Today, the dog took us for a walk along a stretch of the Via dei Monti Lariani, a system of footpaths and muletracks running halfway up the mountains alongside the Lago di Como. The prizewinner for spectacular views is the Alta Via, where the track is never really below 2000 metres. The Via dei Monti, on the other hand, runs along around 1000 to 1500 metres (in the picture, 1200), sports some pretty spectacular views itself and is, when it comes to old pathways, the Real McCoy. For the Via dei Monti was, for a long time, the ancient equivalent of a Route Nationale. You wouldn’t want to be down by the lakeside, where there were bogs and marshes and rivers to be crossed. Up here, the rivers are all still rivulets, even when flush with snowmelt, and the path is low enough to avoid all but the worst of the snow. To echo Toad of Toad Hall, it was the only way to travel.

There are several sailing schools dotted about the Lago di Como and yesterday and today their pupils got an excellent illustration of the fickleness of this beautiful lake’s winds. When we learned a few years ago, in the summer, we sailed with the morning Tivano, a north-easterly wind, blowing from the Valtellina, and always turned back to port in the early afternoon as the southerly wind, the Breva, got going (considered too violently moody for learners). Yesterday, as I jogged past one of the schools, the yachts and dinghies were rigged and their pupils were ready and waiting to head out into the lake for a morning’s fun with the Tivano. But at nine-fifteen another, much stronger, northerly wind, the Ventone, suddenly blew up. This blows from the Val Chiavenna and is lusty and gusty. The pupils waited to see if it would blow itself out, but it didn’t, and so down came all the sails again. Three or four dinghies ventured out and promptly capsized. By eleven the lake was completely empty. Indeed, the Ventone kept going until about one o’clock this morning and the lake was like the North Sea, with big waves crashing against the coast (picture). This morning, on the other hand, the lake was as calm as a mill pond and there was so little wind that the classes could only get out on the lake towards midday, when the Breva started up. Perhaps experienced sailors know what’s going on but for the rest of us the fickleness of the winds is one of life’s lessons…

It is embarrassing to have to admit to discovering a new writer over thirty years late, but I have just read T. Coraghessan Boyle’s Descent of Man, and I am hooked. To quote the blurb: ‘In seventeen slices of life that defy the expected and launch us into the absurd, Boyle offers his unique view of the world. A primate-center researcher becomes romantically involved with a chimp; a Norse poet overcomes bard-block; collectors compete to snare the ancient Aztec beer can, Quetzalcoatal Lite; and Lassie abandons Timmy for a randy coyote.’ Bard-block! Wonderful! There is poetry – ‘light dropped like a stone in a pool of oil’ – but mostly there is black humour, extraordinary fantasy and mordant social satire. In ‘Green Hell’, for example, ‘The pilot breaks the news: we’ve come down in the heart of the Amazon basin, hundreds perhaps thousands of miles from the nearest toilet.’ The advantage of coming to things late is that one can admire their prescience: the reductio ad absurdum of eating contests in ‘The Champ’ , for example, has since come all too close to the truth.

I have been re-reading Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower. I previously blogged about it here. The Pilgrims’ story is, I realise, a fascinating collection of counter-factuals and hypothetical conditionals. What if the Speedwell had not been over-masted (deliberately or otherwise)? What if the Leideners and the strangers had not been obliged to share the Mayflower’s cramped spaces? Would the Mayflower Compact have been signed otherwise? And if the Speedwell had not sprung leaks would the Pilgrims have ended up at the mouth of the Hudson, as they had initially intended, rather than at Plymouth? Philbrick is good on how the Pilgrims soon compromised their morals in the face of a fierce New England winter, stealing native grain and desecrating native graves in their search for sustenance. And he paints an evocative picture of the ghostland that the East coast had become, as bubonic plague wiped out the civilisations that produced such wonders as the cloak in my illustration, now on display in the Ashmolean Museum. I blogged about it here.

To Habay-la-Neuve, near the Luxembourg frontier, this morning for the funeral mass of Simon-Pierre Nothomb who, in a long and rich international career, served as Secretary General of the European Economic and Social Committee from 1992 until he retired in 1998. Simon-Pierre was the scion of a notable political and cultural dynasty (which has produced several ministers, a Prime Minister, several novelists and a poet) and Habay-la-Neuve was, and still is, the family seat. During the war Simon-Pierre sang in the self-same church as a choirboy. From the many tributes I learned that he was a man of passions – Korea, Palestine (he served as an observer), Louvain (did he, I wonder, get the idea for ‘Louvain-la-Neuve’ from ‘Habay-la-Neuve’?), Europe, la francophonie, European university networks, Coimbra; his family; that he often forgot birthdays but just as often gave unexpected presents; that he liked to surprise and flourished on creative conflict. But for me the most impressive temoignage came from a tall, erect, dapper, silver-haired, patrician gentleman. I didn’t catch his name but he and Simon-Pierre had been friends for sixty years and had served together as eighteen year-old volunteers in the Korean war. He described scrabbling about in the mud of the trenches in the rainy season, the stink of rotting corpses on a hill that had repeatedly changed hands between the Americans and the Chinese, and the proximity of the Chinese lines. And he recounted how the two of them had made their way out to a listening post in No Man’s Land to rescue an injured comrade. ‘To be afraid together creates enduring bonds,’ said the man. ‘Simon-Pierre never abandoned his friends.’ The very next speaker was the man they had risked their lives to rescue. The church was packed with relatives and friends and the following quotation, from Korean poet Ji Yong Jeong, was on the funeral card: ‘Je suis revenu au village natal./Seul le ciel de ma nostalgie est bleu.’

We were invited by good friends this evening to a soirée musicale, organised by English composer Nigel Clarke and performed by the ‘Quatuor Ambiorix’, four gifted young musicians (two Poles, a Romanian and a Belgian) studying at the Conservatoire Royale. Pieces by Schubert, Mozart, Pachelbel and Beethoven were all on the programme but the ‘meat in the sandwich’, as Clarke put it, was undoubtedly Dmitri Shostakovitch’s String Quartet N° 3. In his introduction Clarke explained to us how the once-denounced and rehabilitated Shostakovitch had written the piece just as he was about to be persecuted again. The piece was played once, in 1946, and then withdrawn. Unusually, and perhaps as a way of making the music more accessible to his critics, Shostakovitch provided titles for the piece’s five movements and, though they cannot do the extraordinary music full justice, nevertheless speak for themselves: 1. Calm Unawareness of the Future Cataclysm; 2. Rumblings of Unrest and Anticipation; 3) The Forces of War Unleashed; 4) Homage to the Dead; 5) The Eternal Question. Why? And For What?. Our hosts had left the curtains open and as the music progressed we could see children playing in a park in front of the house and then the park emptying as night fell. It was a sobering backdrop for the fundamental question the persecuted and long-suffering composer put to us; why do we keep doing this to ourselves?

Earth Hour began in Sidney, Australia, in 2007. By turning off their lights for one hour one Saturday night close to the Spring equinox, some 2.2 million Sidney-siders and 2000 businesses showed their awareness of climate change and their commitment to combating it. In 2008, the organisers hoped to observe the same ‘Earth Hour’ throughout Australia but then the City of Toronto decided to follow suit and soon the event had gone global. Last year hundreds of millions of people across 135 countries switched off for one hour. This year, as last year, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions are participating by turning as many lights off as possible not just for one hour but for the whole weekend. So, if you pass by and notice the darkened buildings you’ll know why. And if you want to participate yourself, it’s tonight, at 20.30, for one hour. We can all make a difference if we want.

I have just learned, sadly, that one of my predecessors as EESC Secretary-General, Simon-Pierre Nothomb, has passed away at the age of 79, following an accident. Nothomb was appointed Secretary General in 1992, at a time when the Committee was still a sort of annex to the Council of Ministers and hence when SGs were appointed by the Council, rather than by the Committee itself. Scion of a Belgian political and literary dynasty (Charles-Ferdinand Nothomb was his brother, Amélie Nothomb his niece), Simon-Pierre was one of the youngest volunteers to fight in the Korean war (he was just 19) and would later become an ambassador for South Korea and Korean culture. He went on to study in Paris, Leuven and Geneva and was Director of Communications at Leuven University in the 1960s when it was decided to split the University. Indeed, Nothomb was the author of the title of the new university, Louvain-La-Neuve. A committed internationalist and European, Nothomb was behind several initiatives to create European university networks and his efforts led to him being awarded a doctorate honoris causa by the University of Coimbra.

Today, just two days before the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI), one of the major innovations of the Lisbon Treaty, finally enters into force, the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) and the Committee of the Regions (CoR) held a joint conference entitled ‘Time to Act!’ In the opening session CoR President Mercedes Bresso and EESC President Staffan Nilsson hosted European Parliament Vice-President Georgios Papastamkos and European Commission Vice President Maros Sefcovic in considering how the most can be made of this new democratic institution. The initiative enables one million citizens who are nationals of at least one quarter of the EU’s member states, to call directly on the European Commission to propose a legal act in an area within the competences of the EU. Expertly moderated by Euractiv publisher Christophe Leclercq, the Conference went on to consider case studies of participatory democracy in France, Italy and Sweden; how the ECI could be promoted in the member states; and how the two Committees could provide important roles as filters and facilitators and to act, as Staffan Nilsson put it, as institutional mentors. There was a great buzz to this well-attended conference. We really are on the eve of something new.

To the fifth floor of the Jacques Delors building this evening to join President Mercedes Bresso, my counterpart, Gerhard Stahl, and other colleagues at the Committee of the Regions to say farewell to Steen Illeborg, the outgoing Director of the Registry at the Committee of the Regions. In a previous incarnation I worked closely with Steen, each representing our respective institutions, and always enjoyed friendly and entirely productive relations, leavened by, I suspect, similar senses of humour. In his farewell speech Steen summed Danish humour: ‘Nothing so serious that humour cannot apply, and nothing so funny that there isn’t a serious side.’ He spoke also, echoing Dean Acheson in a very different context, about how he had been one of a handful of colleagues who had been ‘present at the creation’ of the Committee of the Regions. At an age when most of us would be happy to put our feet up for a while at least, Steen is off now to Copenhagen University to do a doctorate. I am full of admiration.