Eyes intermittently glued to the ‘breaking news’ on my mobile ‘phone, this morning I attended the opening ceremony of ‘Springfest’ at my children’s school. If ever your confidence about Europe’s potential weakens, then you should attend one of these ceremonies. The whole thing is organised by the kids, who always put on a rich display of gifted talent (music, dance, gymnastics…). And at the end of it all comes the ritual bit that always leaves me with a lump in my throat. The flags of each of the twenty-seven Member States is carried out by a flag party of children of differing nationalities. Each flag gets a loud cheer. And then out comes the EU flag, and it gets a very loud cheer. And then out comes the school’s Springfest flag, and that gets the loudest cheer of all, and then the party begins. It’s when you go to such events that the true meaning of such otherwise anodyne phrases as ‘unity in diversity’ becomes richly apparent. The EU and the eurozone may face big problems at the moment, but when I see the idealism and ‘can do’ attitude of our youngsters, I just know Europe is going to flourish.

Look for the holes in the statues

Sad news from Italy. When I was a doctoral student at the European University Institute in San Domenico di Fiesole (above Florence) I stayed in a small flat in a villa (Villa Mazzi) just off the main square, Piazza Mino, in Fiesole. The man who collected my rent and lived with his family in a larger flat in the same villa, Lino Bertaccini, was the barber of Fiesole. He had inherited the trade from his father, Egisto. Together, for 91 years altogether, Egisto and Lino shaved the chins and cut the hair of the men of Fiesole. Lino and his wife, Olga, and their son, Saverio, and daughter, Monica, became a second family to me. Once, just once, Lino rolled down the shutters of his barber shop and solemnly pulled down his trousers and pants to show me the grapefruit-sized hole in his backside where a shell had almost killed him during the war. You can see similar-sized holes in the statue of The Meeting of Garibaldi and Vittorio Emanuele II at Teano in the middle of Piazza Mino. The story is as follows. It was 1944. The Nazi occupiers had taken a group of village elders as hostages and had locked them up in what is now the Albergo Aurora just off the main square. Lino, then a young boy, was sent by his father with a bowl of hot water and a shaving brush to lather up the hostages in preparation for a visit from Egisto, who was allowed to shave them every day. Lino was halfway across the piazza when a stray British shell fell between him and the statue, punching large holes in both. He could have died. He could certainly have lived off an invalidity pension if he had so wished, but Lino returned in time to the barber’s shop and kept up the family tradition. Now, sadly, Lino has passed away. His funeral was held in the cathedral of Fiesole, San Romolo’s, and the congregation of mourners was so large that it spilled out onto the piazza. If you read Italian, you can read about Lino in this article in Il Reporter di Fiesole, penned on the occasion of Lino’s retirement last year. As to the hostages, three carabinieri, who had deserted to become partisans, gave themselves up in return for their release. The selflessness and sacrifice of the young carabinieri (they were shot) is one of surely many largely forgotten stories of Italian heroism and altruism in that horribly confused period towards the end of the war. With the passing away of Lino Bertaccini, Fiesole has lost one of its most familiar and endearing personalities.

Today is the last day of campaigning before the British electorate votes in what the media are describing as the most open election in decades. For what it’s worth, today’s Financial Times gives the following odds: Conservatives govern with other parties, 8/10; Conservatives win an outright majority, 7/10; Conservative minority government, 6/10; Labour and Lib Dem coalition (presumably, minus Brown), 4/10. There has been some fevered speculation about constitutional mechanics. What happens, for example, if Labour comes third in terms of the popular vote but, through the vagaries of the first-past-the-post constituency-based system, wins many more seats than the Lib Dems? Surely, argue the pundits, the pressure for constitutional change to the electoral system will become irresistable. More pragmatically and prosaically, the leaders of both major parties have been careful to leave the door to coalition government ajar. But a little voice inside my head keeps telling me we’ve been here before. After all, back in 1997 Tony Blair fully expected to have to govern in coalition with the Lib Dems…

We saw and enjoyed Polanski’s The Ghostwriter this evening. It is based on Robert Harris’s novel, The Ghost. I am a great admirer of Robert Harris. For a long time he was a successful and respected television and newspaper journalist and a non-fiction writer. Then, in 1992, his ingenious thriller novel Fatherland was published and its deserved success enabled him to retire and become a full-time author. Besides the same age (both born in 1957), he and I have something else in common: he wrote the first biography of Neil Kinnock, in 1984, and I wrote the last one, in 2001. Harris’s Prime Minister in The Ghost, Adam Lang, is admittedly modelled on Blair, but as a fictional character he also has some of Kinnock’s characteristics: it was Kinnock whose family originally came from Scotland, for example, and it was Kinnock who fell in love with the beautiful Glenys, as she distributed tracts at Cardiff University. As to the film, it is good, but there are loose ends and inconsistencies in the plot and these are precisely in those parts of the story where Polanski abandoned Harris’s original storyline. Ewan McGregor is brilliant as the ghost writer and Olivia Williams is excellent as the former Prime Minister’s manipulative wife but – I’m sorry – whenever I see Pierce Brosnan now I think of Mamma Mia!

Sidney Lumet’s film, Twelve Angry Men, tells a brilliant tale of how one dissenting voice in a jury of twelve ultimately leads to the unanimous acquital of the accused. The lone dissenter, played by Henry Fonda, gradually convinces his fellow jurors that the case against the accused is unsound. It is great cinema and an uplifting tale. Just today my contact in the charity Lifelines sent me a cutting from the Charlotte Observer (North Carolina) with a very similar story – this one from real life; ‘a lone juror persuaded eleven others to settle for a sentence of life without parole instead of death by lethal injection…’  The accused in this case was by his own admission guilty but his defence argued that he had mental health problems. It’s not the same as walking free but it sends out a strong message to state prosecutors. As one lawyer, quoted in the article, says, “You look at that case as a prosecutor and say ‘If you can’t get the death penalty in that case, gee, what case are you going to get the death penalty in?'” And all because of one angry person on a jury.

Thanks to our staff committee, a grey and rainy Monday was brightened up this lunchtime by a choir of schoolchildren from Torva (Estonia). They had a repertoire of songs from Gospel through to pop and dance movements to go with it. They were very good. In the spirit of my 4 April post (Estonian insights), their performance gave an insight into Estonian popular culture for, if you go onto You Tube, you will find there lots of clips from a television programme where such schoolgirl choirs compete. The Torva choir, in last year’s composition, can be heard here.

Let's squeeze some more action in...

This evening we went en famille to see Iron Man 2. It’s something of a mixed bag. Robert Downey Jr. is very good and Mickey Rourke is a great villain. Maybe, just maybe, the scriptwriters wanted to stay faithful to the Marvel comics character, but Gwyneth Paltrow’s part (as Virginia ‘Pepper’ Potts) consists of nothing much more than screams and pouts and Scarlett Johansson (as an undercover spy for S.H.I.E.L.D.) is unconvincing. As to the plot, there’s simply too much of it. It’s as though the producers thought to themselves ‘how do you follow up on a successful action movie? answer: yet more action!’ That said, I am sure I was not the only person in the audience who would love to take a trip in a suit like Iron Man’s!

We’re in the Ardennes this weekend. Nature, always a little later here, has burst out of its starting blocks and the fields and hedgerows are frothing with flowers and blossoms of various sorts. Curiously, the fields are awash with dandelions. In a notebook somewhere I once wrote about nettle fields and dandelion fields and thistle fields (you can be fined in Brussels if you have thistles in your garden). For sometimes, certainly when in sufficient quantities, weeds can be just as beautiful as cultivated flowers – think of untreated wheat fields full of poppies (indeed, think of Monnet). Certainly the brilliant yellows of the dandelions contrasted beautifully with the dark greens of the Ardennes fields and forests. I wonder, though, why there are quite so many dandelions this year. Something to do with meteorological conditions, I suppose.

André Mordant

On the Wednesday evening of the Employees’ Group’s extraordinary meeting in Borzée (see 14 April post) EESC member André Mordant, who was my neighbour at the dinner table, sang a song about les canuts, and he encouraged us all to sing the chorus: ‘C’est nous les canuts/Nous allons tout nus!’ You can listen to the song here. Intrigued, I started to look into the story of the canuts (there’s an English account here). They were the silk workers of Lyons and their first revolt, in 1831, was among the earliest of worker uprisings. There were several revolts, and each was put down bloodily (their battle cry was “Vivre libre en travaillant ou mourir en combattant!”). I suppose in British terms they were the equivalent of a conflation of the Luddites and the Peterloo massacre.

A thoughtful and thought-provoking Josef Zboril

A heavily-charged plenary session ran on into this afternoon. It’s always invidious to single out one opinion when there were so many, but one by Josef Zboril (Employers, Czech) caught my eye. It was about going beyond Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a measurement of progress and was in response to a communication from the European Commission. I think we are all now pretty familiar with the argument that GDP has become insufficient as a measurement of progress, since it does not take into account such less quantifiable or more subjective goods as, for example, well being. But what I hadn’t realised was just how long it took for GDP to become an internationally recognised and accepted standard for statistical comparison. It is so ubiquitous (think of any economics textbook) that it is impossible to imagine it somehow being replaced. Nor was I aware how many alternative forms of measurement have already been proposed.