For the last few months I’ve been working insanely hard on a couple of real-world projects, one of which has just fallen through (through precisely no fault of my own). I haven’t had even a single night out of London since March and haven’t had a proper holiday in almost two years. Meanwhile, a mate of mine’s off to the Bahamas tomorrow. For a fortnight. The utter, utter bastard.

Is it any wonder I’m finding it hard to summon the enthusiasm to write about the exciting world of European politics, especially considering that it’s silly season, so very little’s going on?

But still, the end of this month will see my third anniversary of near-daily blogging. From what I can tell, that puts me up there with Fistful and EU Referendum as one of the longest-running EU-focussed blogs out there – and both of those have the benefit of more than one author to call on.

So, despite the decline in readership brought by a combination of the shift from my old address (to which a surprisingly huge number of people are still linking, despite the lack of activity there for the last nine months or so) and decline in number of posts, thanks to my complete lack of inspiration I thought I’d point you to some of the newer EU blogs that have sprung up of late, and see if my encouragement can give them the impetus to keep it up.

So, in no particular order:

The European Parliament is that rarest of beasts – a loosely pro-EU English language blog that doesn’t appear to be written by an ignorant teenager who ends up doing more harm than good to the pro-EU cause by making ill-thought-out arguments and wild generalisations, backed up by silly attacks on eurosceptics based on little more than stereotyping. In other words, it has a lot of promise.

Global Power Europe has been going a few months now, making the case for “a strong, active, dynamic and just European Union” with a mixture of intelligence and what appears to be proper research and understanding. Rare indeed in the world of blogs.

WSI Brussels Blog comes from the World Security Initiative, aiming to “inform, stimulate, and shape the debate around the security and defence dilemmas facing Europe and the world” – and is thus far looking like an interesting addition, not least thanks to the potential for security cooperation to become a much bigger EU issue over the next few years.

Public Affairs 2.0 is another focussed new EU blog, this time looking at “the use of digital in politics, public affairs and communications in Europe”. With Brussels increasingly looking to the web as a way to effectively disseminate information (see EurActiv’s interesting report on blogs and the EU from a couple of months back), if this keeps going it could prove a handy resource.

Analysing EU may only be posting intermittently (a grand total of 11 posts in the last three months), but looks to be worth reading when new ones appear, approaching the EU as it does from a broader international perspective.

Mary Honeyball is a new edition to the world of elected representative bloggers, being a Labour MEP for London. Oddly, however, her blog seems to be rather more focussed on religion rather than politics, but to each their own.

Social Europe Blog, meanwhile, is another from the left (and left-wing blogs really are surprisingly rare when it comes to the EU) – this time from the magazine Social Europe “the journal of the European left”. It’s been going a few months now, is moderately regular, and seems to have promise (even if they haven’t linked to me yet…).

And then there’s a bunch of others that have been and gone in the few months since I last did a new EU blog roundup, like Brussels Media, Europhobe, EU Energy Policy Blog, and no doubt countless others I’ve completely missed.

If there are any new ones I’ve forgotten here and that are worth checking out, let me know. In the meantime I’m off to do yet more real-world work. Despite the fact that today looks to be one of those rare sunny days, the lack of which has made summer in the UK this year even more depressing than usual, and I’d really rather be sitting out on a beach somewhere. Ho-hum…