Averroès; a great European

The Belgian newspaper, Le Soir, is selling a series of seminal cultural and philosophical texts in book form. The one on sale this morning (I bought two straightaway) was about Averroès. Go on; be honest. Have you heard of him? He was a fascinating and inspirational figure, born in Cordoba, died in Marrakech, an Andalusian Muslim, a philosopher, lawyer, theologist, geographer, mathematician, astronomer, musician, physician, doctor and courtier. Many argue that he was the founding father of Western European secular thought. You can read about him here. And here’s a little anecdote. When we were finalising our Erasmus Mundus proposal (see 27 February post), we were casting about for a name. It was a new programme so, we thought, we needed a new name, and the one we hit upon was Averroès. To us, in our post 9-11 world, with a Commission President who’d put inter-cultural dialogue at the top of his priorities, what could be better than the name of this extraordinary polymath who had spanned the Western and Arab worlds, to the benefit of both? But our Commissioner at the time, Vivianne Reding, with impeccable political logic, pointed out that, with all sorts of belt-tightening going on, it would be better to give the impression of extending an existing winning model, rather than creating a new one. And so our ‘Averroès’ became ‘Erasmus Mundus’ and went on to flourish mightily. I still think it was a nice idea, though!

I really did earn my salt today. I spent all morning in the Budget Group. The main point on the agenda, from my point of view, was a proposal about how the annual budget drafting process should ideally look for the 2011 budget. I know; it sounds a long way off but, for the EU institutions, the planning is already under way. In the afternoon I co-chaired a meeting together with my Committee of the Regions counterpart, Gerhard Stahl, designed to provide some strategic administrative overview and input to our so-called ‘joint services’ (including translation, IT and logistics). From there, I dashed to the Council’s Budget Committee, where I explained and defended a request for a budgetary transfer (successfully, I should add!). As usual, the gaps in between these formal meetings were soon filled in by informal meetings of various kinds. Still, if I’d had my senior staff in place I would only have attended one of the three formal meetings – the one with Gerhard Stahl. The recruitment process for the new directors is taking a long time, but I am already imagining how relieved I will feel to be able to concentrate on one job instead of three.

We finally got around to watching The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen), on DVD this evening. It is excellently acted and directed and chilling, simply chilling. We have friends and acquaintances who were on the receiving end of such monitoring and surveillance. And those in power had subtle punishments down to a fine art. A Polish friend told me that school results were frequently manipulated – upwards, if the children’s parents were in good odour with the régime, downwards, if not. How dispiriting it must have felt! I recently saw a Czech animated film designed to explain to younger people what the Iron Curtain had been all about.  The Lives of Others would be a good place to start.

McCarthy, Keenan, Waite and Morrell

I am a great BBC Radio Four listener. One of the programmes I like is called ‘The Reunion’. It’s a simple idea but it works very well, thanks in no small part to the excellent journalism and chairing skills of the presenter, Sue MacGregor. This Sunday she brought together, apparently for the first time in a very long time, John McCarthy, Brian Keenan and Terry Waite, who were all held as hostages over many years in Lebanon, and Jill Morrell, who was then McCarthy’s girlfriend. The sheer humanity of all four is wonderfully communicated by their reminiscences and by the almost complete lack of bitterness about their experiences. It is also leavened by their good senses of humour. McCarthy recounted being bundled, taped and put in a sack, and then dumped into the boot of a larger-than-usual car for one of the frequent changes of place where he was held. All of a sudden, the car stopped, the boot was opened and another hostage, also bundled, taped, and in a sack, was dumped on top of him. It was Terry Waite. ‘This seems larger than the usual boot,’ he remarked. ‘It was before you got in,’ McCarthy retorted. Wonderful stuff. You can listen to it at here.

Not the dung thing

As Clyde led me for a jog around the lakes at Tervuren today, a thought suddenly occurred. We dog owners are now legally obliged to take with us, visible on the lead, a store of small plastic bags to clear up any mess our dogs might make. This is thoroughly commendable, especially in a city once known as the dog poo capital of the world (sadly, Naples must be in the running for that title now). But what, I suddenly thought, as I dodged a vast, stinking mound, about horseriders? I mean it. Why shouldn’t they dismount and get out a plastic bag (one of the more robust ones sold by supermarkets, I should imagine) and shovel up the mess? I mean, dog poo is dramatic enough but when a horse goes it really does go. All right; you don’t often see a horse in the City Deux gallery but, still…

I'll take the glory, please

The family watched Troy in the evening. Two years back my son and I read through a modernised version of the Iliad. This story has it all (and the film is, for epics of this kind, pretty faithful to the main lines of the original). There are some wonderful characters and roles: Achilles, who opts for glorious doom over an anonymously happy dotage; the brave and noble Hector, accepting the whimsies of the Gods and of his silly brother, Paris; Patroclus, who dons Achilles’ armour and is killed by Hector, and who is in his turn killed by Achilles; King Priam, reduced to begging for his son Hector’s body so as to give him a hero’s burial and Achilles empathetically relenting. Lastly, there is Achilles’ knowledge that, having opted for glory in battle, he will never know the happiness of homecoming. I have adored this story since I first read an abridged and illustrated version in Puffin books many moons ago. In 1981 I at last visited the real Troy and, later, picnicked on the plains before it, and all the time I had in my mind the exploits recounted so vividly in the Iliad. What a story!

They are, you know: if I could work four days for a fifth less salary, I’d do it. On the other hand, I have a friend who argues that holidays are unhealthy for busy people. This, he says, is because when they relax their defences come down and they become prone to infections. Whether he’s right or wrong, I caught a cold on Labour Day, chiz, chiz. Still, I finished the other half of Free Agent (some excellent twists in the plot – see 26 April post), visited the Luc Tuymans exhibition at the Wiels Gallery and took in Gomorra as a DVD in the evening. Oh for a few more days like that!

Free Agent is set in Africa, in Nigeria, during the Biafran conflict. That brought back a few vivid images; all those pot bellied, wide eyed starving children. In my childhood memory (I was ten when Nigeria’s civil war broke out) images of that ghastly Cold War-by-proxy-struggle competed with the Vietnamese War on the evening news bulletins. The author, Jeremy Duns, gets a number of clever twists of the ‘what if?’ variety into his plot.

The Wiels Gallery is one of those buildings (like London’s Oxo Tower) which, I can honestly say, I helped to survive. I did this by donating occasionally (very, very modestly) and lending my name to campaigns and, therefore, it has a special place in my affections. With its distinctive modernist architecture, the old Wielemans brewery (brewing hall picture above) has been wonderfully transformed into a brilliant series of hanging spaces, with lots of natural light and tall, broad walls.

In the end, Gomorra left me feeling irritated and frustrated. Yes, it is well-acted and filmed on the whole. But, as a film, it is self-indulgent and could have done with some rigorous pruning, and as a sort of ‘docu-drama’ I felt it over-egged the pudding. I don’t doubt the horror stories detailed in Roberto Saviano’s original book, but the film gave me the impression of wanting to bring the gangster film back from New York. As entertainment, it pales in comparison with Le Conseguenze dell’amore  or Il Divo  (both Sorrentino films).

The annual staff reports exercise is slowly but surely coming to an end and shortly the subsequent promotions exercise will start. The staff reports exercise has been particularly heavy for me this year. In addition to my direct reports, I have had to act as assessor for colleagues in the two directorates for which I am currently acting director and for some colleagues in our ‘joint services’ (so called because they are shared and pooled with our sister institution, the Committee of the Regions). In short, I had forty-five staff reports to draft. That meant roughly forty-five interviews, followed by forty-five drafting exercises. But my role was not yet over. I am also the appeal assessor and I therefore have spent quite a bit of time this week in hearings with nine assessors and nine appellants. And now, today, the procedure is at last over and I am free! But don’t misunderstand me. In the good old bad old days there was no obligation on assessors to hold interviews with their staff and there was no real obligation on staff to sit down and talk through their performance, their objectives and their future. The new procedure therefore represents considerable progress and I welcome it. It was just a little bit heavy for me this year…

In October last year the EESC adopted an own-initiative opinion (rapporteur: Jane Morrice – that’s her in the picture) on the role of the EU in the Northern Ireland peace process (read the opinion here). The debate at the time was very moving, involving speakers from all parts of the ‘island of Ireland’ but it was also very revealing, for the EU clearly played a far more important role in Northern Ireland than is commonly recognised. This was confirmed yesterday in an article (‘Northern Ireland’s European Peace’) written by Tony Blair’s former Chief of Staff, Jonathan Powell, on E!Sharp magazine’s website. Powell writes:  ‘The border between Ireland and the UK just came to mean much less once we were both in the EU. This was particularly brought home to me when Ian Paisley, the fire-breathing DUP leader, came to see Tony Blair in the midst of the 2005 Foot and Mouth crisis in the UK and in an attempt to take advantage of the looser restrictions on movement of cattle in the south than in the north said, “Our people may be British but our cows are Irish”.’ I can just imagine the scene.

This morning I was busy practising the Secretary General’s essential art of being in two places at once. In the first place, I helped greet Felipe Gonzalez, now chairman of the reflection group on the future of Europe, who was the guest speaker at an extraordinary meeting of the Bureau. I consider Gonzalez to be a historic figure, and it was a privilege to meet him and talk briefly. I was reminded of just how far back his history goes when he explained that he had first met our President, Mario Sepi, at a trades union conference in Florence over thirty-five years ago, when Franco was still in power in Spain. I then had to dash to the Berlaymont for my first meeting together with the Secretaries-General of the EU institutions. Three of us were new (Klaus Welle, from the EP, Eduardo Ruis-Garzia from the Court of Auditors, and me), and there was a sense of a new term (or of new pupils in the classroom), but we were made very welcome and everybody settled immediately into the discussions. Afterwards (the meeting lasted an hour-and-a-half) I dashed back to the Jacques Delors building and caught the tail end of the Bureau discussion. One of Gonzalez’s telling points was that, although the iron curtain fast fell and Europe seemed to adapt rapidly to the new world order, it was only now truly adjusting to all of the consequences of those heady years of peaceful revolution, democratisation and enlargement.

Did you hear the one about...?