It's a bit thick for a To-Do list

England Expects supplies us with a number of email addresses which, I hope, belong to people that can help me with something I have been wondering about for a while (indeed I am not the only one). These helpful people belong to the "CIDC":

"The CIDC is a special taskforce whose mission is to detect lies, errors and other types of misleading reporting on the EU constitution in the European media".

Sirs,

The UK government consistently describes the EU constitution as a tidying up exercise and this phrase is often repeated in the media. This has left me feeling a little concerned.

You see, over here we normally organise tidying up exercises in documents loosely referred to as “plans” or, sometimes, we even relegate them to an appendix of a greater work. On the odd occasion one might even find such a document at the bottom of a filing cabinet stamped with such words as “COMPLETE” or, thankfully less frequently, “INCOMPLETE”.

Some people over here also refer to documents relating to tidying up exercises as “TO DO LISTS”.

These are fitting and well used places for exercises predominantly concerned with tidying up and the tying up loose ends.

For the life of me (and this is where I hope you can help) I cannot grasp why, over there, such documents are referred to as “constitutions”. We would normally reserve a grand document title such as that for more important and far-reaching works. Indeed, in the whole of our history we have been unable to find a cause worthy of such a document, though we have produced a couple of preliminary reports called Magna Carta and The Bill of Rights.

I strongly suspect that the confusion is at my end and that it is my government that has incorrectly described the contents of your governments document.

I hope you can help.

Faithfully,