What is "Thames Valley"? Where is she? To those of us who do not gambol within its borders, "Thames Valley" seems ever more of a fantastical fairyland. I hasten to add I don't mean "fairyland" in the eighty-quid-fine-for-homophobic-hate-speech sense, though I'll come to the matter of the "gay police horse" in a moment. Rather, "Thames Valley" seems a state of mind - like Neverland: "It's not on any chart / You must find it in your heart."

Yes, yes, I know there's a river called the Thames and the strip of land running along each bank qualifies as a valley, but as a legal entity "Thames Valley" appears to have been conjured out of thin air. Back in 1968, some fellow abolished the constabularies of real places like Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire and Berkshire and decreed that henceforth these ancient counties were now mere provinces of the "Thames Valley Police Authority": "It's not on any map / You must enter its speed trap."

The ambitious Home Office bureaucrat is very partial to these fictional jurisdictions. One thinks of "West Mercia", which is around the Welsh border somewhere, just west of "East Mercia" presumably, which they're keeping in reserve for the next pointless constabulary reorganisation. Everywhere else I've ever lived, the police forces bear some approximation to reality: the New Hampshire state troopers don't patrol Vermont, the Surete du Quebec don't do drug busts in Labrador.

When you want to call the cops, you don't need to think, "Hang on, am I in South Mercia or West Avon?" The invented identities of British administration seem to be part of a conscious decision to emphasise their remoteness from the citizenry, if not their wholesale secession from the real world.

Secure in their fairyland federation, "Thames Valley Police" patrol a wild fantastical landscape of the imagination that intersects only fitfully and awkwardly with reality. Exactly a year ago, thousands of Royal Ascot racegoers were stuck in sweltering heat for hours on end due to Thames Valley's new improved state-of-the-art "traffic management".

Royal Ascot's been going on same time, same place for a couple of centuries, but in Thames Valley's capable hands it was transformed into one of those freak natural disasters no one saw coming. This year's meeting, due to building work at Ascot, will be taking place at York, beginning today. But no doubt Thames Valley Police will still lock down the whole of Berkshire all week as a security precaution.

When they install speed cameras, serious accidents increase. When an estranged husband threatens his wife, they send round helicopters and "armed response vehicles" and contingents of officers in full body-armour, and then let them sit around at a safe distance until the estranged husband has finished killing everyone in the house.

That's what they did when Vicky Horgan and her sister were shot and bleeding to death in Highmoor Cross, declining even to enter the village, never mind the house. And that's what they did when Julia Pemberton called 999 at 7.10 one evening, racing round in response, arriving at 7.50 and then waiting until 1.20 in the morning before deciding it was safe to enter. It was: Mrs Pemberton and her son had both been dead for some hours.

As we now know, if you require a less desultory response from Thames Valley Police, the best advice is to speculate about the sexuality of the officer's horse. As my colleague Sam Leith reported yesterday, late in the evening on Bank Holiday Monday, Sam Brown, an Oxford University undergraduate, inquired of a mounted policeman on Cornmarket Street: "Do you know your horse is gay?" Also, "I hope you're comfortable riding a gay horse."

Within minutes, young Mr Brown was surrounded by six officers and a fleet of patrol cars, handcuffed and tossed in the slammer overnight, after which he was fined £80. A spokesperson for Thames Valley Police told the student newspaper Cherwell that the "homophobic comments" were "not only offensive to the policeman and his horse, but any members of the general public in the area."

"Offensive to his horse"? Well, you never know. If any constabulary is keeping a full-time equine psychologist on staff, it's bound to be Thames Valley. Even now, the horse may be on one month's stress leave at home on full pay, with his feet up listening to Judy Garland on his iPod. Whoops, sorry. We don't know whether the horse in question is, in fact, gay. It may be just the way he trots. Whoops, there goes another 80 quid. What I'm getting at is that, even under a generous interpretation of "homophobia", it's hard to see why simply identifying the horse as gay should be a criminal offence.

Mr Brown didn't say: "Tell your gay horse to stop coming on to me" or "I couldn't get near Royal Ascot last year because those gay horses were queening around and backing up traffic." Few of us would appreciate inappropriate speculation about the sexuality of our mounts, yet even in Thames Valley the offence of hippophobia is surely a stretch.

Caligula made his horse a consul but only Thames Valley has made its horses' sexuality a hate crime. Had Mr Brown gone on to slur one of the police cars as obviously homosexual, would Thames Valley's spokesperson have complained that the homophobic comments were deeply offensive to the officer and his vehicle?

Pondering Mr Brown's query about whether the copper was "comfortable riding a gay horse", Sam Leith wondered whether the Balliol man was suggesting the officer was an "unreconstructed homophobe". But the point is that, though the "homophobes" and "systemic racists" of the constabulary have metamorphosed virtually overnight into the most gung-ho celebrants of diversity, they are indeed "unreconstructed" - thus, the somewhat unpleasant heavyhandedness that has long been a feature of British policing is now deployed in the service of zero tolerance homophobia crackdowns.

In these touchy times, are Thames Valley Police really the people you want enforcing the more nebulous sections of an already poorly drawn "Incitement to Religious Hatred" Act? With that in mind, remember that the mounted section use mostly Irish Draughts. Things could have gone a whole lot worse for Mr Brown if he'd said: "I hope you're comfortable riding a gay Arab."

Has Europe become a sideshow? Perhaps this town of haunting but also melancholy beauty is not a bad place to pose that question, for it offers at every corner some reminder of the way that great power and wealth may pass, leaving nothing but their golden shell. It is now just over 200 years since the 118th and last Doge of Venice, Lodovico Manin, surrendered to the slogan-touting revolutionary army of Napoleon Bonaparte, so putting an end to the Most Serene Republic in the fastness of its lagoon, a power whose often enlightened commercial sway had stretched for centuries across the eastern Mediterranean. "Take this, I shall not be needing it again," Manin said on Friday, May 12, 1797, as he handed the Doge's close-fitting white linen cap to his valet. Sometimes it is clear when things come to an end. At others, the lines of history are blurred, less demarcations than smudges.

So it is in a Europe today that does not know if the dominant and fruitful postwar idea of "ever closer union" is now dead. When European Union leaders meet this week in Brussels, they will face for the first time the fact that tens of millions of Europeans have turned their back on a Union whose geography, identity and ambition seemed murky. How they will respond to the French and Dutch rejection of a proposed European constitution is unclear, but it is a safe bet that muddling through will be the favored course. The 25-member Union will not unravel. Still, as any visitor to Venice is reminded, a power that has lost the elixir of ambition is a power condemned to inexorable decline.

Already, Europe is viewed with a cynicism often bordering on contempt in some American circles. The neoconservative view of the Continent - feckless, wimpy, legalistic, aging, tired - is well known. But even among more mainstream Republicans, and within the Democratic Party, there are those for whom Europe poses one question above all: Why bother? At a recent meeting here of the Council for the United States and Italy, a group that brings together influential folk from both sides of the Atlantic, America's often withering view of Europe was as clear as the light on the lagoon.

That view may be summarized as follows: a Continent reluctant to spend on defense, offering only "postmodernist" armies useful enough as peacekeepers but next to useless as warriors, given to earnest blah-blah about the pre-eminence of international law, inhabited by a declining and evermore aged citizenry living in overregulated economies that have not shown significant growth for at least five years.

Contrast that image with another offered at the meeting: that of an India growing at over 7 percent a year, inhabited by more than 500 million people under the age of 25, busy buying hundreds of advanced aircraft, convinced that armies are still created to fight, churning out English-speaking high-tech graduates by the million each year, and persuaded by Islamic terrorism that its strategic goals and America's are often identical or at least complementary.

So, which of these parts of the world is more worthy of the attention of the United States? Which is a compelling affair: the intensifying and fast-changing relationship with India, or the largely stagnant alliance with Europe that served above all a cold-war strategic challenge now overcome? Beyond India, of course, lie other issues demanding of U.S. attention.

China, with its own growth story and welter of staggering statistics that suggest its challenge to American supremacy must be taken seriously. A low-intensity Iraqi war that has already taken a significant toll. The attempt to ignite and manage a democratic transformation of the Middle East that is portrayed as central to long-term American security.

In this world, Europe slips down the list. It often looks more complicated than compelling. It is sufficiently split, sufficiently stable, and sufficiently stalled for back-burner treatment to seem most appropriate. The fact is that the French and Dutch votes have left the European Union in an awkward halfway house that hardly seems a credible basis for any revitalization. With a shared currency, the euro, but an interrupted process of political integration, the Continent finds itself with one foot in transnational federalism and another outside it.

Already, the strains of this situation are showing, not least in Italy, where the economy has contracted in recent quarters. In a country that used to be able to offset its structural weaknesses through a steady devaluation of the lira, the constraints of a single euro currency placing Italy on the same playing field as Germany have proved damaging.
Italy is an extreme case, but throughout the stagnant euro zone, reforms to render the economies more flexible, dynamic and effective appear urgent, because only growth and the creation of jobs will rekindle belief in the European Union. How that will be achieved when the new French prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, declares that, for France, "globalization cannot be our destiny" is unclear.

Such comments suggest that sideshow may not be an inappropriate tag for Europe these days. Any country or area holding itself aloof from the technology-driven demands of global competitiveness and integration can only be a sideshow to the main currents of early 21st century history.

In this light, it is interesting to note John Julius Norwich's description of the once all-conquering Venice that surrendered to Napoleon: "The fact of the matter was that Venice was utterly demoralized. It was so long since she had been obliged to make a serious military effort that she had lost the will that makes such efforts possible. Peace, the pursuit of pleasure, the love of luxury, the whole spirit of dolce far niente has sapped her strength. She was old and tired; she was also spoilt."

In 1982, a Miami judge issued a warrant to search Prince Turki Bin Abdul Aziz's 24th-floor penthouse to determine if he was holding Nadia Lutefi Mustafa, an Egyptian woman, against her will. Turki and his French bodyguards prevented a search from taking place, then won retroactive diplomatic immunity to forestall any legal unpleasantness.

In 1988, the Saudi defense attaché in Washington, Col. Abdulrahman S. Al-Banyan, employed a Thai domestic, Mariam Roungprach, until she escaped his house by crawling out a window. She later told how she had been imprisoned there, did not get enough food, and was not paid. Interestingly, her work contract specified that she could not leave the house or make telephone calls without her employer's permission.

In 1991, Prince Saad Bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud and his wife, Princess Noora, lived on two floors of the Ritz-Carlton Houston. Two of their servants, Josephine Alicog of the Philippines and Sriyani Marian Fernando of Sri Lanka, filed a suit against the prince, alleging they were for five months held against their will, "by means of unlawful threats, intimidation and physical force," they were only partially paid, denied medical treatment, and suffered mental and physical abuse.

In March 2005, a wife of Saudi Prince Mohamed Bin Turki Alsaud, Hana Al Jader, 39, was arrested at her home outside of Boston on charges of forced labor, domestic servitude, falsifying records, visa fraud, and harboring aliens. Al Jader stands accused of compelling two Indonesian women to work for her by making them believe "that if they did not perform such labor, they would suffer serious harm." If convicted, Al Jader faces up to 140 years in jail and $2.5 million in fines.