THX 1138 was George Lucas’s 1971 directorial debut. Co-written by Lucas and Walter Murch, the film grew out of Lucas’s 1967 student film, Electronic Labyrinth. It was never a box office success but, as dystopian science fiction, has a certain cult following. It came a little too early in the 1970s for me (I don’t even know if it went on general release in the UK), so tonight, in watching the film, I was catching up. One aspect of Lucas’s vision borrows heavily from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World: mandatory drug use regulates emotions. And the equivalent of ‘Huxley’s Our Ford’ is ‘OMM 0910’, physically represented by reproductions of Hans Memling’s Christ Giving His Blessing. (OMM 0910 ends every ‘confession’ by declaring ‘You are a true believer, blessings of the State, blessings of the masses. Work hard, increase production, prevent accidents and be happy.’) However, unlike in Huxley’s World State, passion and sex are outlawed. Everyone is controlled. Cameras are ubiquitous. And the dystopia is policed by softly-spoken, peaceful police officers (lanky androids with metallic faces). Worker LUH 3417 (Maggie McOmie) has a male flatmate, THX 1138 (Robert Duvall). A disillusioned controller, LUH stops taking her medication and secretly reduces THX’s doses, so that the two discover passion, sex and love. Now prey to emotions, THX comes close to causing a disastrous accident at the android plant where he works. Meanwhile, LUH’s superior, SEN 5241 (Donald Pleasance), wants to be THX’s flatmate and illegally changes shifts. All three are arrested and confined to a directionless white limbo together with other prisoners who have apparently experienced free thought. Considered incurable, LUH is ‘consumed’ and her organs recycled. THX and SEN escape, together with a hologram star, SRT. But only THX remains free long enough to exhaust the controllers’ pre-determined budget. His android pursuer desists and THX emerges from a tunnel into what is apparently the real, above-ground world (and then the viewer, realising that there has never been any natural light, understands that the dystopia is some sort of underground escape). Consistent with the electronic world he created, Lucas edited the film in a choppy style and the viewer has to work hard to understand what is going on. The characters’ names and the long philosophical interlude in limbo probably also helped prevent this film from enjoying mainstream success. But it demonstrated Lucas’s potential to create alternative worlds and his attention to detail (in the 2004 Director’s Cut, Lucas mischievously inserts the face of C-3PO as the android THX is building, thus providing a retroactive hint about the later importance of android characters).

I love a good counter-intuitive thesis and there is a fine one in this morning’s Financial Times. Simon Kuyper argues, convincingly, I feel, that the social media have improved writing. E-mail, he declares, kicked off an unprecedented expansion in writing, producing the most literate age in history. The use of the social media increases every month. Indeed, ‘writing is overtaking speech as the most common form of interaction’. The UK’s communications regulator, Ofcom, says that ‘Britons now text absent friends and family more often than they speak to them on the phone or in person.’ To those who bemoan the decline of language he points out that such laments have been voiced since at least AD63. He cites a study that suggest texting improves children’s reading ability. Yes, punctuation and spelling are neglected, but most children grasp that the genre has different rules from school essays (older generations have greater difficulty in adjusting to punctuation-free, abbreviated text language). Texts, blogs, e-mail and Facebook are, he insists ‘making journalism, books and business communications more conversational.’ And ‘conversational prose improves your chances of being heard and understood.’ Mostly, he concludes, ‘social media have done wonders for writing’. After all, George Orwell’s ideal was writing that sounded like speech. Good fun.

At lunchtime today I attended the vernissage of an exhibition at the EESC’s Jacques Delors headquarters, opened by our President, Staffan Nilsson, and entitled ‘The World of Livstycket – About Migrant Women and Integration’. The exhibition brought back to the Committee one of the winners of the 2012 Civil Society Prize – the Livstycket organisation – and its formidable founder and CEO, Birgitta Notlöf (on the left in the picture). Livstycket is a modern design and knowledge centre located in Tensta, a northern Stockholm suburb. The organisation helps to integrate immigrant women – frequently refugees – into Swedish society through pedagogical and artistic activities designed to give them linguistic skills and independent economic productivity. In her opening remarks, Notlöf asked us all to imagine being asked urgently to leave everything we knew – country, culture, language, family, friends – for another place and being allowed only to take what we could fit into one small bag (a single bag is a recurring symbol of the organisation). This was so often the lot of the women she and her organisation sought to help. I was humbled when the (Swedish) EESC member beside me, Ellen Nygren (Workers Group), recounted that this was exactly what had happened to her mother in 1944. She had been obliged to quit Estonia, urgently, with just one bag. Sometimes, Nygren (on the right in the picture) wears a red Livstycket dress to occasions like the opera. When she does so, she told me, she is declaring her mother’s survival.

Sadly, the BBC website reports that Pietro Mennea, 1980 Moscow Olympic 200 metre champion, and the 200 m world record holder for 17 years (with a time of 19.72, set in September 1979) has just died, far too young, at the age of 60. Only eight athletes have recorded a better time over 200 metres than Mennea’s world record, which still remains the current European record. In Italy Mennea was nicknamed the Freccia del Sud (the Southern Arrow), after the express train connecting Milan and Messina. I remember Mennea beating Scotsman Allan Wells for the gold in Moscow, hauling him in and edging him out by 0.02 seconds (you can see a clip of it on Mennea’s website – link above). It seems strange to relate now, but there was an exoticism about such a successful Italian track star at a time when the Cold War rivals were still mostly dominant. In later life Mennea was a Member of the European Parliament (1999-2004) and I knew him a little then, as he naturally gravitated to the Cultural Affairs Committee (also responsible for sport), my primary parliamentary interlocuter in those days. I remember a quiet, polite, distinguished gentleman with a receding silver hair line and an immediately recognisable smile. I got a big thrill out of shaking the hand of and talking to one of the fastest men on earth, for that was what he had been. It wasn’t the ‘done thing’ to ask for an autograph but I rather regret that I didn’t.

Readers of this blog may remember that in my forthcoming saga I intend to encompass the 30 July 1916 Black Tom explosion in New York, the greatest incident of material damage to the city before 9/11. A reader’s letter in the London Review of Books has led me to another such wartime explosion, the 6 December 1917 Halifax Explosion, when a French munitions ship, the Mont-Blanc, drifting and on fire after a collision, exploded, killing about 2,000 people and injuring a further 9,000. The Wiki entry recounts that ‘Nearly all structures within a half-mile radius, including the entire community of Richmond, were completely obliterated. A pressure wave of air snapped trees, bent iron rails, demolished buildings, grounded vessels, and carried fragments of the Mont-Blanc for kilometres. Hardly a window in the city proper survived the concussion. Across the harbour, in Dartmouth, there was also widespread damage. A tsunami created by the blast wiped out the physical community of Mi’kmaw First Nations people that had lived in the Tuft’s Cove area for generations. There were a number of casualties including five children who drowned when the tidal wave came ashore at Nevin’s Cove.’ So many people were blinded by flying glass that the reconstructed Halifax became internationally known as a centre for the care of the blind. Wiki further records that ‘For many years afterward, the Halifax Explosion was the standard by which all large blasts were measured. For instance, in its report on the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Time wrote that the explosive power of the Little Boy bomb was seven times that of the Halifax Explosion.’

Very early this morning we walked out at Berthem. I know, I know; I keep going on about the place. But this morning the weather was glorious and once again we passed the simple cabin in the picture, nestling in its pine grove, surrounded by flat, dark, freshly-ploughed earth and maize stubble and my imagination got to work. I keep picturing myself there, shut inside, scribbling away. How many books would I write, if only I could retreat to that cabin? It’s all rubbish, of course. Productivity isn’t a result of surroundings, is it? I am not even certain that the cabin belongs to a writer of some sort, and yet… And yet there is such a concept as the writer’s cabin, well-analysed in David Wood’s December journalistic essay, ‘The lure of the writer’s cabin’,  in the New York Times. And the place out at Berthem fits the bill, being small, sparse and basic. (Should anybody out there know to whom it belongs, please let me know.) As Wood puts it, ‘Between world and word there is both a bridge and a chasm … we know that a manifesto, a book, even a well-turned, well-timed phrase can change the world. Writers are at times, as Pope decried, fools in dunce’s caps. But they can also be magicians, conjuring other worlds, brave new possibilities. The cabin is one culturally powerful image of that semi-detached space in which those creative discontinuities are spawned. It seems to hold a secret, but behind the first there hides another. If the first secret is that to write, one needs a blank sheet of paper, or a blank screen, the second secret, the secret of the cabin, is that one does not strictly need a mountain or a shack at the end of a trail, off the grid. Rather, a table, a chair, somewhere simple, free of distraction. For some, even a cupboard in an office building no-one is using that day will do.’

The Staff Regulations for EU officials provide that all institutions should be assisted by a staff committee composed of representatives of the democratically-elected staff organisations. In the case of the EESC, those elections last occurred in October 2012. Since then the EESC’s new Staff Committee has established itself and come up to ‘cruising speed’ and so it was with great pleasure that I accepted an invitation to come before the Staff Committee this afternoon for an exchange of views on various topics, including work loads, promotion procedures, reform and impending challenges related, perhaps most importantly, to the envisaged reforms to the staff regulations and the implications of a sustained period of austerity. The staff committee is an integral part of the administrative life of the Committee and it is always a pleasure to go before it.

This afternoon the European Economic and Social Committee’s plenary session hosted a visit from Günther Oettinger, European Commissioner for Energy Policy, who came to participate in a debate related to the Committee’s exploratory opinion on exploring the needs and methods of public involvement and engagement in the energy policy field (rapporteur: Richard Adams, Various Interests Group, UK). It was an opinion that Mr Oettinger had himself requested and he clearly valued the work the Committee had done. He described to the plenary the consequences and implications of the shift in energy requirements from the local to the regional to the continental. This ‘Europeanisation’ had to be accompanied by a concomittant democratisation, especially given much greater mobility and the larger budgetary investments involved. But over and beyond the democratisation of the market the Commissioner argued that the efficient functioning of such a market was also predicated on the proper involvement of consumers, who should be more conscious and better informed about choices. Richard Adams’s opinion similarly argues that ‘Public involvement, understanding and acceptance of the different changes which our energy system will have to go through over the coming decades are absolutely essential. In this regard, dialogue with civil society is vital, and the EESC’s membership and constituency, reflecting European society, is well placed to reach out to citizens and stakeholders in the Member States and establish a comprehensive programme embodying participative democracy and practical action.’ In particular, The EESC would take the lead in establishing a European Energy Dialogue (EED), a coordinated multi-level, action-oriented conversation within and across all Member States. The opinion was adopted with a big majority.

It’s a plenary week again already and so the Committee is in the habitual rhythm of management board, pre-session and enlarged Presidency meetings  (Monday) and Bureau meeting (this afternoon). All went smoothly but there was nevertheless a sad tinge to this afternoon’s meeting. It was the penultimate meeting of the current Bureau. The next meeting of this Bureau will be a special one, held on the eve of the elections of the new President and Bureau for the remaining two-and-a-half years of the current 2010-2015 mandate. Because of that, today’s meeting heard reports from the two Vice-Presidents, Jacek Krawczyk and Anna Maria Darmanin, on their presidencies of, respectively, the Budget Group and the Communication Group, and took note of the end of term reports of the the Sections and the Consultative Commission on Industrial Change and the Quaestors and the categories, and so on. There was also a full load of the Bureau’s traditional business in preparing tomorrow’s plenary session.

This morning I was happy to say a few welcoming words at a meeting of a French civil society organisation, the IRCEM Group, which is a non-profit-making organisation working on social protection and social security issues. I welcomed them to the EESC’s headquarters Jacques Delors building and brandished a copy of Jean Monnet’s memoirs, reminding them that it was in some part thanks to Monnet that the French vision of a consultative body representing civil society organisations had been reproduced at European level. It was substitute member and former colleague Jean Lapeyre who had brought the organisation to the house of civil society (as we sometimes refer to our building). Then, at lunchtime, thanks to Spanish EESC member Miguel Angel Cabra De Luna (Various Interests Group), I attended a lunch meeting of Spanish charity organisation, ONCE. Founded in 1938, ONCE organises lotteries to fund public works by and for blind people. A foundation has existed since 1988. The assembled guests heard from Miguel Carballeda Pineiro, the President of ONCE and of its Foundation, about the organisation’s good works and the challenges it faces. Both IRCEM and ONCE are examples of flourishing civil society organisations, of Europe’s civic fabric. The ONCE lunch took place at the top of a hotel sporting spectacular views, as my picture shows.