Molotov Cocktails and Rakia: An evening in Belgrade...

"Try not to attend any political rallies whilst in the country, and avoid getting into discussions about Kosovo with people you don't know" was the travel advisory for Serbia on the Foreign Office website, last week, when I checked it in light of the mayhem and chaos in Belgrade downhill of Kosovo having declared independence.

Not a problem, I thought. Political rallies feature rarely in my diary, and I can't remember the last time I had a discussion with anybody - either known to me or otherwise - on the subject of Kosovo's geopolitical status.

How naive could I be! Ok, I've managed to avoid political rallies - but the first, and only, topic of conversation anybody appears to have in Belgrade currently is 'The Political Situation'.

"What will it do for foreign investment?" is the main question, framed in various different ways. "Well, I shouldn't think it will throw anything much off course", is generally my breezy reply (largely on the unspoken basis that Serbia's international profile was pretty flaky anyway, even before they began to throw stones and petrol bombs through the windows of various Western embassy buildings). "This has been going on for so long", one chap intoned dolefully - and I tried to look vaguely sympathetic as I wondered whether he meant since the mid-nineties, or was he harking back to Princep and his revolver in Sarajevo in 1914? Vague memories of history lessons about The Balkan Question and Palmerston's gunboat diplomacy also came to mind, as did the idea that actually it's really been going on since 1389 and the battle of Kosovo. It didn't seem helpful to mention any of this detail, though, and I changed the subject instead, with some bracing and encouragingly bland remark.....

And so. Belgrade. The trip in from the airport was a rather low-key affair (although tell me any major international airport where that isn't the case), and the housing stock in New Belgrade looked depressingly like The Brunswick Centre, at the bottom of Marchmont Street, before it had its recent and rather effective facelift. The fact that my taxi was stopped routinely by hotel security staff and thoroughly searched for bombs was a little surprising and somewhat double-edged: encouraging, that they think to check; but worrying, that they think they have to. From the fastness of my international, wifi-connected, all-singing-all-dancing, marble-bathroomed hotel room, I can look down upon

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