Though perhaps apocryphal, there is a Russian proverb (beloved of Economist editorialists, for some reason) about a bird buried in a cowpat that pokes it head out and starts singing. A fox, hearing the singing, pulls the bird out and eats it. The three morals of the story are; 1. not everybody that sh*ts on you is an enemy; 2. not everybody that pulls you out of the sh*t is a friend; and 3. if you are in the sh*t, don’t sing about it. Today, on the occasion of the global night of prayer for victims of torture (held in the run-up to the UN’s International Day in Support of Victims of Torture), my colleague Robert Madelin provided an example of a more poignant and macabre, though true, inverted version of such morals by posting on his Facebook blog a brief life of the English catholic saint and martyr, Thomas Garnett. So noble was Garnett in facing up to his impending death that the crowd to whom he had endeared himself pulled hard on his legs to make sure that the hanging killed him. Something similar happened to another English Catholic martyr, John Payne. In other words, in those awful times, not everybody who tried to kill you was necessarily an enemy. In 1606, gunpowder plotter Guido Fawkes meanwhile deliberately flung himself off of the gallows and broke his neck, thus avoiding the ‘fate worse than death’ that would otherwise have been meted out to him. All three men had already been tortured. In Fawkes’s case, he had to watch whilst fellow plotters Thomas Wintour, Ambrose Rookwood, and Robert Keyes were hanged, drawn and quartered. For this was the fate that Garnett’s and Payne’s friends helped them to avoid through immediate death. And when, I wondered, was the last time this vile, ghastly sentence (usually for treason) was carried out? The answer, shockingly, was 1820, though it was not taken off of the statute books until 1870. Our dark ages, of state-sanctioned and law-based torture, are not so far in the past…

To the Musées Royaux des Beaux Arts this morning to catch the Kandinsky and Russia exhibition before it closes at the end of this month. The organisers would have slightly more accurately entitled the exhibition Russia and Kandinsky but, nevertheless, it is a good exhibition and worth a visit. I shan’t write about the great Wassily Kandinsky‘s artistic career, though I can record that I first heard about him at primary school because my – surely exceptional – art teacher told me when I was about eight that he was the author of the first abstract painting. The exhibition is good on his life, as he drifted westwards in geography and philosophy (he started professional life as a lawyer and was, in turn, a Russian, German and then French national). And it is good on ethnic cultural influences. For my illustration I am posting some ‘sacred Siberian wood’, discovered standing in a forest – the faces could almost be African. The exhibition sports a shaman’s ceremonial dress and headgear that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Northern America, reminding the visitor that the Bering Straits land (later ice) bridge existed until relatively recently. The exhibition shows how such ethnic objects clearly had as much influence on Russian artists as, say, African sculptures had on Picasso. But to my mind the exhibition is best in considering Kandinsky’s theoretical analyses of art. I noted, for example, ‘Such red, as is seen by the mind and not by the eye…’, and ‘white sounds like silence, just a little before any beginning.’ And I shall close this post with a fascinating statement of the artistic chemistry between chance and design: ‘Here is a world which came to life by the will of the artist, for the paintings already painted, but was also determined and created through accidents, through the puzzling play of forces alien to the artist. And I owe much to these accidents.’

About a month ago I had lunch with a friend, Julian Priestley, who was for ten years Secretary-General of the European Parliament, which is a massive achievement. Julian is now, among other things, an accomplished author of several books about the Parliament. We got talking about the great novelist, playwright and broadcaster, J.B. Priestley (Julian is a scion of the  family). I had just started his 1962 autobiographical work, Margin Released, but was ashamed to admit I had not read many of his novels. On the other hand, I enthused about his plays. In particular, I had seen Stephen Daldry’s extraordinary 1990s revival of An Inspector Calls, a play which remains as much of a biting critique of class and privilege as it must have seemed in the 1940s. ‘Oh,’ Julian replied, ‘then you absolutely must see the 1954 film with Alastair Sim as the Inspector.’ So that is what we did tonight and it really is an excellent film, with the brilliant Sim turning in a creepy and spooky performance. Indeed, the director, Guy Hamilton, deliberately exploits that spookiness to give the Inspector a more supernatural air. Well worth watching.

Regular visitors to this blog will know that I have been pushing for the use of less paper in our meetings. The push has included pioneering the use of PCs/tablets in our management board meetings. At political level, the Committee’s quaestors have similarly pioneered meetings with much less paper. Today, I walked past the room where the Committee’s promotions committee is meeting and couldn’t resist taking this picture. Yes, there are a few files on the table, but otherwise, it’s all laptops (rather than tablets, I’m told, because they can work faster with an ASDL connection). The sight gave me a real sense of progress!

This evening I accompanied our Vice-President, Jane Morrice, to the opening of a fine photographic exhibition organised by the Committee in order to celebrate the imminent arrival of the European Union’s 28th Member State – Croatia – which will join the Union officially on 1 July. The exhibition was officially opened by Ambassador Vladimir Drobnjak (in the picture) who told us how the photographs, taken by Mario Romulic and Drazen Stojcic, truly did give flashes of the great diversity and beauty of his country, which stretched from the Danube to the Adriatic, had over 1,000 islands and will boast one of the longest land frontiers in the Union (1,000 kilometres, with Bosnia). Catch the exhibition if you can (it is on until 5 July). It is free and all you need is proof of your identity.

I have at last finished Richard Nixon‘s extraordinary 1962 Six Crises. He wrote the book after his loss to J.F. Kennedy in the 1960 Presidential election (which came after eight years’ service as Vice-President) and on the eve of his equally ill-fated bid to become Governor of California. The crises Nixon recounts were all, he believed, seminal and formative moments in his political career, starting with the 1948 Hiss case, and culminating with the 1960 Nixon-Kennedy campaign. The ‘iron butt’ that enabled Nixon to win scholarships to work his way through college was also much in display in his dogged pursuit of Alger Hiss, a case with hints of the paranoia that would lead to the Watergate affair and his ignominious 1974 resignation. The four other crises he relates were the 1952 allegations of a secret political fund, President Eisenhower’s 1955 heart attack and subsequent health problems, communist-led violence during a 1958 visit to Caracas, and his 1959 ‘kitchen debate’ with Nikita Kruschev in Moscow. Throughout his accounts Nixon is disarmingly honest about his obsessive preparation and mastery of briefings. Nothing was left to chance and yet – this is the huge irony running through the book – chance events were forever throwing up the crises he writes about.

There is a thought-provoking article by Andy Carling in this week’s New Europe about mankind’s lunar heritage. Altogether, twelve men walked on the moon between 1969 and 1972. They left their footprints and a considerable number of objects, including Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s moon boots, some flags and the lunar rover. These vestiges of an extraordinary achievement could all be considered as part of mankind’s common heritage. Certainly UNESCO’s Astronomy and World Heritage Initiative considers that to be the case, and so does NASA. The issue arises, and with some urgency, because Google has offered $ 30 million for the ‘first privately funded teams to safely land a robot on the surface of the Moon, have that robot travel 500 meters over the lunar surface, and send video, images and data back to the Earth.’ And this by 31 December 2015. There are, Carling reports, twenty-three teams actively competing. And a bonus prize is being offered for ‘precision landing near an Apollo site or other lunar sites of interest (such as landing/crash sites of man-made space hardware)’. NASA talked with Google and ‘agreement was reached on avoiding landing sites, in particular that of Apollo 11 and 17, the first and last visits by humanity.’ NASA also produced a 96-page technical guide for prospective moonwalkers. As Carling cogently argues, mankind’s burgeoning space law must also rapidly consider how its space heritage can be defined and protected.

Browsing in the bookshop opposite the Centre Borschette, I came across an old guide book to the villages around Brussels. This morning, on our way to walk the dog, we visited some of the sites mentioned in the guide: the chateau at Leefdael, the chapel of St Veronica, and Berthem’s parish church, Sint-Pieter. All are well preserved. In Sint-Pieter there was, typically, an old lady bustling around. She took us out to the sacristy and showed us a photocopied document that explains the history of the church. In a niche in one aisle of the church there is an immensely touching 11th or 12th century polychrome wood carving of the virgin and child. The lady explained that the carving had been brought to the church by a man who had rescued it from an old shrine in the middle of a field, about to be destroyed by road building work. The pretty church is worth a visit to see that carving alone. In my photograph is another curiosity to be found in the church. This, clearly, is a much later virgin and child but look at the ‘baby’ Jesus! His expression is almost sinister. It is certainly adult.

At the bottom of our garden are two rhubarb plants. I transplanted them, together with a rosemary bush, from my late father’s vegetable plot. The rosemary succumbed to a late harsh frost a few years ago but the rhubarb plants continue to thrive and, if I remove the weeds from around them, are good croppers. The challenge each year is what to do with the crop. Rhubarb tart and rhubarb and custard have become staple fare but not everyone in my family likes rhubarb. Just as I now turn our annual crop of pears into a syrup, I was anyway looking for a way of avoiding the imperative of eating everything straight away when I stumbled (as they say) upon a recipe for rhubarb and ginger jam and decided to give it a go. The recipe is very easy. Wash and cut the rhubarb into pieces, layer it with sugar in a bowl, pour lemon juice over everything and leave to stand for eight hours. By that time, the rhubarb has ‘expressed’ itself. Place a fair-sized, bruised piece of ginger amid the rhubarb in a muslin bag and bring the mixture to a vigorous boil. When it ‘sets’ (after about ten minutes; test using the back of a cold spoon to see when the liquid turns syrupy), ladle the jam into warmed jars and Bob’s your uncle. As the picture shows, the result was seven jars of delicious jam (proven by the fact that half a jar went already at tea time).

To the Bozar this evening for an excellent concert given by the City of Birmingham Orchestra under the athletic baton of Andris Nelsons. The conductor warmed up with the overture from Wagner’s Flying Dutchman, before we relaxed back into Mozart’s piano concerto n° 22 (our second dose of wonderful Mozart this week!), with a fine lyrical performance from German pianist Martin Helmchen, his fingers literally dancing across the keyboard. As an encore Helmchen played an exquisite version of Robert Schuman’s The Prophet Bird. Then Nelsons got back into energetic mode with Beethoven’s 7th Symphony. Beethoven’s genius is brilliantly displayed in this symphony (though as in every other, I suppose!). Each of the four movements builds around instantly recognisable melodies, leaving this listener wondering which of them he would hum on the bicycle ride home! But then, after several well-deserved rounds of applause, came a tragic Latvian air. Nelsons announced, as the encore, Emils Darzins‘ Melancholic Waltz. Afterwards, my excellent Latvian Deputy Director of Translation (a fellow melomane and concert-goer) told me a little more about the piece and the sad life of the composer himself. The Melancholic Waltz, reconstructed after his death (probably suicide) was one of the few orchestral pieces to survive the composer’s maddened destruction of his own work. Once you know this story, the waltz takes on a different, elegiac aspect. That’s Darzins in the picture.