I got out early this morning to our favourite dog-walking spot, near Berthem, with Leuven visible in the far distance. I am a wildlife enthusiast and our favoured circuit always rewards: a red squirrel darting across a lane; a green woodpecker flashing through a copse; rabbits a-plenty; birds of prey and buzzards soaring above. But this morning we were richly rewarded with sightings of two early march hares and three roe deer. The roe deer is remarkable for several reasons. One is that after the spring mating season the female somehow keeps her fertilised egg (roe deer typically give birth to twins) in a state of suspended development until the following spring, with the fawns being born in May or June. The second is that the fawns are not only genetically programmed to stay stock still when their mother is away foraging but produce absolutely no detectable scent. A hunting hound could pass within a few metres of roe deer fawns and see and smell nothing. For this reason roe deer fawns, if discovered, should never be handled because if the handler imparts human scent to the fawns their mother, sensing this, might well abandon them. The three deer we saw this morning still had their bright white winter rump markings and made a sprightly get away along the crest of a hill.

To a farewell party for Zoltan Krasznai this lunchtime. In my little speech I explained that in four years of sterling service I had always followed Zoltan’s briefings to the letter and never regretted it, and I had never had to correct one of his summary records. Zoltan was also responsible for introducing me to the fascinations of bee-keeping and I shall miss his pots of home-produce honey close to the kettle in our kitchen. Having said my farewells to Zoltan, I went on to a second farewell party, a retirement one this time. Louisa Ruggieri (picture), the daughter of Italian immigrants who settled near Liège, left school at the age of fourteen and worked as a hairdresser, gradually building up her own practice. A bad fall and a broken wrist made it impossible for her to maintain her studio and her address book of personal clients inevitably dwindled. So in middle age Louisa had to find a new activity. She came through the institutions to the European Economic Committee where, most recently, she worked as an usher. Louisa always brought the sunshine with her as well as the mail, and I shall miss her cheery smile. On the other hand, who could not wish her and her husband (they synchronised their retirements) a long and  happy retirement together!

Today I hosted a farewell lunch for Zoltan Krasznai, a bright young Hungarian colleague who is heading off to fresh pastures in the European Commission and who has served me with great distinction for four years. Our Belgian trainee at the moment is a champion French boxer (la savate). To break the ice, I asked my other guests if they had shown similar sporting prowess. Here’s the list of my champions: bowling and archery; chess and athletics; gymnastics (including a national champion); squash and bilboquet. Yes, bilboquet (that would be Bernard, faithful readers would imagine, and you wouldn’t be wrong). I was deeply impressed by the degree of skill and application around the table. I used to have a theory about how those ambitious in sport later translated their ambitions into other arenas. If so, I not only presided over a lunch table of talented athletes but also of future achievers.

To the Brussels Press Club Europe this evening to listen to Douglas Alexander, the UK Shadow Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, deliver the annual John Fitzmaurice Lecture. John Fitzmaurice was a European Commission official, half-British, half-Danish, who was also a prolific author and a political activist. I was John’s trainee in 1985, and later came back to the Commission’s secretariat general as a colleague and a good friend. Because of that connection, I was honoured to be invited to give the same lecture a few years back. Of course, Alexander’s speech took place against the backdrop of the UK Prime Minister’s recent commitment to renegotiation and a referendum on the UK’s EU membership terms. The Labour Party has so far staunchly resisted the pressure to make a similar commitment and the audience was therefore understandably interested in the alternative case that Alexander had come to make – basically, muscular and substantive reform within the existing Treaties. Alexander was eloquent on the way war in Europe had moved from ‘memory to history’ and how the new narrative for European integration had to be more about enlightened self-interest in a globalised world where European economies would increasingly find it difficult to survive in any viable form outside the EU trade bloc. My professional ears pricked up when Alexander spoke about a compact between the UK government and civil society. Alexander, I recall, was an enthusiastic and interested visitor to the EESC in 2005, when he was Minister for Europe. He needed, I remember, no convincing about the importance to democracy of a healthy civil society.

I met a former Commission colleague today. He and I spent some time in the old Berlaymont building in the 1980s (long before it was refurbished) and a chance remark got us reminiscing nostalgically about the Berlaymont tea ladies (not like the ones in the picture). Doubtless there was a time when tea-ladies with their trolleys existed in most office buildings, but I’d like to think that the Berlaymont tea ladies were an institution in their own right. They would do their rounds twice a day, once in the morning, once in the afternoon. They imposed a discipline on us that has gone now. In those days people didn’t have electric kettles or coffee machines in their offices and there were no vending machines, so the arrival of the aproned tea ladies, announced by a little bell, was in effect a signal that tea-break could begin (and, conversely, when they went it was over). Colleagues queued up patiently, some with their favourite mugs or cups, and in addition to tea or coffee or fruit juices, could buy sandwiches and sweets and chocolate. Many of the tea ladies were cherished characters with witty repartees or storehouses of appreciated gossip or interesting in some other way. They were all characters. Of course, if you were really thirsty you could take the lift down and walk across the esplanade that used to exist to the Rotonde bar. However, as those still in the Berlaymont know, it’s quite a trek to get from the end of one arm to the central core of the building, let alone to go down and out. I forget when the tea ladies were phased out – perhaps it was in the late 1980s? In any case, at some stage the Commission built a press centre in the Berlaymont and that became the new target, for the press bar served ‘proper’ coffees. When the Commission moved out to the Bredyel building something similar happened. Although there was a bar upstairs it was a well-known fact that the best coffee was to be had in the press bar. Now I have drifted from tea ladies to coffee bars. If I don’t stop I’ll start to reminisce about the sixth floor bar that used to exist in the Committees’ own Jacques Delors building when it was still occupied by the European Parliament. For a long time it was the only parliamentary bar and by hanging about it for long enough you could be guaranteed to meet pretty much everybody, staff and MEPs alike.

It is once again almost time for the winner of the European Economic and Social Committee’s annual short video challenge competition to be announced. You can see the three shortlisted finalists at this link. They are all good in their different ways and I am certainly not going to jinx any one of them by expressing a personal preference. I must say however that I was touched by one of the anecdotes told in Marius Krivicius’s video, Better Together. An inhabitant of Vilnius, this young Lithuanian recounts a sad childhood memory of his family’s pet dog running across the frontier into Poland. At the time, they simply couldn’t follow, and they never saw the dog again. It is through such illustrations that we can understand both the benefits of the European integration process and the sad and at times tragic frustrations of what went before.

During the course of the evening I learned the sad news that Bruce Millan, a former Secretary of State for Scotland and European Commissioner for Regional Policy from 1989 to 1995, had passed away a few days before. A small, silver-haired, quiet, dignified, polite man, it might have been easy to underestimate Millan at first sight. In addition to his unflinching probity and straightalking habit, his twin secrets were sheer hard work and mastery of the detail. As a dossiers man he was an excellent complement to Jacques Delors’ visionary zeal. His own modesty would prevent him from claiming what others about him knew, which was that Europe’s new structural and cohesion policies owed a huge amount to his drive and sheer hard work and also to his inherent sense of fairness. Like all British Commissioners steeped in the Westminster tradition, Millan was viscerally respectful towards the European Parliament and parliamentary procedure (Strasbourg plenary sessions were the context in which I saw him the most). Where some saw parliamentary question time as a chore or a bore, Millan saw it as an important duty and would always try to give MEPs a proper answer – not in the sense of length or detail, but giving them the answer they sought, no matter how unpalatable, rather than the answer it might have been easier to give.

To the Albert Hall this evening (the Brussels-based Albert Hall, that is) for the annual press review, written, staged and performed by members of the Brussels-based press corp under the genial direction of the multi-talented Geoffe Meade, longstanding Europe editor of the Press Association. It was, I think, a vintage year. There was a great collection of ascerbic witticisms (‘If the left get in there’ll be nothing right and if the right get in there’ll be nothing left.’). Maximus Twitterus moaned about the I-Stone and Facerock. Europe adopted a motion ‘by equanimity’. One country yokel proclaimed that the British believe in the single market and his friend replied ‘yes, but we don’t do it’. And both concurred that the UK’s relationship would ‘probably end in tears – two tiers.’ There were timely references to ‘Trojan horse meat’ and, of course, Pope Benedict’s retirement (‘really giving up something for Lent’), ‘the first time a leader had given up his position to spend less time with his family’, which was rounded off with a little Verdi (‘Il papa e mobile’).  Dalian Lombardino gave this wonderful performance as ‘press room poet laureate’. And the troupe marched off at the end, singing, to the melody of a First World War soldiers’ song, ‘So long, Europe, we must leave you. Why we’re going isn’t clear.’ A wonderful night’s entertainment.

Pedalling back from work this Saturday evening I crossed the Square Ambiorix and stopped to admire this fine fellow – proof that more snow has fallen and tribute to the creative endeavours of the residents of the Ambiorix area. Being me, I had to look a little into the history of snowmen (there is a book) and so now I know that the earliest European documentation about snowmen dates from 1380 (in The Hague) and that they became popular in the middle ages. I had better stop there.

As a six year-old boy, I remember being very, very frightened by a television science fiction character. At school in those days, we had fantasised that a race of aliens had already landed on earth and that ‘they’ were among us. Walking back home with a schoolmate, John, we quite frequently convinced ourselves that we had caught a half-glimpse of ‘something’ that ‘could’ be ‘one of them’. It was great fun and only scary in a pleasant way. But one evening, watching Doctor Who, I saw a dalek for the first time and was truly afraid. I didn’t dive behind the sofa, though I was tempted, because I was enthralled and, frankly, I still am to this day. Only the cybermen and the silurians came close, but the dalek beat them both because it somehow represented a logical evolutionary result – disembodied intelligences, devoid of any positive emotions, contained in impregnable mechanical shells, equipped with murderous death rays and metallic voices barking ‘exterminate!’, with a default instinct of enslaving or destroying other life forms. The daleks became an ubiquitous cultural icon and a major generator of revenue for the BBC, but little of that went to the daleks’ creator, Ray Cusick, who passed away yesterday and is already, understandably, the subject of a number of admiring obituaries. When he’d created them he had been a simple, modest BBC employee, taking home a weekly salary (it’s impossible to imagine him being treated in the same way today). Later in life Cusick pooh-poohed the dalek link but, like Karel Capek’s robot, he gave a word to the English language and somehow visualised an emerging concept.