Last Monday I wrote about how I had launched a small revolution, in the form of less paper in the EESC’s management board meetings. One week on, encouragingly, the revolution has quietly grown, as the photograph shows, with a few more colleagues bringing along their PCs and hence avoiding the previous usual piles of paper. This is excellent news. If the top management can do it, all parts of the house should be able to do it. That is good news for the environment and also good news for us: less ink and paper used, less waste paper to be recycled and also, incidentally, the advantage of electronically accessible archiving of all meeting documents.

This evening I finished Christopher Hitchens’s autobiography, Hitch-22. Hitchens was admirably courageous, both physically and intellectually (though some would say he was ideologically foolhardy), a great wit, a brilliant debater and a first-rate journalist. But the man who comes across in the first half of this book is not somebody I think I could have liked. Several times Hitchens admits self-deprecatingly that he ‘plays both sides’ – sexually, socially and politically. He looks back and scoffs at the young socialist firebrand who would picket Cowley one day and be supping at All Souls the next (and bedding future Conservative ministers the day after that), but he also wants us to admire him for the unorthodox combination. In fact, this Hitchens was an assiduous networker, name-dropper and a snob (at times inverted). What redeems the book and the man, for me, is his late discovery that he is a Jew. His mother had hidden her origins. Her husband never knew and her sons only discovered long after she had died. Hitchens traces his family back to German Prussia and the borderlands with the old Poland. The best chapter in the book is his unflinching exploration of that great well of sorrow, the holocaust and its aftermath and the diaspora it unleashed – of which he was but one small, brilliant, fragment.

A long walk in bracingly blustery conditions this morning took us out on a new route to the village of Neerijs, near Leuven, in Flemish Brabant. The village is a sort of composite history of Belgium: a stately home and a young aristocracy; a well-endowed farm on the estate; a church repeatedly embellished and reconstructed; first world war and second world war memorials and, inevitably, three Commonwealth war graves in the village cemetery. Now the stately home has been converted into luxury apartments. The aristocracy, the De Bethune, is apparently still extant, though it is unclear if the family has retained any links with the village. The carriage house has been converted into a location for events. The listed farmhouse is still there but the decoratively cobbled lanes around it have been neglected. And around all of this there is a nature reserve, the Doode Bemde. Being close to flourishing Leuven, the village is certainly not poor. But the architectural ensemble hints at a more cohesively ambitious past.

To Bozar again for a second wonderful musical experience in the space of four days. The highlight of the evening was seventeen year-old Polish-Canadian Jan Lisiecki’s sublime rendering of Robert Schumann’s piano concerto (with an even more sublime rendering of a morsel of Chopin as an encore). He was accompanied by the accomplished Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia under the good-humoured baton of Antonio Pappano. If I were a young piano prodigy I think I would love to have Pappano as my conductor. He is so smilingly, encouragingly, winningly expressive. The starter on the bill of fare was an extract from Verdi’s Luisa Miller, and the second half was an extraordinary rendering of Schumann’s second symphony. For good measure, there were three encores, including Elgar’s Nimrod and two extracts from Rossini’s William Tell (including the famous overture), before the ever-cheerful Pappano gestured that he was off to bed. It was a humbling experience to watch a man-child, Liesiecki’s luxurious shocks of blonde hair emphasising his youth, so in command of his material, so assured in his performance and already so distinctive in his technique.

Our Italian hidey-hole has an empty niche in an external wall. As in Belgium, traditionally niches are for a Madonna or a saint, and so I have been Madonna hunting. The niche has awkward dimensions. The statue cannot be more than twenty-five centimetres tall. The two ladies in the illustration are my best finds to date. Both are between fifty and a hundred years old. The one on the left comes from Wallonia, the one on the right from Flanders and, more particularly, is modelled on the sixteenth century statue in the old shrine at Scherpenheuvel. The owner of the antiques shop where I found it gave me some touching information. In the past I had occasionally seen Madonnas at the Place de Jeu de Balle and at other such markets with hands or even the baby Jesus snapped off. The reason, the antiquaire explained, is that until the mid-twentieth century an illness or death in the family, because it meant that for some reason prayers had not been answered, would be marked by snapping off a hand or an arm from the statue. If you ever come across a Madonna where the baby Jesus has been broken off, this is not an act of vandalism or clumsiness. It means, sadly, that a child died in the household.

When you hang around in academe for a long time, you start to get fed up with exams and everything that goes with them: the stress; the intense revision; the big hall with separate desks and chairs; the empty desk top and the blank sheet of paper for notes; the instructions and the distribution of the exam; the intense silence, punctuated by miserable sighs, the prowling and pacing of the invigilators… When I did the theoretical exam for my driving licence and thus renewed my acquaintanceship with the experience I remember thinking ‘Thank goodness I won’t have to go through that again.’ Except that this morning I did. Together with about sixty Belgians, including my better half, I sat my exam to qualify for the Brevet de Conduite Général which, if we pass it, will enable us to captain quite large boats on inland and coastal waters. It was an experience leavened by typical Belgian wit. When a kindly invigilator informed us that if we needed any help during the exam we should just put up our hand, most of the people in the room immediately put up their hand. Soon after the exam started, a young chap took a call on his mobile phone. A patient invigilator scolded him and he apologetically turned off his phone, whereupon a voice sounded out ‘And what was the answer?’ Cue general mirth again. The sociology of the room was interesting. About 90% of the people were older middle-aged men. The remaining ten per cent was equally divided between women and younger men. There was only one young woman. We debated what this might mean afterwards. I fervently hope I passed. It was extremely difficult to find the time to revise. Basically, you have to memorise a vast amount of material, much of it related to the waterways and locks of Belgium and its rivers and canals, and thus of limited use to somebody hoping to navigate on an Italian lake. Still, for a little while yet I will be able to tell you what lights you would see at night at sea if two trawlers were dragging nets between them and the nets had got stuck, or what the various combinations of the extraordinarily complicated lock gate lights at Zemst mean or whether a green light above a white one represents a trawler not making headway or, rather, a cable-drawn ferry… The whole thing has been a quintessentially Belgian experience, with an unexpectedly beautiful day navigating on the Meuse, the helter-skelter theory lessons out at Ottignies, the good-natured exam itself and, above all, the uncomplaining acceptance that, notwithstanding the small size of the country, you just have to accept that the rules, signals and even the basic vocabulary will be different, depending on whether you are navigating on the high seas, or the coastal waters and ports, or the Gent-Terneuzen canal, or the lower maritime Scheldt, or the Brussels ship canal, or the Meuse.

This evening’s sublime concert at Bozar was notable for several reasons. On the programme were two pieces of Stravinsky (concerto for strings in D and octet for wind instruments), interspersed with two Beethoven piano concertos (the first and the third). The young (in age and spirit) Mahler Chamber Orchestra stood up for the Stravinsky concerto. There was no conductor and the first violinist, Steven Copes, gave the beat. Freed from their seats, the musicians seemed somehow to be also liberated in their expression, swaying and at times almost dancing to the music. It was a good start to an excellent evening. The pianist, Norwegian maestro Leif Ove Andsnes, not only gave the concertos the required virtuoso treatment but in between acted as the conductor, giving the beat from his piano stool. It was an exceptional arrangement that worked really well, providing a visual organic link between the soloist and the orchestra. Andsnes has built a reputation for his romantic interpretations of Beethoven’s piano concertos and that romanticism was brilliantly to the fore this evening.

Once every two years the staff of the European Economic and Social Committee vote to appoint their representatives on the staff committee. The committee’s status and role is set out in the EU’s staff regulations. The committee plays an important role, in partnership with the administration, in ensuring that the staff work in the best possible conditions. Those elections took place today and early this morning I went off to the ballot station to cast my vote. The legitimacy and representativeness of the staff committee is enhanced by high turnout and I am happy to report that turnout is always in the seventies in the Committee. I very much look forward to working closely and constructively with the new Staff Committee, once elected.

I led a small revolution today. I went to a meeting of the management board without taking any paper with me. Instead, thanks to the preparatory work of my ever-excellent Bernard, I was able to access all of the necessary documentation from my lap top. Though there was no obligation on anybody else to follow suit I was happy to note that several colleagues joined me in eschewing (most) paper for the extent of the meeting. I don’t think we will ever entirely rid ourselves of paper (I don’t see how, for example, we could have studied the draft 2014 budget except through the detailed A3 spreadsheet we received from the director of finance) but I think we can, with just a little effort, get by with using much less paper, and that was the point of today’s initiative. I admit that it is not easy. My generation of bureaucrats was brought up to distribute sets of paper almost like a spoor. But given the rate of technological progress (especially ubiquitous wifi and broadband and steadily-cheaper tablet prices) it is high time we reconsidered our working habits and practices.

Woody Allen’s Sleeper was next on our list of post-American tour films this evening. Why Sleeper? Because it was filmed in and around Denver, the city’s architecture (particularly Charles Deaton’s house) being considered futuristic at the time. (We visited Denver and saw the house, up on Genesee Mountain, on our way back from the Rockies.) The New York Jewish one-liners mostly still work and the visual gags (the orgasmatron and the orgasmic orb among them) still work uproariously. The film’s basic conceit is to examine how the world might look different if somebody were cryogenically frozen and then reawoken some 200 years later. Here, leaving aside the Woody Allen-ness of Woody (who basically always plays himself), the film, made in 1973 is perceptive, particularly on the trend in Western societies’ towards removing the private and the intimate from human relations. In Woody’s dystopia, as in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, relations become drug-enhanced and mechanistic. The jokes wear thin in the last third of the film, where an authoritarian society seeks to clone its assassinated leader from the only surviving part of his body – his nose. But we enjoyed watching this again. And Deaton’s house still looks as modernistic today as it did when it was built, incredibly, in 1963.