My older brother was a football fanatic in a decade, the 1960s, that deserved some fanaticism. He introduced me to the game of Subbuteo, of which he was also a fanatic. He bagged Manchester United when giants such as Bobby Charlton, Nobby Stiles (we saw both in England’s 1966 World Cup win, of course), Denis Law, Pat Crerand and the incomparable George Best were playing. If I couldn’t have them, I thought, then I’d have their rivals, Manchester City, who had nice light blue shirts into the bargain. I suspect dominance in real life was matched by dominance on the Subbuteo pitch. Anyway, my brother still has all the boxes with the players (see picture). He’s now Isle of Skye-based but, thanks to mobile phones, we re-lived the old rivalry this afternoon. No scriptwriter could have invented the scenario, with the two teams joint top of the Premier League, separated only by Man City’s favourable goal difference, with just one game to go. Man Utd were playing against tough opponents (Sunderland), Man City against bottom of the table Queen’s Park Rangers. United went ahead and City went dramatically behind, and only two goals in five minutes of stoppage time finally gave City the league title after a forty-four year drought. The matches are summed up here. I stayed up for Match of the Day and the BBC very cleverly spliced the two matches together; great entertainment. There’s far too much money in the game these days, but such a suspenseful ending to the league did a power of good. My brother’s final text? ‘Deserved Champions. Great season.’ Ah…… Now English eyes turn to Chelsea’s forthcoming challenge…

This evening we finished the fifth and final season of The Wire. What will we do with ourselves now? It has been a brilliant piece of sustained writing. It has also been a bleak and depressing portrayal of the human condition. People come and go, but the systems remain. The various actors are locked into their places. A very few escape. Those born in the Baltimore housing projects are condemned to a Hobbesian fate in which cheap lives are easily lost. The newspapermen, like the police, the dockers, the property developers and the teachers (the other systems portrayed) fight futile territorial battles and console themselves with petty victories and vengeances, sex, drugs and alcohol. Those who rise to the top are not necessarily the most able but always the luckiest – at least for a while. The implicit question posed throughout the five series is what, if anything, can be done about the situation? There is no answer, of course, but it is clear that the rise of reformists to positions where effective reforms might be driven through is a rare product of luck and a capacity to actually deliver something lasting is the result of yet more serendipity – and serendipity is in very short supply, at least in the Baltimore of the Wire.

It was Open Doors Day at the European Union’s institutions today. Once again, the European Economic and Social Committee, the house of organised civil society, enthusiastically threw its doors open to the public, led by the presence all day of President Staffan Nilsson and Vice-President Anna Maria Darmanin. The day is organised on a strictly voluntary basis but, as the photograph shows (taken just before the doors opened), a lot of members and staff turned up to greet the public and to man the various stalls and attractions. Our new Very Important Polinators, the honey bees on the roof, were on display, via a remote camera and a screen, and were a popular fixture throughout the day. The doors opened at ten and closed at six. By then, we calculate, over three thousand people had visited us. The teamwork between members and staff, the good atmosphere and the general enthusiasm and smiles on faces once again showed the European Economic and Social Committee at its best.

I cannot quite believe it. This evening we joined a throng of proud parents for N° 1 sprog’s bal du bac. Only yesterday, it seems, she was knee high to a grasshopper. Now, like all of her contemporaries, she’s a few weeks away from the end of school and the beginning of adult life. It has all gone so fast. Nothing makes you feel your age quite so much as your growing offspring! At the same time, I never cease to be impressed by the maturity of these young Europeans (certainly compared with how I was at their age) and hence to feel optimistic about the future that will soon be in their hands.

At lunchtime today we celebrated the birthdays of two young colleagues in the Secretary General’s secretariat, Laura (Italian, on the left) and Frida (Swedish, on the right), and once again my waistline was seriously threatened by the generous onslaught of various goodies from various EU member states. I am blessed with a great team of gifted colleagues who work very hard and such moments are precious time-outs and excellent restoratives. Over the lunch we were regaled (if that’s the right word) with stories from Bernard (Belgium), an aviation expert, about the very special plumbing challenges that engineers had to overcome when designing and building the Airbus A-380. You can hear all about it (complete with attrocious puns and word plays) here. A big job indeed.

Early this morning the dog took us for a walk at the arboretum. Even though it was chilly, spring has definitely sprung now, and the under forest was bright green with mosses, unfurling ferns and other undergrowth. The birds, too, were on song, trilling and warbling away. A scene of growth and hope, then, and there, in the middle of the forest, we came across this touching sight. Clearly, this was somebody’s favourite spot, their favourite walk, somewhere they had come many times and imbibed the same messages of growth and renewal, somewhere where they have now returned forever and where their spirit will now live on.

This morning the European Parliament voted by a large majority to grant discharge to the European Economic and Social Committee and its Secretary General for the 2010 budget. The European Parliament’s press release states that:  ‘By granting a discharge to an institution or agency, Parliament declares that it has spent its budget (funded by the European tax-payer) in line with EU rules. This “closes” the budget. At this stage, the Parliament can either grant or postpone discharge. MEPs act on a recommendation of the Council and base their decision on a review of the annual accounts and the Court of Auditors’ annual report.’ This is my fourth successful discharge procedure but, because of the two-year delay, only my second for years that I actually fully managed (2009 and 2010). I am happy for the Committee, its members and its staff. The credit is due to them for enabling the captain to run a good, tight ship – and a happy one!

To La Monnaie this evening for a first-rate performance and production of Handel’s Orlando. The plot – blind love leads warrior to destructive madness but all live happily after thanks to the convenient presence of a magician who puts everything back to rights – is nothing to write home about. But not only did the Baroque Orchestra B’rock, under the experienced baton (expressive hands, actually) of René Jacobs, provide the perfect basis for five excellent sung performances from the singers, but Pierre Audi’s clever and sophisticated direction and Christof Hetzer’s sensitive and intelligent stage design provided a nuanced backdrop for five great acting performances. Chief among them was Bejun Mehta’s portrayal of Orlando himself. Mehta is a fascinating double success story. An American born in China to an Indian father, he was a celebrated boy soprano who then went on to be a cellist and a record producer before realising that he was not a baritone, as he had wrongly believed, but a countertenor, leading to a second highly successful career as an opera singer. In this production Audi and Hetzer toy with fire and the images of flames to portray an Orlando sliding into pyromania and Mehta skillfully introduces the gradual changes in Orlando’s behaviour as he becomes increasingly mad, bad and dangerous to know… Three cherubic monsters appear at the beginning and the end to make it plain to the audience that the whole thing was just a fantastic load of old nonsense but, goodness, wasn’t it fun!

I am an avid listener to BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs. The lives revealed through the interviews are frequently fascinating. The programme’s format and the skills of the interviewer (currently Kirsty Young) seem somehow to bring the original and the quirky out of its guests. And quite frequently the choices of the guests throw up artists or music that I didn’t know and hence discover. This happened recently when gifted jazz musician Jamie Cullum was the guest. One of his eight chosen pieces was the beautiful  ‘Concerning the UFO Sighting near Highland, Illinois’ by Sufjan Stevens, and so I discovered Stevens’s album Illinoise, and I am hooked. Stevens is one of those lyrical poets that America so often throws up. In effect, they put their verses to music. Of all the tracks on the album, the one that has got me thinking is a chillingly sweet ballad about notorious mass murderer John Wayne Gacy, Jr, that sets out quite deliberately to unbalance the listener. The disc is warmly recommended.

Today marks the 62nd anniversary of the declaration made by French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman that is commonly identified and celebrated as the beginning of a new, supranational form of European cooperation that led ultimately to today’s European Union. Eurocrats get the day off (but accordingly have to work on Armistice Day). I tried this question out on Facebook but it got no answers, so here goes. If the European Union had an equivalent of Mount Rushmore, who would be carved into the granite? The original has four Presidents (Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln) so, to tighten things up, Schuman would be excluded. I assume all would agree that Monnet should be up there. But what about Hallstein? Delors? Assuming you’d accept those three, who’d take the fourth place? Sicco Mansholt (earlier architect of the CAP, start of the EMS, first enlargements)? Roy Jenkins (EMU, start of Commission attendance at G8 meetings)? Jacques Santer (Amsterdam, Nice, the euro, but then resignation)? Romano Prodi (Nice, the European Constitution, the physical introduction of the euro)? José Manuel Barroso (Lisbon Treaty, 2004 and 2007 enlargements,…)? Answers, on a postcard, please…