This afternoon I was happy to sit at the back of a meeting room in our headquarters Jacques Delors building that was full of young Europeans. What had brought them there was a joint initiative of Gianni Pitella, European Parliament Vice-President, and European Economic and Social Committee Vice-President,  Anna Maria Darmanin, who jointly presided the meeting. They had travelled together to similar gatherings in Leeds, Cosenza, Valletta, Barcelona, Strasbourg, Salerno and Warsaw in order to hear what young people really think about Europe. This listening exercise generated five ideas, which were debated today. These were: the creation of a true European political union, including a directly-elected President; the creation of a European public employment service to guide the choices of young people in their search for work; the standardisation of human, social, civil, political and economic rights in the EU; the creation of a European Degree Programme; and the creation of a European public broadcasting company. What became apparent, as these five themes were discussed, is that while young Europeans may worry about their futures (in terms of employment, above all) they still clearly see the logicality of Europe as being the answer, or the potential answer. It was instructive to be listening in!

I just haven’t had the time to write posts about this year’s thrilling and entertaining six nations championship, which opened on 2 February and closed yesterday, with an imperious Wales putting young pretenders England to the sword at Cardiff and dashing their hopes of the Grand Slam and the Championship. In passing, Italy beat France and Ireland and showed a strong England at Twickenham that this team has to be taken seriously. Scotland played with great heart and throughly deserved their third place finish. There were so many contrasts and passages of brilliant play that the commentators produced a bumper crop of figures of speech. My favourite simile came from Jeremy Guscott, at half time between England and Scotland on 2 February. Both teams had a brilliantly ferocious first half, with furious attack matched by just as furious defence. It was, said Guscott, ‘like watching gladiators play chess.’ As always, there are parallels and metaphors in sport. My favourite in this championship came from the 24 February match between Scotland and Ireland at Murrayfield. The Irish camped out near the Scottish tryline and were 8-0 up at half time. Despite keeping the pressure on for most of the remainder of the match, the Irish could not convert their chances and Scotland won the match 12-8, through four penalties. There are times in life when all we seem to do is to defend, defend, defend, but the moral of that match is that even rare opportunities can be enough if the defence is strong and the chances, when they come, are recognised and taken.

To the Maison de la création – Centre culturel Bruxelles Nord (the former Laeken town hall) this evening for one of the parcours in this Ars Musica event. We’d come to see a friend, Pauline Claes, singing in an extract from John Adams’s opera, I was looking at the ceiling and then I saw the sky. The Song about the bad boys is a wonderfully lively, jazzy, gospelly infectiously cheerful piece (three voices and a piano). It was but an aperitif for our musical evening. We were led by a guide from floor to floor and room to room and treated to a series of short performances. Thus, we saw Louis Preudhomme play Eric Sammut’s Ameline (marimba); Myriam Graulus and Pascale Simon play Joji Yuasa’s Interpénétrations (two flutes); Laurent Houque play Mladen Tarbuk’s Danza di corde (violin); Kobe Van Cauwenberghe play Fausto Romitelli’s Trash TV Trance (electric guitar); and, to round the evening off, Josep-Maria Balanyà conducted the Dizôrkestra in Improvisations (an exercise in sound painting for voices and instruments). The clips are from what I could find on You Tube, but they give an idea about how rich and varied the evening was. As for the venue, the former Hotel Communal, built in 1907, is an imposing piece of civic architecture. The central staircase sports panels urging ‘L’obstination, l’emportement, le courage, la meditation, l’exaltation, l’inspiration’, and I spotted the following Condorcet quote under an art deco painting in one of the grand rooms; ‘Dans la domaine des sciences, la perfectibilité humaine est indéfinie.’

The recent snowfalls, together with gusty squalls, have been sculpting the fields around Berthem in ever-changing ways. Early this morning we took a dirt road that initially seemed clear but further along the winds had created deep drifts and the cold had frozen the melt water underneath so that the road became all but impassible. And it was there, in the middle of nowhere, that we came across a 4 x 4, mysteriously buried to its bodywork in the middle of a a muddy field. In Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, Llewelyn Moss comes across an abandoned pickup truck while out hunting and we half-wondered if we would similarly find the remains of a drug deal gone wrong. But the truck was empty and it soon became apparent what had happened. Instead of backing down the narrow dirt track to a place where he could turn, the driver had backed off the road into the field, thinking that he would be able to do a U-turn. But the freshly-ploughed earth was deceptively sodden. The more the driver had pushed the accelerator, the deeper his tyres had dug, until the truck had sunk down to its bodywork (the roof was covered with mud spray). He had had no choice but to abandon his vehicle and would doubtless come back, once the snows had melted, with a tractor to pull the truck out of the mud bath.

To the Kaaitheater this evening for the fourth in the ever-rewarding series of Liquid Room ambient concerts. It was an extraordinarily rich collection of pieces, including Karl-Heinz Stockhausen’s Freude (2005), John Cage’s Amores (1943), George Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique (1924), accompanied by the film he made together with Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy, and Steve Reich’s Four Organs (1970), all of this (and much more, as they say) being performed with technical excellence and artistic brio by members of the Ictus Ensemble. Also of note were the ‘lecture-performances’ of choreographer Xavier Le Roy, who seeks to synchronise body, sound and image, to fascinating and at times very witty effect (you can see him having fun with Stravinsky here, for example).

This afternoon I attended a regular meeting with my counterpart in the Committee of the Regions, Gerhard Stahl, together with our respective directors of finance and human resources and the directors and deputy directors of what we call the ‘Joint Services’. These are common services created by the two Committees through the pooling of their resources in order to achieve economies of scale and synergies. Thus we have common translation and logistics directorates. This potentially complex arrangement is overseen by a series of governance mechanisms, including this afternoon’s meeting. Although we Secretaries-General theoretically  jointly chair these meetings, each Committee takes it in turn to host them, and so tradition has it that the hosting Secretary General takes the lead. Today, that was me. The meeting went very well. We are having to face up to a number of challenges at the moment, particularly as a consequence of a sustained period of austerity, but happily the cooperation has stood the test of time (we are now well into the fifth year of the current seven-year cooperation agreement).

The EESC’s administration is constantly striving to do things better. Readers of this blog will know that we are making concerted efforts to use less paper, the bane of any bureaucratic life. Today, at the invitation of our human resources director, Gianluca Brunetti, and his team, I was invited to push a button and thus usher in a small revolution. I should explain that every official in the EU institutions has a personal file. It is a sort of obligation under the staff regulations. Into that file goes everything to do with the professional life of the individual concerned, from that first job application through to retirement documentation and, until now, the files have been entirely paper-based. Not any more. Gianluca and his colleagues have launched a programme to scan and convert all of those paper files into electronic files and today I was given the honour of launching the scanning process with regard to the first file so to be converted – my own. In no time at all the machine had gobbled up my papers and, one after another, they appeared momentarily on the screen. We’re talking ancient history here: a rapport de stage from 1985; my first ever personal file (at the Council of Europe, Strasbourg) from the same year; my first ever EU job (at the Council); my first staff report; and so on. They say that a drowning man sees his life flash before him. Well, I wasn’t drowning, of course, but I did see my whole professional career flash before me and it was an interesting sensation. Nothing is more cruel than a rapid succession of photographs over the years, and there they all were (since you had to append a passport-sized photograph to documents in the good old bad old days). In the illustration I have found an old photograph showing me with considerably more hair and considerably less wrinkles! It was altogether an interesting experience and, from the professional point of view, a thoroughly satisfying one. Until now, consulting your personal file meant a trek to the dusty archives. Henceforth colleagues will be able to access their files without moving from their work stations. And all those dusty paper files and the space they occupy will gradually disappear.

Our writers’ workshop, which meets every fortnight, always starts with the reading of short ‘exercises’, designed to keep our writing muscles in form. This week dapper soon-to-be 83 year-old Cleve Moffett read out a touching reminiscence which he has kindly agreed I may reproduce here as a ‘guest blog’: “Undoubtedly my happiest adolescent moments were playing the drums, and playing them well, in a small jazz band which, of course, necessitated friends: Judson West, trumpet, Parky Boone, tenor sax and sometimes, in a fix, a doddering old lady who could play not at all bad ragtime piano. When I took one of my solos, when the rest of the band stopped playing and all the dancers stood still and gaped, I was in my element, thundering away alone, featured, spotlighted and wildly applauded. Who needed friends? But that wasn’t what I was going to talk about. I was going to talk about Marcus Clayton. He was the son of a high-ranking military officer, a colonel perhaps or a major, whichever is higher, stationed at Fort Blandings, not far from my home town of St. Augustine, Florida. At Blandings there was a shooting range and a field where soldiers practised throwing hand grenades. (I’m talking about the 1940s, my early teen years.) For Marcus these exercises were a glorious show. One day when the field was deserted he climbed the fence and crossed over it looking for fragments of military ordnance, and to his delight found an unexploded grenade, apparently a dud. He picked it up gingerly and was taking it home to show it proudly to his father when it went off, blinded him and tore his right arm off just below the elbow. When I met him he could make out bright light with his left eye, but his right eye was glass. His mother, Thelma, was a church-going acquaintance of my mother and because Marcus had few if any friends they thought we should get together. He attended the St Augustine School for the Deaf and Blind (better known as the D and B; those were the days before euphemisms). It had an excellent reputation as a school that encouraged talent; among their alumni were Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder. (Since the students couldn’t see one another there was no need for the school to be racially segregated.) I didn’t know what to expect from our first meeting, and of course no one understood that better than Marcus. He didn’t want anyone to feel sorry for him; he hated pity in any form. His approach was to be jocular and extroverted. He liked jazz and so I brought along some of my favorite records. But Thelma had planned that I would read aloud to him, something I enjoyed doing because I had a weekly radio program on WFOY and liked the sound of my own voice. We didn’t get very far with Marcus Aurelius and somehow a novel by the then notorious Thorne Smith came into our possession, The Bishop’s Jaegers (a word I can’t find in my dictionary but seems to mean underpants or drawers). Thanks to Google, I am now able to read the opening lines for the first time in more than 60 years. Here’s a sample: “Before hoisting them over his sturdy, ecclesiastical shanks the Bishop contemplated his drawers with nonsectarian satisfaction. It was not the Bishop’s wont thus to dally with his drawers. Far from it. As a rule, etc. etc.” In time, Marcus and I became the best of friends. When he learned that there was a one-armed jazz trumpeter named Wingy Manone he took up the instrument himself and got very good at it. He got very good at everything he ever tried to do – playing the piano, reading braille, going to university, becoming a tenured professor, marrying more than once and having several children. When I went to Italy, married, lived in New York and came to Brussels we gradually stopped writing and now neither one of us knows if the other is dead or alive.”  If you are out there somewhere, Marcus, Cleve is out there too!

It’s a wet and windy Saturday morning with a low, grey sky. Whilst walking the dog out at Berthem my better half spoke about the word ‘spleen’. She likes the word, an English word, and she had been reminded of it by the title of a poem by Baudelaire, Spleen, in the Fleurs du Mal collection. The poem begins thus: ‘Quand le ciel bas et lourd pèse comme un couvercle.’ It was such a good word, she explained, that Baudelaire had used it expressly, in preference to any French word. And because he had used it, it was now an accepted part of the French language. Here’s a French definition: ‘cafard, chagrin, tristesse, mélancolie, nostalgie, idées noires, passage à vide, taedium vitae.’ And here’s an English definition: ‘lowness of spirits, moroseness, ill temper, spite.’ Thank you, Charles.

This afternoon the EESC’s Liaison Group with European civil society organisations and networks met for the last time under the joint chairmanship of Staffan Nilsson (EESC President) and Jean-Marc Roirant, President of the European Civic Forum and of the European Year of Citizens Alliance. The EESC is, according to the Treaties, composed of representatives of civil society organisations in the member states. The Liaison Group, as its name suggests, is a way of reaching out to, and co-opting, representatives of pan-European civil society organisations. Like other such innovatory bodies (the Consultative Commission on Industrial Change, for example), the Liaison Group is, from the EESC’s point of view, a sort of extension of its representative and advisory reach. Today’s meeting had two main agenda items which, although theoretically distinct, merged into a single broad debate. The first was a prospective exchange of views with the next President of the EESC, Henri Malosse. The second was a retrospective assessment of the Group’s activities over the past two years. Two conclusions, among many others, were first that the EESC has been playing well its self-defined role as the house of civil society and, second, that still more emphasis should be placed on communication back to the grass roots.