Since we were all badly in need of some escapism, N° 1 daughter was dispatched this evening to choose a DVD that would please ‘everybody’. She returned with a 2006 blockbuster, The Host, which, the blurb told her, was ‘second only to Alien in terms of popularity’. Well, it was both a ‘blockbuster’ and indeed  ‘second only to Alien in terms of popularity’ – in South Korea!  We sportingly watched the whole thing, moaning and groaning, and afterwards agreed that it had been a pretty bad film but, actually, it has grown on me. In the first place, it has that very particular Asian combination of the sad/serious and slapstick comedy (think Jackie Chan) which nowadays we find daft but not so long ago adored in the likes of Norman Wisdom and the Ealing comedies. In the second place, the monster’s gruesome mandibles indeed owe a lot to Alien but the rest of its newt-like body would not have looked out of place in a Hanoi water puppet show. In the third place, the film makes some thinly-veiled criticisms of South Korea’s American military guests and some pretty explicit references to real US horrors like the leakage of vast amounts of formaldehyde into the Han River or Agent Orange. And then you realise that the monster is a classic metaphor (aren’t they all?). Wherever foreign armies lumber, damage is done…

Today is a red-letter day for the European Union and another symbolic embodiment of the enlargement process. On the one hand, Lithuania, which acceded to the EU in 2004, today takes up the Presidency of the Council of the European Union and, on the other, Croatia becomes the European Union’s 28th Member State. At the EESC we have been preparing for both events for some time and are certain that the arrival of our new Croatian members and our relations with the new Lithuanian Presidency will go not just smoothly but very warmly. Welcome!

It was at the Rainbow Theatre in the early 1970s (1972?). I went to a concert with ‘a girl’ for the first time (oh, Brigid Whelan where are you now?). Rod Stewart was then enjoying an extraordinary double career with the Faces and as a solo artist. In the theatre there was, I remember, a lot of screaming. Onto the stage came Rod, wearing tartan trews and trailing a large Scottish flag. Actually, onto the stage he slid, on his knees and continued to slide most of the way across the stage. Some argue that he beat David Bowie to glam rock. He was, anyway, magnificent that night. The crowd erupted, as they say, and when I looked at my companion she was in tears. I simply couldn’t understand what was going on. Well, tonight I took the missus to see a dapper and sprightly Leonard Cohen at Forest National. As he launched into Dance Me to the End of Love, the same thing happened; the water works. Only, this time I understood. Cohen’s extraordinary set lasts almost three hours. Most of the golden oldies are in there: Sisters of Mercy, Suzanne, Famous Blue Raincoat, I’m Your Man, Hallelujah, This Waltz, Everybody Knows, First We Take Manhattan…. And Cohen still has that wonderful voice, now combined with hat-doffing respect and an occasional old man’s jig. He has an excellent backing band, drawing in many cultures, from the Mexican drummer to the Catalan guitarist to the Moldovan violinist. And who could boast a Professor of Music in their band? Cohen can and does. Not since Paul Simon passed through have we been treated to such a feast. Arguably, though, Cohen, together with Bob Dylan, is more of a cultural icon. In any case, having seen all three of them in the recent past I would without hesitation declare Cohen’s performance the best. Only that three-hour array of instantly recognisable melodies and lyrics and poems reminded us that our minstrel was an extraordinary 79 years old.

My father was a great fan of Prokofiev, and my mother of Chopin. But my love from an early age was always Debussy’s piano pieces, probably, I suspect, because of the six movements of Children’s Corner. So it was a great thrill when I was at last able to learn a relatively simple Debussy piece. Alas, the demands of the job long ago forced me to abandon the piano. Now I get my piano thrills indirectly, through our daughter, who has not only managed to keep up university studies but also her piano playing. At lunchtime today her piano teacher laid on a modest end-of-term concert for all of his pupils in his flat. It was an informal affair with an upright, as the picture shows, with delicious home-made food and drink afterwards. And our daughter played Debussy’s Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum. It’s difficult for me to describe the pleasurable sense of privilege I have felt in listening to this joyous piece ringing through our house during many hours of practice.

Some time ago a generous friend gave me a collection of audio books that he had used to wile away the hours during various long-distance road trips. There’s been a bit of driving recently, and so I have at last got around to listening to some of the CDs, which are mainly of titles I would not otherwise have read. The latest book ‘read’ was Brian Haig’s Secret Sanction (published in 2001). Haig, now sixty, is the son of a General, and a former U.S. soldier himself who studied military strategy then, in his mid-forties, changed career, working in communications, becoming a media commentator and, gradually, establishing himself as a thriller writer. Oh, yes, and he is also the son of former Secretary of State Alexander Haig. No thriller writer sets out to produce great literature. Haig gets in a few formulaic wisecracks: ‘about as welcome as a proctologist with big fingers’; ‘she could make rocks cry’; and, writing about an inveterate liar, ‘if he ever told the truth it was a mistake’. But otherwise this is a tough, dry story about a maverick military lawyer called to investigate an atrocity committed in the Balkans during the former Yugoslavia’s long, painful death rattle. Two aspects of this book are remarkable. The first is that, amidst all the ghastliness that was occurring, the perpetrators of Haig’s imagined atrocity are American Green Berets and, indeed, the story is all about the plots behind the plots that led to such a terrible act. Haig courageously opted for a less evident but ultimately more intriguing seuqence of events. The second aspect is that the war-torn lands Haig describes have now gone and are rapidly becoming history, the latest development being the June 2013 European Council’s decision to open accession negotiations with Serbia, and in two days’ time Croatia will become the EU’s 28th member state. The past is indeed a foreign country.

Today I finished Elie Wiesel’s slim, but never slight, Night – his terrifying account of how he and his family were swept away by the Holocaust to Auschwitz and Buchenwald. The book is up there with Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning and Primo Levi’s If This is a Man, not only as a graphically honest account of what occurred to the victims, but also, as the blurb puts it, by providing ‘rare insight into the darkest side of human nature’. The human nature in question is not only that of the captors, but that of the victims, as their humanity is gradually, brutally, extracted from them and sloughed off under increasing duress, until finally all that remains are survival automatons, devoid of emotion, sentiment or ethics. Surely the most horrendously poignant passage, in a book full of poignancy, is the page-and-a-half in which Wiesel describes not only his father’s final hours of suffering and ultimate disappearance during the night but also, with simple sincerity, his own guilt-racked feeling of relief that he no longer has to care for him (though he will, of course, always care about him). His community’s behaviour as dispassionately described at the beginning of the book is perhaps similar to the descriptions that made Hannah Arendt so unpopular for a while. As Wiesel describes it (though with the benefit of hindsight, of course), his community is instinctively law-abiding and respects its figures of authority (who include his father). Those figures of authority, in turn, trust that compliance might guarantee the worse but avoid the worst – though not even the most pessimistically creative among them could have imagined what that worst could be. Georges Soros once said: ‘There are times when the normal rules do not apply, and if you obey the rules at those times, you are likely to perish.’ In a final irony, Wiesel recounts how Buchenwald’s inmates themselves liberated the camp, just hours before the first American tanks rolled up to its grim gates. This is a book that should be read and re-read; a reminder of what man is capable of doing to man.

It has been a tense and intensive two months, with school exams and first year university exams to be crammed for (or maybe not, as the case may be) but today all exams were at last out of the way and so this evening, as a special treat to we parents, who are only some three billion years behind current viewing habits , it was agreed that we would watch the opening episodes of Game of Thrones. The first episode was a page out of the Russell T Davies Doctor Who screenwriting style book (aka ‘give it as much welly as you possibly can and leave your viewers reeling’). Within minutes there were dead body parts – lots of them, in a rather pretty arrangement – and several blood-spurting decapitations and ghouls and incest and various graphic couplings and lots of nudity and an assassination attempt and treason and treachery aplenty and avalanches of visual and oral clichés and – hang on just a minute while I get my breath back. The funny thing is that it all seems strangely familiar. For example, Sean Bean plays Boromir. No, sorry, that was Lord of the Rings. Silly me! He plays Lord Eddard Stark. And for Joffrey Baratheon read Steerpike or Draco Malfoy (in my picture). Aren’t the messenger ravens just a little bit like the owls in Harry Potter? And those White Walkers, aren’t they just a little bit like the Orcs or maybe the Death Eaters? Oh well, you’ve got the idea. That would be why one of the scriptwriters, David Benioff, ‘jokingly’ described the series as being like ‘The Sopranos in Middle Earth.’ Why ‘jokingly’? That’s exactly what it is and, irritatingly, and despite all the clichés, it works – just look at the ratings. So relax, sit back, put your sunglasses on, don a cape to catch up all that spattered blood, suspend all credibility and enjoy.

One of our number is an American screenplay writer, and I have been encouraging him to think about the following episode as a potential play of some sort. It is the eve of the election of a President of the United States. The polling booths have closed and the counting is getting underway. One of the two Presidential candidates, realising the long wait now ahead of him and aware also that if he wins he and his family will be surrounded by tight security and media interest for at least four years, decides to slip his leash. With the complicity of the local police, he picks up his wife and children and agent in his car and then throws off his media tail, turning down several side roads and hiding the car in an empty garage until the press have driven by. Once the coast is clear, he drives south, along the coast, stopping to swim in the ocean and eventually crossing the border into Mexico. They eat lunch together in a famous Mexican city – not incognito but certainly unexpected, and then drive back up the coast. He drops off his family in their hotel suite just as the first returns come in. Could this really have happened? And, if so, who was it? Goldwater in ’64? Humphrey in ’68? Mondale in ’84? Dukakis in ’88? Or maybe Al Gore in 2000? The answer, extraordinarily, was Richard Nixon in 1960, driving south from Los Angeles. The city they drove to was Tijuana. It’s all in his Six Crises which, I believe, is a potential treasure trove for scriptwriters. Of course, it probably couldn’t happen now, but it truly did happen, and not so long ago.

This is one of those posts that might lead somewhere – or otherwise it won’t.  Recently, in a Famennes antiques shop, I came across a framed painting of a young girl with the masts of a ship behind her and ‘gothic’ decorations around the portrait. At the bottom of the painting was the following rhyme: ”Little lassie far away/Reckon that there will come a day/When this awful lane will turn/And the banished will return.’ On the reverse, in a scrawling hand, is written: ‘Madame H. Bräm-Jonckheere à l’age de 13 ans, peint par son père Edouard Jonckheere, en captivité en Allemagne de 1914 à 1918, d’après une photo.‘ Confusingly, at the bottom of the back of the frame is a type-written caption that reads as follows: ‘Hélène Jonckheere  et J. Bräm à l’age de 11 ans en 1917, peint en camp de concentration par son père Edouard. Holzminden.’ Holzminden was indeed an internment camp. There was a more famous prisoner-of-war camp next door (a sort of First World War version of Colditz, complete with tunnelers and escapees), but I suspect Edouard was an internee, one of ten thousand held there. They set up schools and a theatre and even a university. My picture shows children playing in the camp (it also held women and children). There are a few vague traces of the family name on the internet, but nothing really firm enough to follow up on. So; if anybody from the Bräm-Jonckheere family would like to be reconnected with a piece of the family past, please get in touch.

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…