Today I'm hit by three "exes", each in turn capitalising on the punch of the one before...

The first "ex" is in the extraordinary heat of this, the hottest day so far in this year's Berlin summer. It was 30° in the shade yesterday, and today it's hotter.

The 2nd one is already an "Ex" - the Existence of Nokia in Germany tending toward zero. I finally realised because of some mails in the office today, that Nokia is now really an Indian firm (in Finland they are still managing some servers and the trademark name, no more, really) and will gather more and more of its data centre operations in and around Bangalore.

The final and most resounding "EX" is of course part of the BREXIT that mostly the English voted for till late last night, and that got counted & officially instated this morning. The pound almost immediately crashed by a mile, approaching minus 10% of its value yesterday against the dollar. The finance sector in London - a city that voted almost to a man to "Bremain" - is in an uproar regarding its future. UKIP have already - figuratively within minutes of the official result - gone back on one of their campaign slogans, that implied they'd do a whole lot for the NHS. Scotland, and, more urgently, Northern Ireland, will probably secede Real Soon Now.

And the ECONOMIST's well-written "Brexit Briefs" describe how the U.K. will soon have to decide whether to stay in the EEA - meaning it will now have to accede to most of those horrid EU regulations, anyway, to keep trading with it for free - or go the much harder way of setting up long-winded trade agreements with half of the EU countries, that it still wants to import from or export to, individually.

Mrs. Merkel has said the EU should now promote its ideas much more to individual EU citizens than before. I say that lame EU bureaucrats need to get up and do more listening to worries of their harder-up citizens - like the English fishers, who seem to me justifiably happy about being freed of their partly inane quotas. And then bending laws & finance to flow toward lightening those worries. Pronto!

The EU needs to be reformed - the whole cake needs to be rebaked from scratch, perhaps with several layers of participation. With built-in checks and balances, and much less red tape! With a less powerful & not just nominally representative Commission, and a more powerful Europarliament! -- So as to allow even hardy & proud island folk to find their way back into the project.

...

My personal feeling on the British affair my heart started at about age 10, back as an immigrant child in Africa, learning this strange but powerful new language called English, is that I'm just numb. And have to keep telling myself it's all only just Legalese. (Good luck!)

And that I shouldn't fall into the same rhetorical hole of nationalistic competitiveness, that millions of other Europeans seemed to have fallen into. Just yesterday.