Milestones
On Friday Rhodri Morgan will have been First Minister for 8 years.
So when the Counsel General started talking about an "exciting milestone" this morning the lobby wondered, just for a moment, whether Carwyn Jones was getting his best wishes in first and his best foot forward in the race to succeed him. He wasn't - not that overtly anyway but more on that particular race later in the week.
The "exciting milestone" will be reached this afternoon when the final draft of the Additional Learning Needs Legislative Competence Order is laid before the Assembly.
Don't scoff.
It won't make hearts beat faster anywhere else, least of all in Westminster but as long as the whole Assembly approves of the draft (and they will) and as long as the new Welsh Secretary agrees to lay the Order before both Houses of Parliament ('he will of course' says Carwyn Jones), as long as the House of Commons and House of Lords can find an hour and a half to debate it and as long as they approve it (they will ... this one anyway) then by 'not long after Easter' it'll be in her Majesty's hands.
She will then make the Order and it'll be full steam ahead on the road to creating "a substantial number of new Welsh laws" as Carwyn Jones put it and again, "a new body of Welsh law". (Now that might make hearts beat faster in Westminster).
No talk of bumpy roads this morning, only a steady voice and an insistence that this is a process where some difficulties along the way are "completely natural".
If you want to be led through that process it by the hand, then take a look at the explanation came up with and note the subtlety of point 7, that the "process by which LCOs are passed is somewhat complex".
But don't scoff.
It may be complex, it may be considerably bumpier than those steering the process up and down the M4 want to admit but it is all we have. And at last, this Welsh Assembly Government will soon have to prove it has the ideas and the drive to make those new Welsh laws ones you care about.
Carwyn Jones did allow himself one bit of overt creeping and one bit of ´óÏó´«Ã½ bashing.
He not only congratulated the Welsh rugby team but introduced their glorious victory (sorry, just slipped out) as one which "the First Minister had of course predicted".
The ´óÏó´«Ã½ bashing? That the camerawork during Saturday's match was, in his view, dreadful. "If I'd wanted to watch the match from the sky, I'd have been a bird".
Listen: as the Mam who kept the kids happy while Dad got to sit on the sofa, I'd have been happy to watch it from anywhere.
I'm Betsan Powys, ´óÏó´«Ã½ Wales' political editor. I'll be blogging the inside track on .
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