At the turn of the last century, one Charlie Plank, whose father had immigrated from Bristol (England), found himself trying to make a living out of farming near Red Deer, in Alberta, Canada. He married a young American seamstress, Mabel. They had five children (in the photograph); Charlie, Lester, Bill, Bob and Phyllis. When the second world war broke out Charlie, the oldest, was swift to volunteer. Lester couldn’t wait to do the same. On 4 July 1941 he got his chance, enrolling at Edmonton with the Royal Canadian Air Force. He had just turned 19. He went through a year’s training and on 26th September 1942 embarked for England. On 25th February 1943, he was assigned to 420 Squadron, No 6 Group, as a bomb aimer, his Wellington bomber flying out of  Middleton St George. On 17 April 1943, less than two months later, Lester’s plane was shot down over Belgium and he died and was buried in a small Ardennes village cemetery. Charlie survived the war, but through confusion over place names the Plank family were never able to track down where Lester had been buried. And then, through a set of fortuitous coincidences, in early 1993 I was able to reconnect the Plank family with their lost brother (Charlie and Mabel, sadly, passed away in the 1970s). On 17 April 1993 Charlie, Bill, Bob and Phyllis crossed the Atlantic and came to the Ardennes to attend a commemorative ceremony. Charlie was by then very old and ailing and much of the organisation was undertaken by the middle brother, Bill. And that was how I came to know a good man who has just, sadly, passed away. Among his many legacies was the creation of a trust fund, to the memory of his fallen brother, for the education of children in the village where Lester is buried. Bill, by inclination a globetrotter, came back to Belgium several times and struck up a friendship with a local man whose life had become tragically intertwined with Lester’s death, but that story will have to be for another post. I met Bill by chance, but it was a privilege and a pleasure to have known him.

We finished the fourth season of The Wire this evening. It left us feeling thoroughly depressed. There is a growing sense of claustrophobia. There is no way out for characters like Michael (left), who despite his fundamental innocence evolves almost inexorably into a hitman and killer. Whilst the dealing trade plays itself out perpetually on the streets and corners, a reformist mayor finds he has inherited a massive budgetary hole that obliges him to make hard choices between crime and education, choices (already) coloured also by his contemplation of his next move up the greasy pole of politics. The discovered corpses of a score of victims of the drug wars become a gruesome political football and a desperate education system starts to teach exam answers by rote as the only way of achieving the results that might guarantee basic funding. It all boils down to statistics and basic acts of human kindness are washed away by systems. All very Manichaean – and brilliant writing.

To Molenbeek this evening, to La Maison des Cultures et de la Cohension Sociale, for a series of performances closing the studies at the Conservatoire Royale of a number of singers, including the gifted daughter of a friend (in the picture as Sextus). On the programme were: an act from Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande; an act from Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito; and an act from Puccini’s Suor Angelica. ‘L’intrigue se déroule‘, said the programme notes about the Debussy, and indeed it did. The Mozart was full of swift emotions and actions; the Puccini scene was depressing in its portrayal of a convent as a prison, and all of the students were magnificent. Oh, and the Maison des Arts is well worth a visit as well. A most enjoyable evening.

When I first came to Brussels, in the mid-1980s, there were a lot of scruffy second-hand bookshops dotted about the city and most of them had either a backroom or a shelf with English books. Once in a while I would do a lunchtime trawl of these bookshops and, more often than not, I’d come across a modern first edition or an interesting title, and always at knock-down prices. One-by-one, those bookshops disappeared, and in those that remained there were decreasing numbers of finds to be had. A lot of the old book shop owners were old and simply retired. The buildings were demolished and rebuilt or refurbished. Groundfloor spaces could no longer be hired for peppercorn rents. I think also that a generation of anglophone and anglophile Belgians had passed away at around that time and the large numbers of English (and American) books in the shops were the results of house and attic clearances. Today, rushing out at lunchtime to get some medecine, I was very pleasantly surprised to come across a second-hand bookshop in the rue Froissart that seems to be flourishing and is reminiscent of all those bookshops that have disappeared. Moreover, it is bright and clean (not fusty and musty) and the shelves are well-arranged. There’s little chance of finding modern first at giveaway prices – the internet has seen to that, but the bookshop is well worth a visit (the English shelves are at the back on the right) and I am happy to provide it with some free publicity: Bouquinerie Thomas, 13 rue Froissart (between the rue Belliard and the Place Jourdan), open Monday to Friday, 11.00 till 18.30.

This evening we went to Bozar Theatre to see Matthew Lenton’s Interiors. Broadly inspired by a theatre piece by Belgian symbolist Maurice Maeterlink, Interiors is more particularly inspired by a story Lenton read about a Norwegian, living in a remote area, who insisted that an active social life was the only way to survive the long, dark winters. The audience gaze, Rear View Window-style, into the dining room of a house whose widower owner and sexually frustrated grand daughter are preparing for a traditional feast to celebrate the shortest day of the year (and hence theoretically the end of the worst of the winter). The guests arrive, all with guns to ward off possible polar bear attacks. We cannot hear their conversations, but we can see their interactions, at times comic, at times sad. A spirit, at first ethereal and then embodied in a young, anonymous, female ghost, tells the audience some of what is going on. We can guess the rest. The dynamics of sexual desire and jealousy, of the constant struggle for attention, of inward introspection, of the desire for intimacy and company are brilliantly and silently played out by the cast. There are cultural references, from Anton Chekhov (those guns!) to Hitchcock to John Irving (what the characters did next, as In the World According to Garp), but the piece works powerfully well at the simplest level; a realistic, poignant portrait of aching loneliness in a crowd.

The President and I went on from the Forum to the 22nd meeting of the EESC’s Liaison Group meeting with European civil society organisations and networks. The meeting, jointly chaired by Staffan Nilsson and Jean-Marc Roirant, had two important points on its agenda. The first was a presentation and discussion of an own-initiative opinion that the Committee is preparing on the implementation of the Lisbon Treaty’s provisions on ‘participatory democracy’. As the rapporteur, Luca Jahier (picture – President of the Various Interests Group, Italy) powerfully argued, the associative world needs to be wary that these provisions, intended to be prescriptive, do not simply mutate into a description of the status quo ante, for that was clearly never the intention. If the Union is to live up to the challenge of legitimacy its Heads of State or Government identified in the December 2001 Laeken Declaration, then all of its institutions must at the least engage in a genuine dialogue with civil society. The second agenda point was a presentation by rapporteur Andris Gobins (Various Interests Group, President of the European Movement in Latvia) of his draft opinion on the European Commission’s proposal for a 2014-2020 ‘Europe for Citizens’ programme. Once again, here was an example of the EESC deliberately reaching out to involve other aspects of organised civil society in its deliberations, thus enriching the debate and fostering participatory democracy.

This morning I accompanied EESC President Staffan Nilsson to the opening session of a Conference organised jointly by the Committee and the European Youth Forum on the theme of ‘Quality Jobs for Youth: Are We asking for Too Much?’ Despite the undoubted seriousness of the theme, there was a great atmosphere in the meeting room as the President was joined by Laszlo Andor, European Commission member for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion and a very impressive Peter Matjasic, President of the European Youth Forum. After the set-piece speeches the meeting, chaired by the Committee’s Krzysztof Pater, President of the EESC’s Labour Market Observatory, moved on to the nitty-gritty theme of pre-employment contracts and precarious jobs; were these a threat or an opportunity? Following on from my lunchtime discussion with Joost Van Iersel, here was another example of the way in which the Committee reaches out to the wider world of organised civil society, providing a platform and a context for dialogue (on this occasion, notably, between the youth evident in the picture and the European Commission).

Today was a tale of two dense  but highly productive meetings. In the morning the EESC’s Enlarged Presidency (composed of the President, two Vice-Presidents, three Group Presidents and the SG) met to perform its traditional, if informal, role of preparing for next Tuesday’s Bureau meeting but also to consider a number of more general political matters, such as preparations for the hosting of Croatian observers at the Committee’s meetings and the follow-up to the European Parliament’s draft discharge resolution. There was also an administrative item on the agenda. The SG presented the administration’s five-year management plan and a very constructive exchange of views ensued. In the afternoon, the Section Presidents joined the meeting (turning it into what is informally called the ‘Enlarged Enlarged Presidency’ – who can find me a picture to illustrate that?) in order to discuss the Committee’s input into the European Commission’s 2013 work plan and engage in a discussion about enhancing the Committee’s own working methods. The discussions were satisfyingly rich and constructive.

Today I had a lunchtime chat with EESC Committee member Joost Van Iersel (Employers Group/Netherlands), who is a former Dutch member of parliament and is currently the Chairman of the EESC’s Steering Committee on the Europe 2020 Strategy. The Strategy’s title may not mean a lot to the woman or man on the Clapham omnibus but it remains the European Union’s collective economic, social and environmental blueprint for a sustainable future. My lunchtime guest was eloquent on the various ways in which the EESC is forever seeking to co-opt various sorts of expertise and networks into its own advisory function. The Consultative Committee on Industrial Change, for example, brings in delegates nominated by the Groups (from industry, for example) in order further to enrich the Committee’s reflections on the constant challenge of industrial change. Similarly, the Liaison Group (of which more on Friday) brings in representatives of pan-European civil society organisations. In the same vein, the Europe 2020 Steering Committee not only exercises a horizontal role within the Committee (thus mirroring the over-arching nature of the Strategy itself) but has the specificity of involving the national economic and social councils in the twenty-two member states where they exist. The Steering Committee thus provides the Councils with a unique platform they would otherwise not possess but also provides the European Commission with a nuique opportunity to plug into a broad consultative network with national civil society organisations. The value of the Steering Committee and its network is explicitly recognised in the recently renegotiated Protocol on Cooperation between the European Commission and the EESC. Yes, all eyes are quite naturally currently on responses to the crisis but the Europe 2020 Strategy remains the EU’s longer-term game plan not for survival but for renewed, jobs-rich and sustainable growth.

As I never tire of pointing out, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions are engaged in a unique and pioneering arrangement whereby, through pooling of resources (in translation, logistics, IT) and careful planning, the two institutions achieve considerable economies of scale and, as last year’s mid-term review of the arrangement concluded, with considerable success. I am convinced that this success is due in no small part to a complex set of governance mechanisms at all levels, up to and including the Secretaries General and, through the Political Monitoring Group, our political masters. My counterpart at the Committee of the Regions, Gerhard Stahl, and I ‘live’ on the same corridor and occasionally drop in on one another for informal chats. In addition, we meet more formally at regular intervals and discuss agenda points prepared for us by our secretariats. We had such a meeting today and, as always, it was entirely positive and productive. This is not just because Gerhard and I have known each other for a very long time but also because we are both convinced that it is our common duty to make sure that the administrative cooperation between the two Committees works well – and it does.