To continue on the literary theme this evening my writers’ group had its summer dinner in a restaurant off the Place St Job in a part of Uccle that felt like a village. A good time was had by all, with a lot of lively discussion which, because of the geographical spread of the group (Irish, American, Scottish, Swedish, English), was satisfyingly broad and eclectic in scope. I always come away from these occasions having learnt a lot. Towards the end of the evening we decided that we should each say why we wrote, limiting ourselves to a single sentence. Here are the responses I managed to note down: ‘I want to be heard’; ‘It’s a way of legitimising my existence’; It’s the only thing I have always wanted to do’; ‘You can create the world that’s in your head’; ‘To save my life I wrote things down’.

This lunchtime I had the pleasure and privilege of welcoming British author Helen Walsh to the Committee for our first literary lunch of the season. The idea is simple. Our Committee is a body that brings together representatives of Europe’s civil society organisations and, in so doing, embodies Europe’s cultural diversity. One of the primary vectors for that diversity is language, of which literature is a high form. At the same time, the Committee serves as a bridge between the EU and civil society, and we therefore like to welcome people from all walks of life onto our premises when we can (the recent Open Doors Day was an excellent example of this). Last but not least, in this, the year of combatting poverty and social exclusion, our Committee’s members are deeply concerned about the socio-economic crisis Europe is going through and, above all, about the consequences of this for our societies, particularly for the most vulnerable (the Biennial Conference in Florence one month ago addressed precisely this theme). Working together with EUNIC (European Union National Institutes of Culture), we have therefore organised a series of literary lunches in which we invite authors who, through their work, have addressed the theme of poverty and social exclusion, to present readings from their works, in their mother tongue. We got off to a perfect start today. The weather was obliging and we were able to hold the event on a terrace and we had a lot of guests. Above all, thanks to our cooperation with the British Council, we had in Helen Walsh an eloquent analyst of racism and prejudice in post-industrial sink estates. Her latest novel, Once Upon a Time in England, from which she read extracts, is as she explained based on the real life experience of her Malaysian mother and English father surviving in a Warrington estate where poverty and racial prejudice were never far away.

Will I be the next Belgian PM?

Which leads me on to the question foreign journalists are fond of asking at the moment: to whit, for how much longer will Belgium remain a country? Today’s General Election has produced an entirely predictable result and it feels a little like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold. On the other hand, some commentators are tonight arguing that the traditional practice, whereby the largest parties in each regional community are automatically considered to be obligatory parts of any national coalition, should be disregarded. That would, most controversially, leave Bart De Weever’s New Flemish Alliance Party out in the cold, although it has won some 27 of the 150 seats in the lower house. It would be a very risky move. At the same time, in the other ‘half’ of the country, Elio Di Rupo’s socialists have won just one seat less and could conceivably govern without the NFA. A time for steady hands and cold-blooded calculation! In any case, to paraphrase MarkTwain, reports of Belgium’s death are much exaggerated – for the time being.

This evening we went to the KAAI Theatre to watch P.A.R.T.S. New Works. P.A.R.T.S. is a dance school founded and headed by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. After two years of training the pupils get a chance to put on a show – and what a show! The first work we saw was by a Finnish choreographer, Veli Lehtovaara, and was entitled Paper plane – propositions, tautologies, contradictions and reprises. For forty-five minutes three dancers, a Swede, a Finn and a Portugese lady, held our attention with a mixture of gymnastic geometry, wit and grace. In the second half we saw three works culminating in Daniel Linehan’s Montage for Three, in which two dancers immitate a stream of photographs of the famous and the obscure, mimicking their poses and expressions. Gradually, the dancers replace the images and start to change the poses we had previously seen. It was a very clever and witty work. Once again we headed home thinking how lucky we were to live in such a city and in such a country.

At midday I took two friends, one a composer and one a musician, down to the border country between the Famenne and the Ardenne regions in search of a venue for a concert. We started off at a village church but concluded that the acoustics just wouldn’t work. We then went to a wooden construction built by a religious community of monks and nuns. Sister Agnes proudly showed us around a massive wooden hall that serves as a church in the summer and a cow barn in the winter. The space and acoustics were right, but it would have been impossible to heat the barn (the concert is planned for October). Sister Agnes took us to the community’s chapel and there picked up a Kora (an African harp) and began to play it for us. It was a beautiful day and a beautiful spot. Birds twittered outside and we could hear the brothers finishing the lunchtime washing up. It was a beautiful moment. The radiant and joyful hospitality of the community, the sense of well-being among our hosts, their pride in the well-stacked firewood and the buildings they had all built or restored themselves, Sister Agnes’s harp playing and Mother Nature putting on a blinder of a day, the good company of my friends – it was just the tops.

Spot the claws

We think we have a crows’ nest on the roof. In any case, for the past week they have been very agitated, croaking loudly from morning to night. In the middle of the week we started to get falls of rubble and soot through the ventilation grill in our downstairs toilet. A-ha! we thought; they have built their nest at the top of the chimney. And then we saw some birds’ droppings on the floor. Oh no! we thought, superman will have to climb up on the roof and break up the nest. So this morning I was studying the grill in the way supermen do, prior to doing something stupid. As I was pondering my next move, I heard a scrabbling noise just above the grill. I unscrewed the grill and took it away and there I could see a pair of claws, perched on the top of a grating behind the grill (see the photo). So I toiled for several hours and eventually, having wrecked the toilet, was able to free a young crow. He must have been there for the best part of a week but seemed to be none the worse for his experience. I told him what an idiot he was and took him out into the garden and then something happened that made the whole experience worthwhile. As I released him onto the lawn, two crows called out from a nearby tree. He flew up to the nearest tree to escape me and the two crows joined him. They were clearly his parents. (I don’t want to exaggerate but their caws sounded pretty joyous to me.)They perched there in the tree, mumbling to each other. I pointed up at them and said ‘You owe me one!’ Then went back in to repair the big hole in the toilet ceiling.

A lucky crow

The train was on time and so I decided I would walk to the City. I took the Grays Inn Road down to Holborn and then walked towards St Pauls. A voice at the back of my mind kept telling me there was something significant about the area I was walking through, but it was not until I saw a signpost to St Alban’s church that I realised. This was where my father, who passed away just three years ago, was born and lived until the family were bombed out in the war. Here he is in his own words, as told to my brother a few months before he died: ‘I was born at 10.30am on 22 May 1927 in the Royal Free Hospital, Grays Inn Road, WC1. Home was Bell Court (named after the Bell Pub) in the St. Alban’s Buildings at the front of St. Alban’s Church. It was later renamed Brook’s Court. Bell Court was destroyed when a German land mine fell close by in 1941. Our family lived here in a top floor flat consisting of two rooms. I used to have to pass all the gangs on the way up the stairs. In the living room there was a sink and a gas stove. The rooms were lit by gas mantle (there was no electricity) and this remained the case into the war. There were four apartments on each floor. In the middle were the toilets which were shared. The flats had a flat roof and parapet. The roof accommodated large coppers with a boiler and drying houses. Each family was allocated one day during the week to do their washing. Ironing was undertaken using a flat iron heated on the stove. The children from the nursery school went to church with the older boys and girls. I have a vivid memory of a service one day where the sun was streaming in through the church windows. The air was so thick with incense that it almost made me feel faint. The priest held up the chalice during the service and it looked to me as though he was holding up a baby…’ I turned off the Grays Inn Road and went into the church. There is now an impressive 1966 mural painted behind the altar (see the photograph), but the church is otherwise as my father would have seen it back then in the 1930s. In front of the church stands a modern low-rise development of social housing. It was strange to think that my father had once, as a small boy, lived somewhere up in the air above those houses…

I was up early again this morning to get the Eurostar to London. I took a day off to go and interview Horst Reichenbach, who is now a Vice-President of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development but was Director General of the European Commission’s DG Administration 1999-2004 and was therefore a key player in the Kinnock reform process. I needed to interview him because I am currently working on an update of my 2001 biography of Neil Kinnock. The first edition only touched on the beginning of the reform process, but now I can treat Neil’s political career in the round. The more I look into the Kinnock reform package the more I realise what an achievement it was to get the whole thing through. An academic friend, Hussein Kassim, tellingly wrote an article entitled “‘Mission impossible’, but mission accomplished: the Kinnock reforms and the European Commission,’ that just about sums it up (published in the Journal of European Public Policy, 15:5 August 2008). There is no doubt that the Commission was lucky to have a seasoned reformer like Kinnock to take the whole thing on and brilliant officials like Horst Reichenbach and Philip Lowe (who I saw a few weeks back) to help him deliver. Reichenbach had also already got one reform process under his belt, having reformed DG Consumer Policy and Health Protection in the 1997-’99 period, after the findings of the European Parliament’s Temporary Committee of Inquiry into the BSE crisis. And Philip Lowe had previously spent time reforming DG Development and creating DG Aidco. Indeed, one of Reichenbach’s theses was that the success of the reform process owed a lot to a series of coincidences, as well as to the combined force of their networks of contacts…

among Bev's admirers...

In the early evening I attended the retirement party of an unsung heroine, Beverly (‘Bev’) Tempest. In the second half of her career she worked in the private offices of a succession of British Commissioners: first Neil Kinnock, then Peter Mandelson and lastly Cathy Ashton. The administrative term for Bev’s position was ‘assistant’ but that is a frankly misleading and completely inadequate understatement. Colleagues like Bev (of whom, fortunately, there are a good few in the European institutions) are gold nuggets, level-headed oases of calm in periods of excitement, magicians of the appointments diary, soothers of fevered brows, pourers of oil on troubled waters (and of white wine on those long nights), immensely hard workers and, into the bargain, thoroughly nice people. They are also modest and self-effacing and Bev probably won’t be thankful that I have written this tribute (I couldn’t even find a picture of her on the internet). But those for whom she has worked know her true value, which is why Neil and Glenys Kinnock had travelled from London for the occasion and why there were two Secretaries-General and a sprinkling of Directors-General and Directors in her front room this evening.

The whole of this morning was taken up with a series of ‘bilateral’ meetings. Since I took up the cudgels of the Secretary Generalship in September 2008 I have had to get used to the fact that I am no longer responsible for my agenda and only control my time if I choose pro-actively to do so. Rather, my excellent officials book me into meetings as a function of urgency and time available. I have therefore developed a philosophy of meetings; they are like the weather. There can be good and bad weather but the one certainty is that there will always be weather, and in the same way there will always be meetings. Among the good meetings are my encounters with new officials. I welcome every new official personally to the Committee. I do this because Sir John Priestman (Secretary General of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe) and David Williamson (Secretary General of the European Commission) both did it when I started as a young official in their respective institutions and I think it’s an excellent practice and in any case one I am determined to emulate. This morning I met, among others, a young Portugese translator. We got chatting about her – as yet unfinished – PhD thesis with the fascinating working title ‘Melancholy, interpretation and fall.’ The essential melancholy of interpretation, as I understood it, is that when we translate we are doomed to approximation and hence to failure. This reminded me of the saying that poetry is what you cannot translate. I could have carried on chatting for hours. Europe, endless!