The EESC’s Bureau held a very productive meeting this afternoon and evening. As always, the meeting was in part about the routine of preparing Wednesday’s and Thursday’s plenary session although, even then, not all is ‘routine’; the Committee will be hosting the European Commission President, José Manuel Barroso and Vice-President Joaquin Almunia and signing a new cooperation protocol with the Commission and debating the crisis and adopting a resolution. In addition to these political discussions, the Bureau also discussed the Committee’s draft budget for 2013 and approved a set of Guidelines governing the use of interpretation. Basically, the provision of interpretation is expensive and the Committee is constantly seeking ways of reducing costs through better planning and discipline in meetings.

Addicts that we are, we tonight reached the end of the second season of The Wire. The scriptwriters (primarily David Simon) have done it again in writing into and then out of the series a wonderful character (see this post); on this occasion Frank Sobotka, a Polish-origin leader of a dock-workers’ union, who comes off worse in a power struggle with fellow Polish origin police Major Stan Valchek. Sobotka is a classic paternalist who cares about his men and about their jobs. The port basin is silting up. He needs to work the system to get the basin dredged and the big ships back. That means bribes, paid for by theft from the container port, but always ‘clean’ crime (and never drugs or people trafficking). What fun they had writing this character! Here he is, philosophising about his wrongdoing; ‘I knew it. I knew I was wrong. In my head I thought I was wrong for the right reasons.’ And here he tries to justify his workaholism to his neglected son; ‘It was all work, Zig, even when it wasn’t.’ And here he echoes my Cambridge, Massachussetts, cab driver (see this post)’s analysis of the American economy: ‘You know what the problem is? In this country we used to make shit, build shit. Now we just put our hands in each others’ pockets.’ I shall miss him!

Once again the EESC is at the beginning of a busy Bureau and plenary session week and once again the well-oiled machinery grinds into motion: early morning management board meeting, followed by the ‘pre-session’ meeting (of all services involved in the plenary session) and, in the late afternoon, a preparatory meeting of the enlarged Presidency (the President, two Vice-Presidents and the three Group Presidents, together with the Secretary General). We are now over half way through the current two-and-a-half year mandate and, at the political level, it shows, in the entirely positive sense that close working relations and mutual understanding have been consolidated, thus enabling the Committee to work effectively at what it does best: fostering consensus.

The dog took us out for a walk this afternoon, out towards Leuven. The weather has been strange today, with angry skies and frequent hailstorms, but we walked mostly in sunshine. The days are lengthening and the bird life is increasingly visible. Today, in addition to the usual round up of sparrows, tits, chaffinches, greenfinches, wrens, blackbirds, fieldfares, woodpigeons and crows, we saw, in order of appearance, a green woodpecker, an early lapwing, a white heron (again – I suppose I shall soon have to admit that they are egrets), four buzzards gliding high on thermals, a flight of geese and a hen harrier, skittering past. Strangely, there was no sign of the usually ubiquitous pheasants, though they are clearly raised around here for hunting. On the other hand, we saw a big hare, lolloping over a ploughed field, no doubt preparing for March!

To the Palais des Beaux-Arts this morning, to a major retrospective, scheduled to coincide with the Danish Presidency of the Council of the EU, of Per Kirkeby’s work, together with an intriguing exhibition of Kurt Schwitters’  ‘forbidden paintings’. Exiled from Nazi Germany by the allegedly ‘degenerate’ nature of his work, Schwitters lived for some time in Norway, where he started to paint realistically (and very well) – this despite previously having been a major representative of the avant-garde in Germany. Kirkeby was fascinated by this discovery. Two of Schwitters’ paintings (in the exhibition) hang on his wall ‘like icons, seeing to it that I don’t forget the blessing of “stylelessness”.’ As the programme notes put it, ‘Like Schwitters, Kirkeby refuses to let himself be pigeonholed; his art transcends the dominant spirit of his time.’ That is indeed a dominant theme of this very rich exhibition. Kirkeby has been extraordinarily inventive but in artistic terms always true to nobody but himself. In short, this exhibition is a must-see.

We’re well into the second season of The Wire now and completely hooked. But something brave and rather intriguing has happened in the plot; one of the main protagonists – an attractive individual full of moral contradictions -has been murdered. Now, I know this creates a rich potential for all sorts of dramatic tensions and graphically confirms the series’ gritty realism but it also comes at the price of all the effort that went into building up the character and his credibility. The series has been been described as modern Dickens but you wouldn’t get Dickens killing off one of his favourite characters at the beginning of Chapter Six. Unlike a fantasy series, such as Lost, there is no artificial exposition (flashbacks and the like) in The Wire and, unlike Lost, the series was, I believe, written out before filming began, so characters could not be written out (or in) according to the dictates of opinion polls and focus groups. It’s a brave thing to do, therefore. Such deliberate dismissal of commercial imperatives in favour of dramatic potential is an illustration of why the series never reached the heights of popularity enjoyed by lesser productions.

To Uccle early this afternoon, to the appositely named Silence crematorium, to say farewell to John Hellon. You can see good old inimitable John in this video, playing the man whose memory lapses (starting 34 seconds in). That’s his unmistakable laugh right at the end of the clip. The moving ceremony, topped and tailed by music from one of his many friends, was delivered in turn by his bewildered son, a warmly remembering friend, and his distraught companion. Those present will not easily forget that combination nor the man whose life was being remembered. I would like to illustrate this post with an image of John but cannot easily find a good one on the internet. I like that fact, for there was, as his son eloquently put it, always something enigmatic and unknowable about John. Postscript. Thanks to my friend, Vincent Eaton, I can now post a photograph of John and here’s a link to a video of him – typical John!

Here, as promised in this post, is the link to Aphelion Webzine which, thanks to Robert Moriyama, the short stories editor, has just published my short story, The Garden of Eden. As the previous post illustrated, the story is a good example of why budding authors have to be persistent and not allow quantities of rejections slips to discourage them. On the contrary! We should wear them like badges of courage! Talking of which, my friend and fellow author, Vincent Eaton, has put together a series of humourous video clips documenting his various encounters with rejection slips. You can see the first of them, and the links to the others, here.

This afternoon I spoke, at the invitation of its Chairman, Councillor Gordon Keymer (picture), to the UK delegation of Committee of the Region members. The EESC doesn’t have national delegations in the same sense, though members of the same nationality may meet quite often. In our sister Committee, on the other hand, members work within two dimensions – their political allegiance and their national delegation. I spoke frankly about the challenges ahead but also about the undeniable success of the administrative cooperation agreement between the two Committees. It may take a lot of governance at all levels, but it works and, in my opinion it does so because it is predicated primarily (and somewhat paradoxically) on the complete institutional autonomy of the two advisory bodies, with very different compositions, roles and powers granted to them under the Treaties. Thus, there is no merging of identity but, rather, a full recognition of identity plus the pooling of resources in a mutually satisfactory way (that also happens to save the taxpayer a lot of money and brings with it a lot of synergies and economies of scale).

This morning the EESC’s enlarged Presidency (the President, Vice-Presidents, Group Presidents and the SG) met and top of the agenda was a now successfully renegotiated draft Protocol of Cooperation with the European Commission. We will be welcoming European Commission President José Manuel Barroso to our plenary session next Wednesday and after the debate he and our own President, Staffan Nilsson, will hopefully sign the new Protocol. Before we get there, however, next Tuesday’s meeting of the Committee’s Bureau has to give its approval to the document, hence today’s preparatory meeting. Based on today’s discussion, all should go well. The new Protocol represents a considerable improvement on its predecessor and in particular provides for the Committee’s strengthened role under the new Lisbon Treaty’s provisions, particularly in the area of participatory democracy (Article 11).