This morning I had a general meeting with all of our colleagues working in the Committee’s Directorate for Human Resources and Internal Services. This is one of those ‘back room services’ par excellence – many of the colleagues are invisible to our ‘clients’ (by which I mean our members, of course)  and yet the work they do – generally of a very high standard – is absolutely indispensable. The meeting was part of a series I am holding with all of the specialised services of the Committee’s administration, primarily to thank everybody for all their excellent work, but also to give colleagues the chance to enter into a dialogue about their work with their Secretary General, for one of the advantages of a smaller institution is that the hierarchy can be (and should be) relatively flat. The good atmosphere in the Directorate is legendary, which is why I have chosen to illustrate this post with a photograph of the directorate’s recent ‘away day’ – those smiles say it all.

The President

I spent all of today, following an early-morning meeting of the management board, in a meeting chaired by EESC President Staffan Nilsson, in which he consulted with the Chairmen and women of the Committee’s specialised Sections, its Consultative Committee on Industrial Change and its observatories,  on his intended updated work programme, Engaging People for a Sustainable Europe. Staffan still has a year-and-a-half of his mandate before him and wants to plan ahead. The work programme is based on three priorities: dialogue and participation; sustainability and growth; and solidarity and development. The purpose of the meeting was above all to identify all the milestone activities of the Committee (from European Consumer Day through the Civil Society Prize to Single Market Forums and national hearings in the context of the Europe 2020 Strategy). The Committee is necessarily reactive when it comes to giving its opinion on the European Commission’s legislative proposals, but it is also pro-active, above all in ensuring strong civil dialogue in priority policy areas. Of course, the Committee must also be ready and able to react to unforeseen developments but, as the head of the administration that has to ensure that the Committee’s activities run smoothly and effectively, I can only applaud the President’s initiative in organising such planning exercises. For the record, the meeting went very well.

Today we were at a gathering of old friends just outside Liège, at Embourg. From their balcony the view plunged down into a green valley and back up a wooded hill to an imposing and somehow haunting structure. This, it transpired, was the Basilica of Our Lady of Chèvremont, for many years a place of pilgrimage. But the site long pre-dates the current structure and, indeed the church. In fact, fortifications stood on the hill long before Liège came into being and were once thought to be impregnable. For some reason, that sort of juxtaposition has always fascinated me. For example, Fiesole, where I once had the great pleasure of living, is much older than Florence and was for some time much more important. And just recently I jogged past a sleepy village in the Belgian Famenne called Revogne. Now there are the remains of a gate and a rather pretty seventeenth century chateau on a hill. But for about 200 years Revogne was the regional power base of Les Princes Évêques de Liège and was easily the strongest military installation for miles around. That is, until 18 August 1466, when a Louis Bourbon hellbent on revenge utterly destroyed it and its nearby satellite, Dinant, massacring the inhabitants. I suppose it all comes back to Shelley’s Ozymandias again.

This morning we pedalled down to a crowded Grand Place and ducked behind a very popular beer festival into the Hôtel de Ville to visit a lovely exhibition entitled ‘Le Baroque dévoilé’. Brussels is full of Baroque jewels, particularly in terms of architecture (and, indeed, visitors are given a free tour guide to some of the principle works in central Brussels) and sculpture (young Manneken-Pis is a good example). But it is also rich in the artists’ and architects’ preparatory work, which mostly languishes behind closed doors. The curators of this exhibition have very cleverly selected a number of preparatory drawings and terracotta models and juxtaposed them with high-quality photographs of the finished works in situ. There are also a number of original oak carvings. If you’re in town, it’s worth a visit (it’s on until 25 September). Some of the terracotta preparatory sculptures are of exquisite quality.

The Sunken Lane by Stanley Berkeley

The dog took us for a walk out in the potato fields around Berthem this morning. We enjoyed truly glorious weather (dare I hope that we get an Indian summer to compensate for the horrors of July and August?), but all around the farmers have been repairing the damage done by the unseasonally heavy rain and the sunken lanes seem to have sunk a little further. Sunken lanes – of which there are so many in the countryside around Brussels because of the sandy soil – fascinate me. They are as much an indication of human activity and effort as, say, a dry stone wall in the Alps. They have also played a significant part in a number of battles. Perhaps most notoriously, sunken lanes and roads played key roles in the Battle of Waterloo, one running along a ridge serving as a protected communication line for Wellington, and another running across the battlefield which acted as a funnel that trapped Napoleon’s cuirassiers with disastrous consequences. This is how the wiki entry describes the moment: ‘The Household Brigade crossed the crest of the Allied position and charged downhill. The cuirassiers guarding d’Erlon’s left flank were still dispersed, and so were swept over the deeply sunken main road and then routed. The sunken lane acted as a trap which funnelled the flight of the French cavalry to their own right, away from the British cavalry. Some of the cuirassiers then found themselves hemmed in by the steep sides of the sunken lane, with a confused mass of their own infantry in front of them, the 95th Rifles firing at them from the north side of the lane, and Somerset’s heavy cavalry still pressing them from behind.’

The Slocum: a floating death trap

An evening of research about the German community in New York for my magnum opus. Who now remembers the General Slocum? On 15 June 1904 the huge paddle steamer, a then familar sight for New Yorkers, caught fire and sank in the East River, just off the Bronx. An estimated 1,021 of the 1,342 people on board perished. She had been chartered, as every year, by the German Lutheran Church in Manhattan’s Little Germany, for a church picnic. In one fell swoop Little Germany all but disappeared (the few surviving members of the community moved up town). It was the New York area’s worst disaster, in terms of loss of life, until 9/11. Similarly, who now remembers the 30 July 1916 Black Tom explosion when, in an act of sabotage carried out by German agents, roughly one kiloton of ammunition waiting to be shipped to the Allies blew up, the equivalent of an earthquake measuring 5.5 on the Richter Scale, causing property damage estimated at $20 million? The explosion has been described as the worst terrorist attack on New York prior to 9/11. Lastly, the RMS Lusitania, sunk by a German torpedo off the Irish coast on 7 May 1915, killing 1,198 of the 1,959 people aboard. Despite popular belief to the contrary, the disaster did not encourage the US into the war – that came two years later. But why did the ship sink in 18 minutes only? What was that mysterious second explosion? Was the ship secretly carrying explosives? Why did the Royal Navy depth charge the wreck in the 1950s? Episodes like Black Tom and the Lusitania demonstrated just how deeply American industry was involved in the Allied war effort. Combined with pro-British and anti-German propaganda, they also convinced many German New Yorkers to anglicize their names and play down their origins. It’s all history now, but only just: Germany’s final compensatory payment to America for the Black Tom damage was made in 1979; the last General Slocum survivor died on 26 January 2004; and the last Lusitania survivor died on 11 January of this year.

Maggie Hughes was back at the Committee today, giving a general presentation to the Section on Employment, Social Affairs and Citizenship about the challenges she faced when her son, Robbie, was badly injured in an attack whilst on holiday abroad. She was last here in March, pursuing her campaign for some sort of EU-level standard of help and support for the relatives of those who encounter difficulties (accidents, attacks, thefts) whilst abroad. Thanks in no small part to her efforts, the European Commission has heeded the call and a proposal is in the pipeline. The presentation was timely, with us all fresh back from our holidays. As Maggie pointed out, it is when something goes wrong on holiday that people start to encounter other parts of the country they happen to be in – the police, the judiciary, hospitals and the health system, insurance companies, etc – that, despite their best intentions, are not necessarily geared to working with foreign nationals. Nothing can bring back the Robbie Maggie knew before the attack that injured him so badly but, in line with her philosophy, something good is going to come out of something bad, and not just the legislation, for Robbie has been shortlisted to play paralympian football for his country next year. Here’s how London ITV covered her visit.

And so back to work: the management board on Monday morning, a long and enjoyable catch-up meeting with my President, Staffan Nilsson, on Tuesday morning, and a meeting of the so-called enlarged Presidency (President, Vice-Presidents, Group Presidents) today, and various other meetings dotted about those. At the political level, there are three Section meetings this week (Single Market, Production and Consumption yesterday; Employment, Social Affairs and Citizenship today; and Economic and Monetary Union and Economic and Social Cohesion tomorrow) and therefore many of the Committee’s members are back in the meeting rooms and corridors – just as it should be.

In May last year I saw Massenet’s Don Quichote at La Monnaie and vowed that I would read Cervantes’s original over the summer. Well, I did, but the summer in question was this one! I have only read the first volume, the original one (published in 1605), so far (in Edith Grossman’s excellent translation). I know the second volume (published in 1615) becomes more philosophical and maybe I will change my point of view but I have a number of observations to make. The first is that although Cervantes’s Don Quixote is madly (and maddeningly) romantic he is also a physically dangerous lunatic. He not only risks his own life and that of the poor Sancho Panchez but seeks to do serious damage with his sword – and sometimes succeeds. The second is a suspicion that the iconic scene where he tilts at windmills is quite so well known because it happens early on in what is quite a lengthy text (there are other iconic devices – inns are always castles to Don Quixote, for example, and prostitutes are invariably maidens whose honour must be defended). The third is that the book contains a number of stories that don’t directly involve the two protagonists – not the least of them being the tale of the recklessly curious man (chapters 33 to 35). At times it reads like a bracketed set of short stories (like A Thousand and One Nights). The fourth, more spuriously, is that the mule train drivers who populate Cervantes’s countryside as much as shepherds and villagers and inn-keepers were clearly to Spain in the seventeenth century what lorry drivers are to Europe now. Coming back to my first observation, though, the overall moral I draw from the story is that those who live in a fantasy are capable of inflicting great hurt on others as on themselves. It is, in other words, a cautionary tale as much as anything else.

We showed two Belgian friends, both gallery curators, some of the artistic and architectural jewels of the region today. One of these, a bit off the beaten track, is the church of Santi Eusebio and Vittore and its extraordinary wall paintings. The church stands on a rocky outcrop high above Como lake. There are two curious geographical connections. The first is Palermo. As the local population grew it became clear that the land could not provide food for all and so, between the 16th and 18th centuries (echoes of the Mani!), many families headed towards Sicily, especially to Palermo, where they prospered but maintained their Peglio links, sending money and precious objects back up north. The second is Flanders. In particular, the church walls were decorated by one Giovanni Mauro della Rovere (1575-1640), of distant Flemish origin. On either side of the altar at Peglio he painted two massive illustrations of the last judgement and of the inferno (with plenty of Bosch-like details). As one of our guests pointed out, artists were constrained by a number of conventions in depicting heaven, but there were no holds barred when it came to depicting hell and the ‘Fiammenghino’ really let his imagination run riot to great effect, as the detail shows.