Last Saturday, with sick children languishing in the house and experiencing flu-ey symptoms myself, I decided to become all industrious in a sort-of non-laborious way, if you see what I mean. Against a wall in our garden stands a pear tree which must be at least forty years old. It is an excellent cropper. The problem is that every year some sort of parasitical Continue reading

When my parents recently passed away they left behind a large number of photograph albums and an even larger number of negatives. We three brothers split the archive between ourselves, with a view to scanning and sharing everything. Recently, I have started this work with some of the older negatives, and here’s a photograph I came across. I can remember those woollen trunks. They itched and scratched and, once wet, became uncomfortably heavy and started to stretch. Also, they took ages to dry and left you feeling chilly and damp long after you’d come out of the water. I don’t look unhappy though, do I?

People are falling like flies at the moment. N° 1 sprog has definitely had THE flu and has have many of her classmates. N° 2 may have had IT and I don’t know what I have got but I am not feeling too hot. Three of my team have got IT and I see plenty of empty offices as I stroll through the corridors. We were given a graphic illustration of how bad it has got when we sent out a message to all staff. Generally, we get quite a few ‘out of office’ messages. But today we got screenloads. All this leads me to wonder if this is the worst, or if there is worse to come. For the time being, we are coping…

This afternoon I gave a welcoming address on behalf of both Committees to an organisation called Eurolib. Founded in 1997, Eurolib brings together all the libraries of the European Union’s institutions and agencies. As I told our visitors, such an organisation makes obvious good sense, since it can only lead to economies of scale and the sharing of expertise but also it allows libraries (such as ours) to specialise. I told them about one of my favourite quotations in this context: your library is your portrait. It was coined by Holbrook Jackson. When we go to people’s houses, we frequently sneak a look at their bookshelves, thus getting an idea about their tastes and enthusiasms. In the same way, an institution’s library says a lot about it. Is it up to date? Is it well-ordered? Is it specialised? Are their gaps? Both consultative committees are currently hard at work in modernising and transforming their libraries into information centres and service providers better geared to the needs of our members. So I suppose you could say that we have taken down the old portraits and are currently putting up new ones…

Like London buses, bad news tends to bunch together. This afternoon I also learnt about the death of Werner Maihofer, who passed away on 6 October. When I arrived at the European University Institute in 1981, its founding President, Max Kohnstamm, was just leaving and his successor, Werner Maihofer, was just arriving. Both were great figures in different ways. An Olympic speed-skater in his youth, Maihofer became a leading FDP intellectual in the early 1970s and took over from Hans-Dietrich Genscher as German Minister of the Interior in 1974. These were the days of the Red Army Faction and, as a leading liberal thinker, Maihofer found himself in the ironic position of reluctantly imposing a series of restrictive measures on civil liberties. In 1978 he got caught up in a phone-tapping scandal and, taking it on the chin, resigned and returned to his university chair in Bielefeld. In 1981 he was appointed President of the EUI. I was a young researcher representative and got to work closely with him on the academic and financial councils. His English remained comically poor (but was always better than my non-existent German), but we managed nevertheless to communicate sufficiently well to push through a series of measures which, collectively, ensured that researchers maintained their rightful place in the overall scheme of things. I remember him as a thoroughly decent and humane individual who was not afraid of siding with the researchers against his professorial colleagues if he felt that that was the best thing to do.

In the year below me at Johns Hopkins there was an Englishman with an infectious laugh. Jonathan Cooper was good company and a really nice guy. He is also the first person I ever met who made and lost over a million pounds – and stayed exactly the same. He held down various jobs after Bologna but in the City of London’s heyday he set up a business selling healthy sandwiches to young City traders. It was a living, but the break came when a local authority put out a call for tenders to provide sandwich lunches to its schoolchildren. Jonathan put in a bid and, much to his surprise, won the contract. One contract led to another and in a very short space of time he went from running a sandwich bar to industrial production and from earning a living to becoming a millionaire. Jonathan’s Dad ran a garage and salesroom and Jonathan had always been a sleeping partner in the business. Then his Dad fell ill and the business first foundered and then collapsed. Jonathan’s fortune disappeared as fast as it had come but Jonathan himself remained the same lovely guy with that infectious laugh. It has been years since I have seen him. We drifted out of touch. But I know we would have carried on just where we left things – laughing late into the night. But we won’t be able to do that any more. Today I received the news from Bologna that Jonathan is dead, felled by a lightning-fast cancer, leaving a wife and three kids behind and the fondest memories of that infectious laugh and endearing smile. Sometimes clichés cannot be avoided. The world is much the poorer for his departure.

My counterpart at the Committee of the Regions, Gerhard Stahl, is away on mission at the moment so I got to chair the regular meeting of our two Committees’ EMAS (Eco-Management and Audit Scheme) steering committee alone. Hot on the heels of our proud achievement in winning the Ecodynamic Enterprise label (see 29 September post), we are determined to go still further in reducing our energy requirements and rendering our Committees as ‘green’ as possible. I really enjoy these meetings, since whatever we do is, without a doubt, for the better.

As if to seal my bardic status (don’t take this seriously), I have had another poem published in an anthology. Coo! Soon I’ll be able to retire and live off of the proceeds. More seriously, yesterday evening I had to go back to the recording studios to record the title of my West Malling Poem, What Hope Saw. It’s just three words but, I promise you, once you start thinking about stress and intonation there seem to be endless possibilities. My admiration for those who read poetry and prose seriously has gone up immensely. In my ignorance, I thought I could just read through the poem and push off back home but, no, the stanzas and the title were recorded separately and several times over and this simple fact meant that I had to think carefully about the follow-ons (for example)…

Otto and Franz Josef

We had very near and dear friends to lunch yesterday. He has Russian roots. She is half-American, half-Belgian.  And both their families are far-flung and cosmopolitan. At one stage the conversation got onto historical connections. I told them about an article I had just read, co-authored by a young Hungarian working in my secretariat, Zoltan Krasznai. (‘The Christ of Limpias and the Passion of Hungary’, William A. Christian Jr. and Zoltan Krasznai, History and Anthropology, Vol. 20, N° 3, September 2009, pp. 219-242.) The article recounts the strange way in which the residence of the exiled Hungarian royal family in the Basque village of Lekeitio in the early 1920s sharpened the interest of Hungarian monarchists in the apparitions of the Christ of Limpias in nearby Cantabria. The monarchists interpreted the alleged movements of the Christ as sympathetic suffering for the dismemberment of the Hungarian nation by the Allied powers in the Treaty of Trianon; the Passion and Crucifixion of Hungary becoming the dominant nationalist metaphor in the interwar years (you can still find objets in Budapest bric-a-brac shops). Zita Bourbon-Palma, the Italian widow of Charles (crowned King of Hungary in 1916, died of pneumonia on Madeira, 1922) installed herself with her six children in a draughty villa in Lekeitio. One of those children was Otto von Hapsburg or, to give him his full name, Archduke Franz Joseph Otto Robert Maria Anton Karl Max Heinrich Sixtus Xavier Felix Renatus Ludwig Gaetan Pius Ignatius of Austria. I knew this Otto, this living link (and still living) with Charlemagne who, from 1979 to 1999, served as a Member of the European Parliament. By then he was a gentleman supporter of the European ideal and it was fascinating to read about this particular aspect of his childhood and to realise just how much history he had lived. The lunchtime topic now became monarchy/aristocrats who had known one life, lost everything and had to adapt to another. Immediately, the name of Vladimir Nabokov came up (see previous posts about Speak, Memory). Here, there was a Belgian connection, both with regard to his parents’ exile at one stage and to his brother Kirill Vladimirovich Nabokov, who studied at Leuven and later managed a travel agency in Brussels (he was also a poet and journalist). Oh, said our Belgian-American friend, I knew him very well. He and his wife were, it transpired, friends of her parents. She had even stayed at his flat as a kid. Beat that! Postscript (20 October): within minutes of me posting this entry a colleague wrote to inform me that she had commuted for three years with one of Kirill’s daughters and that they had become good friends…

I recorded ‘What Hope Saw’ in a studio this morning for, yes, the poem and Nigel Clarke’s composition are going to be issued as a CD! Watch this space. As to the reading, this was a very interesting experience for me. The way I parsed the poem to read it was very different from the way I had written it. Also, because there were several takes and the stanzas were recorded separately, I had to think carefully about intonation and about whether, for example, I wished to finish a stanza on an upbeat or a downbeat. It was one of those miniature revelations that make you realise that there is much more to it than you would realise when, for example, you listen to Poetry Please on Radio 4…