It's over, reader! The CMS COP is over. Boom. Halfway through the newsletter. I have been staring at a computer screen for the past twelve hours. I have written a two-thousand word analysis of a multilateral convention I knew nothing about two weeks ago. I have eaten my weight in little puffy pumpkin samsas and fake Uzbek ketchup pringles that just tasted like tomatoes. My body feels like a brain that's been stilted up on two chopsticks, staggering around.

Ah, welcome to PLOV, the last PLOV that's about a conference centre where two thousand people have been looking at their computers and speaking Lawyer for a week! I, Bernard Soubry, am your guide, and also so much more than a brain on sticks.

February has come barrelling over the mountains. You could see it far off for days, the tops of the peaks in Tajikistan getting whiter and whiter, and then fuzzing off into mist. Til suddenly last night there was wind, I mean, real wind, like edge-of-your-nostrils-frostbitten wind; get-yer-layers-out wind.

This morning, what looked like small droplets but turned out to be freezing rain--something that becomes a lot more hazardous if the hotel at which you're staying has decided to lay marble tile outside from the door of the restaurant, all the way to the door of the Congress Centre. I come close to wiping out (and destroying thousands of dollars of gear) about six times on the way to work.

The COP is over. Sixteen species got put into the Convention. A bunch more had concerted conservation actions prolonged or set up. What looked like a big rumbling fight about the budget turned out to be a little fart. Deep sea mining, which was going to be controversial and impossible to handle, got dealt with through some good diplomacy and old-fashioned punting-til-next time.

I won't write much about the mechanics of it, because that's my job for tomorrow--professionally, as opposed to newsletter-form. We'll have a summary out for you on Monday or Tuesday here, at which point I will be on the night train to Nukus, looking forward to the moonscape of the Aral Sea.

The peculiar feeling of the end of a COP: as the final gavel falls, everyone stands up and applauds. There's some laughter. Two or three people hug. Yes, it's been incredibly tiring, and the work has been good, and we get to celebrate it. But the overwhelming feeling is one of relief.

Mostly, I just feel excited I won't have to type all day any more. I feel like an empty plastic bag. I stand around and look at everyone and cannot decide what to do. Stand? Sit? My team leader is talking about dinner and I look at her like she's speaking a foreign language. What do you mean, what do I want to eat? Stuff me full of cotton, for all I care. I'm done.

Around us, the screens fill with a video recap of the past week--everything those guys pointing cameras at us were collecting. It feels like the meeting is surrounding us, replaying itself over and over, suffusing the air, turning the real world to Jell-O.

I watch it loop once, twice, and get the hell out of there and into the icy rain as soon as I can. Wipe out on the last step up to the hotel. Truly feel my knees for the first time in a week. Laugh a long, long laugh, first a giggle, then an unhinged guffaw. The chortle of a free man.

Still laughing,

B