireland tells us the media come to suffer battle coverage fatigue. Afghanistan may come to suffer from it too. On the other hand it may not, and if that is the case the political clock on the wall is ticking hard.

I wonder if she’s aware that the government has put a loud hailer on the roof and plastered the carriage with election stickers? And I think they may have hooked up one of those road marking machines to the back so she paints battle lines in her wake.

The Queen is expected to announce a whole load of legal guarantees which opposition parties claim are election hoardings masquerading as draft laws.

Laws to guarantee deficit reduction, to guarantee an end to child poverty, and a law guaranteeing everything you’d wish for your child at school.

There are not enough days to get this lot through parliament before a general election, but that’s not the point. It’s a time for a cash-strapped political party to get some free political advertising.

I hope someone takes that bumper sticker off the back of the royal carriage before Her Majesty goes back home.