In what was something of a Maltese day for the Committee, the EESC’s plenary session later this afternoon welcomed John Dalli, European Commissioner responsible for health and consumer policy. His visit came hard on the heels of the publication of the Commission’s European Consumer Agenda. In his welcoming remarks President Staffan Nilsson declared that ‘EU citizens have a crucial role to play as consumers in achieving the Europe 2020 goals of smart, inclusive and sustainable growth. Empowering consumers helps improve the quality of products and services, and enables the market economy to operate more effectively.’ Increasingly, he argued, ‘consumers are perceived as the driving force for sustainable growth and recovery from the economic crisis.’ The Commissioner’s speech and the ensuing lively exchange with members confirmed this vision.

Under the Lisbon Treaty’s provisions on the democratic conditions of the European Union, Article 11(2) imposes an obligation on all EU institutions to enter into a structured dialogue with organised civil society. There are seven such ‘Institutions’ (with a capital I), and the European Court of Auditors is one of them. In recognition of this, today Dr Louis Galea, a (Maltese) member of the Court, came before the European Economic and Social Committee’s plenary session to talk on the theme of common objectives – the democratic legitimacy and effectiveness of the EU. The Committee, he declared, ‘plays a distinct role of its own in consolidating the democratic legitimacy and effectiveness of the EU.’ The Court, he further argued, had a complementary role to play in consolidating legitimacy, particularly where public funds were at stake. Like any other such Court or Audit Office, it had ‘the duty to promote the principles of transparency, accountability and public audit, as a necessary basis for democracy.’ While the EU and its institutions had greatly improved, there was still room for further progress, particularly given fresh challenges, such as the initiatives designed to deal with the economic and financial crisis and the Commission’s proposals for administrative and budgetary reforms.

It is plenary week again and, once more, the European Economic and Social Committee’s efficient machine has clicked into action: management board meeting early yesterday morning, followed by the ‘pre-session’ meeting and then, in the evening, a meeting of the Enlarged Presidency (the President, Vice-Presidents, Group Presidents and the Secretary General). This afternoon, it was the turn of the 39-member Bureau to meet. As usual, the meeting was primarily about preparations for the May plenary session and future work, but there were also some ‘political’ discussions, in particular on budgetary matters and about facing up to the challenge of the tight deadlines the European Parliament has (entirely understandably) imposed where it asks, using its new Lisbon Treaty prerogative, for the Committee’s opinion on a legislative proposal. In general, the Committee always meets this (three-month) deadline, so the discussion was more about how the Committee can improve its working methods still further. Thanks also to President Staffan Nilsson’s chairmanship, the meeting went well. A hidden economy of well-prepared and well-chaired meetings is lower interpretation costs. The Bureau has quite deliberately done away with the possibility of running beyond six-thirty and hence using a second ‘slot’ of interpreters. By so doing it has achieved considerable economies.

N° 1 sprog has, commendably, been studying moral philosophy at school. Recently there have been some dinner table discussions of the -if-the-justification-for-eating-animals-is-that-they-are-not-considered-sentient-then-why-can’t-we-eat-non-sentient-human-beings-since-we-are-also-animals? variety, with a strong dose of utilitarianism sprinkled over everything. ‘You should watch Soylent Green,’ I said. So, thanks to Amazon, I managed to dig out a second-hand DVD of a film I remembered from when it first came out in 1973 (directed by Richard Fleischman and based on Harry Harrison’s 1966 novel, Make Room! Make Room!). Does it stand the test of time? Curiously, yes. The apocalyptic future world portrayed in the film is misogynistic, Malthusian, Hobbesian but is a still-functioning dystopia in which corrupt political and economic classes merge seamlessly. The world is overheating (there is what must be one of the earlier references to climate change) and the human population has sky-rocketed. The privileged few live in air-conditioned flats with compliant hostesses (‘furniture’) and tapped water. The rest bake and starve and, when they can’t lay their hands on the latest wonder foodstuff, soylent green (supposedly made from plankton), and riot, they are shovelled away by bulldozers. The state offers voluntary euthanasia, preceded by twenty minutes of drugged ecstasy, for those who can’t stand it anymore. Enter chiselled man-mountain Charlton Heston as the lone detective with a complicit establishment against him, out to discover the awful truth that soylent green is made of… In his last film performance Edward G. Robinson plays Heston’s ageing and learned friend, Sol Roth. Sol opts for euthanasia and the scene famously sports real Heston tears, for Robinson had told his friend Heston, but only Heston, that he was mortally ill with cancer. Robinson died twelve days after filming was completed.

Of course we watched and enjoyed it – Chelsea’s ‘dramatic’ 4-3 penalty win over Bayern Munich at the Allianz Arena, that is. Who could not feel for the indomitable Ashley Cole, who missed out on this prize with Arsenal in 2006 and 2008 with Chelsea? Or Drogba, who scored the crucial normal time goal, gave away a penalty and scored the final winning penalty goal? Now all the punditry is about whether Chelsea’s owner, Russian rich man Roman Abramovich, will do the right thing and confirm Roberto di Matteo as the team’s full time coach. I wonder. Di Matteo himself is gnomic in his pronouncements. I suspect that in part this is because he knows inwardly that the FA Cup and Champions’ League wins were one-offs inspired by a number of factors while the new coach will have longer-term tasks before him. Di Matteo was able to inspire through the personal loyalty of players, several of whom are getting long in the tooth (Drogba, Lampard, Terry), and developed simple but highly effective game plans (beating Barcelona being the most obvious example). Whoever the new coach is, he will surely have to rebuild, and creating and rebuilding are different challenges to reviving and inspiring. But whatever happens to Di Matteo, nobody can take today’s brilliant achievement away from him.

Another, more recent, film this evening; The Dancer Upstairs. John Malkovitch’s 2002 directorial debut, and based on Nicholas Shakespeare’s novel of the same name, the film is effectively a vehicle for a Javier Bardem every bit as much in control as he is in No Country For Old Men, but with the character he plays – a soft-spoken, idealistic lawyer turned detective – being diametrically opposed to the psychopathic Anton Chigurh he would portray a few years later in No Country. The action is set in a Latin American amalgam of a country, with a corrupt but basically democratic regime struggling against a populistic Maoist guerilla movement (vaguely modelled on Peru’s Shining Path). Bardem’s Detective Agustín Rejas is a good man in a bad world with a wife and a daughter and a love interest who lead him into moral and sentimental dilemmas. He gets his man, but loses his love. The regime, meanwhile, has got the figurehead but can never decapitate a movement that is everywhere. Chilling stuff…

This evening we watched Liliana Cavani’s controversial 1974 film, The Night Porter. At the time, it courted controversy for several reasons. It dealt explicitly with sado-masochism, but within the still painful context of Nazi concentration camps, and it portrayed a group of former Nazi officers plotting the murders of any surviving witnesses to their atrocities so that they could go on planning for a new fascist resurgence. Nowadays, though Cavana’s courage must be admired (I don’t believe the critics who argued that she had deliberately and irresponsibly courted controversy), the themes the film addressed are no longer taboo and so the film can be judged a little more calmly. It is well directed and Dirk Bogarde (as the Nazi sadist) and Charlotte Rampling (as the masochistic former concentration camp inmate) turn in powerful and entirely believable performances. But, seeing it again, I think the film runs out of steam as the plot runs out of credibility. As she is a surviving witness, Bogarde’s Nazi cronies want Rampling dead. But Bogarde and Rampling have rekindled their weird relationship. So they hole up in a flat and starve before deciding to walk out to their deaths. I do not say that the audience are thinking ‘and about time too!’, but once the couple have reconsommated their relationship the film runs out of things to say. And if the intention is to portray growing madness in a sealed room, then the film comes a poor second to Polanski’s Repulsion – if that is what it sought to echo.

Today I went to the Bozar for an exhibition entitled ‘Brussels 2040; three visions for a metropolis.’ Three teams of architects had been invited to brainstorm and their competing visions were on show. They contrasted interestingly. One team was for a compact, densified, greener Brussels, ‘re-taken’ by its citizens. One was for a ‘horizontal metropolis’, a ‘knot’ of networks at the heart of a connurban sprawl stretching from Lille to Rotterdam to Cologne. And one was for ‘double Brussels’, by which they meant a small metropolis but a global one, at the barycentre of the Euro-delta and subject simultaneously to centripetal and centrifugal forces. From the Bozar we went to visit the nearby Coudenberg palace remains. This is a wonderful experience. Once, where the Place Royale now stands, there was a huge palace complex, latterly belonging to Charles V. After a disastrous fire destroyed the palace in 1731 the hilltop was levelled upwards and hence the remains of much of the ancient palace complex, including a whole street and the cellars of the chapel and the banqueting house, were preserved for centuries until excavated and put on show. If you like secret passages and the whole concept of secret Brussels, you’ll love this place. It is in any case well worth a visit.

To Maastricht this morning, to the European Institute of Public Administration, for a business meeting. Once the meeting was over we had to wait a few minutes for our minibus back and so we nipped into the ancient church opposite, the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwebasiliek (Basilica of Our Lady), for a quick visit. An organist was practising on the fine organ (picture). Maybe it was because we were close to lunchtime, but I found myself transported back almost half a century to St Joseph’s church, Harrow Weald, at about a quarter-past midday, after sung Sunday mass. Though we boys were by now ravenously hungry (though not because we had to fast – we were considered too young for that) and the Sunday roast awaited us at home, my mother would always keep us waiting, talking to friends and neighbours. The church had a reasonable organist, Mrs Bowers, an older, long-skirted lady, and at times quite a good choir. Whenever I realised that we were not going to make a quick getaway I always slunk back into the church because I had discovered that when everybody was leaving Mrs Bowers started to let her hair down and she always, always finished with some deep base notes – the equivalent of power chords on an electric guitar – that made the furniture and my stomach rumble and buzz most enjoyably. In her own sweet way, that little old lady rocked!

After the writers’ workshop this evening I told my tale about Joyce’s Martello tower and about bumping into Seamus Heaney. Fellow scribe Cleve Moffet bested me with the following tale. As a twenty-something young American he went to Perugia to study Italian. His draft papers caught up with him and he had to go to an American military station at Trieste for processing. After the tests and the questioning (he was a conscientious objector), he found himself at a loose end in the city. So he looked up the name ‘Joyce’ in the local telephone directory, and there was the name, Stanislaus Joyce, James Joyce’s brother. With nothing better to do he went off to the address and rang the doorbell and Stanislaus opened the door. He did not say anything memorable, but his work as his brother’s keeper and guardian of the Joycean flame was by then well done and he would die a few years later, having published several works that documented the earlier years of his brother’s life. Of James’s time in Trieste,, Stanislaus wrote; “It seems to me little short of a miracle that anyone should have striven to cultivate poetry or cared to get in touch with the current of European thought while living in a household such as ours, typical as it was of the squalor of a drunken generation. Some inner purpose transfigured him.”