I spent the whole day in interviews again and, again, I marvelled at the commitment of the three EESC members who were sitting on the panel with me and my colleagues (see 12 June post). With a bit of luck, I should be able to go to the 14 July meeting of the EESC Bureau with proposals for three directors’ positions, including the heavyweight two I am currently filling on an ‘acting’ basis – finance and human resources. Soon, too, the next step in the gradual implementation of the new establishment plan – the creation of two deputy Secretaries General – should take place. I will then find myself able to delegate on a serious basis and to start clearing my desk for more strategic work. This process will have taken almost a year, but I will consider it time well spent if we manage – as is currently the case – to do all of this without imparting a sense of upheaval. When it is completed the implementation of the new establishment plan will have been a quiet and gentle revolution.

En garde!

This afternoon the President and I gave out medals and certificates to EESC officials having served 40, 30 or 20 years in the Committee and/or in the EU institutions. These are almost family occasions, with a festive atmosphere. I have prepared notes on each of the recipients, full of affectionate detail,  and, as I said in my opening words, I truly enjoy these occasions because I found out about the wonderful hinterland of our officials. On this occasion I was not disappointed. There were amateur thespians and gastronomes and hunters and a colleague who has recently ridden his bicycle around Cuba, Argentina, India and Japan (including pedalling to the top of Mount Fuji to see the sun rise). But the colleague who caught my eye was a Danish lady who is a former Olympic fencer – and is still very good at it. Keep it up, Annie!

To cap off an enjoyably active weekend, I managed to finish Marcus Sedgwick’s The Book of Dead Days in the Eurostar on the way back. In fact, there’s a good probability that I’ll end up reading all of Sedgwick’s output, since I got all of his books for my son and promised to read each of them if he did. Dark, occult happenings are Sedgwick’s specialisation, but this one has the added interest (for this would-be writer) of taking place in an imaginary world. I used to think that it was easier to write about imaginary worlds, but the more I read of this sort of book (for some reason it reminds me of Jim Crace’s Arcadia) the more I realise just how difficult it is to pull off. When we set imaginary events and characters in a real world and a real period, we at least have a basic framework in which to place them.  But in an imaginary world you have to create everything and it has to be done in a convincing way.

The National Gallery is just across Trafalgar Square and so was an obligatory port of call this morning. Once again, though, we decided on a targeted approach; we would, we declared, visit just one picture per period. This was a tough call. We ended up with Uccello (St George), van Eyck (the Arnolfini portrait), Holbein (The Ambassadors), Michelangelo (The Entombment), Velazquez (The Rokeby Venus), Stubbs (Whistlejacket – obligatory after War Horse the previous evening), Turner (The Fighting Temeraire), Seurat (The Bathers) and Van Gogh (Sunflowers).  What a collection!

This morning I got up early and went for a run alongside the Thames. I went down Whitehall to Westminster, over the Thames, back up the other side to the Tate Modern, where I crossed back over on the Millenium Bridge and came back down the Embankment to Northumberland Avenue and Trafalgar Square. The weather was beautiful. The river was beautiful. And the city, not still quite awake, was beautiful.  Not for the first time, I found myself saying ‘this is what Brussels lacks; a river’.

Then, in the evening, we went to see what had, in effect brought us to London; Nick Stafford’s brilliant adaptation for the stage of Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse. The original production, at the National Theatre, seemed to have sold out before tickets even went on sale and it has taken until now for me to get hold of tickets for the West End version. We were not disappointed. It is the most extraordinary piece of theatre and artistry. Without giving too much away, the horses are played by life-size puppets, worked by no less than three puppeteers. But somehow the eye doesn’t see the puppeteers, though they are hard to miss. It is brilliantly done. The story is set around the devastation of the First World War. One statistic illustrates the basic plot line; over one million horses were taken to France from Britain during the war and only 62,000 were brought back. If you get a chance to see this, please go. It is worth a trip to London in itself.

Another Cleopatra

In the afternoon we went to the British Museum, another haunt of my childhood. There used to be a magic shop (run by Neville Maskeleyne’s descendants, I believe) on the other side of the road, and after I’d scared myself visiting the mummies in the museum, I’d cross over and spend my pocket money in the magic shop. Now the museum has been spruced up wonderfully. Of course, like all great museums it would be possible to spend days in there, but with limited time at our disposal we targeted our visit on three objects/displays: the Rosetta Stone; the Elgin Marbles; and the mummies (natch). The Rosetta Stone is disappointingly displayed in a glass cabinet in the middle of a very large room full of Egyptian and Assyrian objects. How much more eloquently it would speak to us of its enigmatic past if it had a darkened and subdued room to itself! Coincidentally, the Elgin Marbles were in today’s newspapers, since the wonderful new museum at the foot of the Acropolis built to house them is now complete and there is talk about ‘loans’. And in the middle of the mummies we bumped into Cleopatra. For a moment we thought it might be the Cleopatra; you know, the one with the big nose. But in fact our Cleopatra was the daughter of an important official at Thebes at the time of the Emperor Trajan (AD 98-117) who died some 150 years after the Cleopatra. You can read about her here. In any case, it gave me the chance to bore the children by reciting one of the two greatest lines (in my opinion) about beautiful women and their effects. It comes from Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra (which I studied for O level) and goes like this: ‘Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale/ Her infinite variety: other women cloy/ The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry/ Where most she satisfies.’ The other greatest line, by the way, is from Christopher Marlowe, in Doctor Faustus, describing a vision of Helen of Troy: ‘Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships, And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?’

Later in the afternoon, as we crossed into Trafalgar Square, we were treated to the interesting and amusing sight of hundreds of nude cyclists pedalling down the Haymarket from Piccadilly Circus past us and down Whitehall. I don’t think I need say anything more!

Today is the Queen’s official birthday, and all sorts of festivities are going on. As I write this, we have just had a surreal experience. Our hotel is just off Trafalgar Square, behind Whitehall. From our window we can see the Union Jacks flying. Our TV-starved son turned on the box to watch a military parade, the soldiers clad in their tall bearskins. I asked him to turn down the sound but… could still hear the sound. In fact, the music was carrying loud and clear over Whitehall and the rooftops from Horseguards, so we watched what we couldn’t see but listened to the real thing! Afterwards, we heard the 21-gun salute from the Park and then, being almost directly in line with the Mall and Buckingham Palace, watched the flypast. It began with a Lancaster bomber, flanked by a Spitfire and a Hurricane, and I immediately had a lump in my throat; a reaction I cannot describe in any rational way. But it does give me the chance to tell a story about a similar and equally irrational reaction. It was 1968 and, as an eleven year-old boy, I was on a nature field trip with my teacher and class. We were walking down a country lane when we saw a Heinkel He-111 flying low towards us, straight along the road. To a boy and girl, we leapt off the road and into the ditches, followed a few moments later by our teacher – so strong were the images and expectations of the Second World War still in us, a war we had never known and only lived through films and books. Of course, we later discovered that they were making a film, The Battle of Britain, but we hadn’t known at that moment. Did we think the plane had flown through a portkey?

Like portkeys in the Harry Potter stories, there are places in London that immediately transport me back to my childhood. Hamleys the toyshop, in Regent Street, central London, is one of them. Whilst my ladies went shopping in Oxford Street my son and I set off to Hamleys in search of a megatron that couldn’t be found in Brussels. When I was a young boy my parents took me and my older brother up to Oxford Street and Regent Street to see the Christmas illuminations. Piped music was played in the streets (to this day, the strings in the opening bars of Prokofiev’s Troika transport me back immediately to Oxford Circus, with us emerging, blinking with the crowds, out of the mouth of the London Underground) and, just like today, the press of the crowds pushed people off the pavements and into the roads. Hamleys is still in exactly the same place and is still exactly the same size. Nobody has re-done the façade nor added on floors nor sought to build out at the back. And it still has magicians and young sales people demonstrating card tricks and boomerangs and railway tracks whizzing around above the shoppers’ heads and toy cars you can drive and… I don’t know about my son, but I definitely had a lot of fun!