This evening (N° 2 sprog’s turn) we watched Ip Man, a martial arts film very, very very loosely based on the true life of Chinese martial arts artist and teacher, Yip Man (whose pupils included Bruce Lee). Though the hero figure is a little too saccharine sweet for my tastes the film is interesting for several reasons. The first is its depiction of the way in which Foshnan evolved into a hub of martial arts (wing chun) in the 1930s, with several schools being rapidly founded and thereafter competing energetically against one another. The second is its depiction of the brutal Japanese invasion at the beginning of the second Sino-Japanese war, which, although invented for the film, was based on an all-too-horrific historical reality. The third is a subsidiary plot line about a wing chun master who cannot accept the Japanese yoke and becomes a bandit but is then reduced to robbing his own people. Lastly, the climax of the film comes when a Japanese general, himself a martial arts lover, is obliged to fight Ip Man on level terms because to refuse would represent humiliation not only for him but also for his country. The general is then very publicly beaten, which is of course equally humiliating, but he has been led into a blind alley by his own culture. The scene is cleverly plotted and well acted. I used the word ‘loosely’ three times because, although the real Yip Man was much less heroic and saintly (he was an opium addict, for example), his life was also deserving of a biopic rather than a bromide.

A gorilla gardener

One other article in the morning newspaper caught my eye: ‘Gardeners in crime’. Guerrilla gardeners – and there are apparently many of them ‘out there’ – transform scraps of wasteland into urban gardens. They do this surreptitiously because a lot of what they do is probably illegal. (Or was – Munich legalised guerrilla gardening in April which, I suspect, took some of the fun out of it.) And these clandestine gardeners are ingenious. The article cites a Canadian designer, Vanessa Harden, who has created precision weaponry for the cause. This includes a precision ‘bombing device’, disguised as a camera lens, that allows the user to ‘shoot seeds over fences, or to the fringe of railway tracks’. She even has a website with a You Tube clip (here). And here’s another website on the theme. Marvellous stuff.

The man in the picture, Alan Haberman, who just recently passed away at the age of 81, could legitimately lay claim to have radically altered people’s lives during his own lifetime. Unlike Sir Tim Berners-Lee (the web), Steve Jobs (Apple) and Marc Zuckerberg (Facebook), though, he remained relatively unknown. This may be in part because he did not invent the barcode, though it is mainly thanks to him that this now indispensable device became so ubiquitous. It might also be because it took a long time for the price of scanning technology to come down to commercially viable levels. In pushing so hard (see today’s FT obituary here), it could be argued that he badly undermined general numeracy levels (we have probably all experienced the shop assistant lost in simple calculations when the electric till goes down). On the other hand, by diminishing supermarket queues and facilitating baggage handling he surely added significantly to the general sense of well being throughout the world.

This morning I once again took part in a fun initiative organised by our administration to encourage people to lead healthier and more sustainable lives (see previous post here). I won’t repeat my boasts about my state of fitness (there – I have sneakily done it anyway), but I am posting this as an excuse to write about the skills of the lady in the photograph. She is our nurse, Caroline, and she has a remarkable gift: she always gives painless injections (and, by extension, never hurts you when she is taking blood samples). As you can see from the happy grin on my face, with her friendliness and good humour she is also an important part of our well-being policy. I recently had the pleasure of awarding Caroline her twenty years’ service medal and, as I told the audience on the occasion, she always has her colleagues’ well-being at heart; so much so that she is not beyond ticking off her Secretary General for going too fast on his bicycle in the rue Belliard!

We did it! With the exam season safely out of the way this evening we enjoyed the last episode of the American television series, Lost, having watched our way slowly through six seasons over several months. ‘How will it all end?’ the sprogs kept asking me. My constant reply was ‘ in a significant decline in ratings.’ Joking aside, having written and filmed such a complex creative exercise, literally by the seats of their pants, the writing and production team faced a fresh challenge in scripting an ending that would satisfy the series’ followers. The consensus among the Westlakes was that they succeeded. Indeed, the quality of the writing throughout the series has rarely flagged and the series surely deserves its stellar reputation. It is no mean feat to keep children and adults glued to their chairs whilst cleverly exploring a series of fundamental questions in religion and moral philosophy. What is good? What is evil? How can you recognise them? Are individuals better defined by their own perceptions or those of others? Can communities be strong without aggression? Can people atone for evil acts? Can torture ever be justifiable? And so on and on. Great fun! It’s a terrible pun and has probably already been done to death but I’m afraid we’re going to be lost without Lost.

This afternoon I and my counterpart at the Committee of Regions, Gerhard Stahl, jointly chaired a last coordination meeting of our joint and separate services before this autumn’s final EMAS audit.  To explain, the EU Eco-Management and Audit Scheme (EMAS) is a management tool for companies and other organisations to evaluate, report and improve their environmental performance. The scheme has been available for participation by companies since 1995 and was originally restricted to companies in industrial sectors. Since 2001, however, EMAS has been open to all economic sectors including public and private services. The two Committees are enthusiatic participants in the scheme. Indeed, the project is a joint flagship initiative of the two administrations in the field of sustainable and environment friendly development. After several years of hard work we are now fast approaching the finishing line of the procedure that will hopefully grant us the EMAS award and certificate. Until now, no other EU institution has been able to obtain this prestigious recognition of its environmental efforts for all of its staff and buildings, so our two Committees will be the first! At this week’s meeting we took the last necessary decisions in order to have everything ready for the final external verification procedure. Thanks to our excellent colleagues, everything is going swimmingly.

This morning I gave a warm welcoming address to a group of colleagues joining us from economic and social councils in the EU’s member states. These colleagues are the mistresses and masters of their councils’ websites. Since 2000 we and they have cooperated together in a network, ‘CESlink‘, of mutual information and document exchange. Today’s meeting is going to take a close look at the way we currently ‘do business’ in the light of two important surveys (one of public users, the other of the secretaries-general) that were recently carried out. What do we want of our network? What is expected of our network? Later, our guests will be addressed by the EESC’s Vice-President, Anna Maria Darmanin, who has enthusiastically embraced the social media (commendably, she Tweets, Facebooks and blogs). She will argue strongly, I am sure, for a more interactive approach. There was a time when the organisation of interactive initiatives could seem discouragingly complex and labour-intensive (I remember my own first, exhausting experiences in organising web chats) but the internet and software have evolved hugely and the problem now is more one of choosing among different possibilities. There was a very positive buzz in the meeting room as I left and I am sure that our specialists will have a very productive and creative working session.

At the usual Monday management board meeting this morning we heard an interesting and rich presentation on the work of our small administrative team responsible for the safety and security of both the European Economic and Social Committee and, because it is a joint service, the Committee of the Regions. Like IT, security is a classic ‘behind the scenes’ service on which we rely fundamentally but which, if uninformed, we risk seeing only as occasionally irksome. As officials or members, we want our PCs to work fast and we want good web access, but we are less enthusiastic when, for example, it comes to changing passwords regularly (though this is of course an indispensable part of modern-day IT security policy). Similarly, our colleagues working in security and safety provide us with the safe and comfortable working environment we require (covering everything from checking that fire extinguishers and alarms work properly through to looking after lost property), but we like it less when, for example, we are obliged to quit our buildings for evacuation exercises or show our security passes. So the presentation today was primarily about information and we were duly appreciative, for our security and safety service is about far, far more than checking people’s passes at the front door.

Just the 3 of us

This evening we were invited by good friends to a magical musical evening. The setting was, basically, the living room of their house. For the evening it had been transformed into a small theatre. In between generous quantities of food and wine we were entertained by a trio (voice, piano, cello) called Just the 3 of us. You can hear them in action here. The three friends, all accomplished musicians in their own right, meld wonderfully around Dida Robbert’s voice (Danish, the cellist, Johanna Peiler, is German, and the pianist, Biem Van Hoften, is Dutch) to produce the sort of atmospheric music – love songs, broken hearts – that one can imagine in smoke-filled bars in the early hours of the morning. The audience was a mixture of young and old but clearly all enjoyed the show. Wonderful! Thank you, MG and S!

We went to see Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s latest film, Le Gamin au Vèlo, at the Arenberg this evening. At one level, it is another good and at times very moving example of what the brothers do best; portraying grim social reality on the urban fringes. A selfish and immature father (played by Jérémie Renier) deserts his twelve year-old son, Cyril, (played brilliantly by Thomas Doret – curiously, we never hear about the mother) and even sells the kid’s bike to make ends meet.  A hairdresser, played by Cécile de France, rescues the boy from a home and gradually becomes his foster mother. Cyril wants to find money so that his father can live once again with his son and so falls under the spell of a drug dealer and petty crook. But the father refuses the money (we always knew it was the responsibility he was afraid of), ultimately, the boy renounces crime, embraces the relationship with the hairdresser and, preumably, they all live happily ever after. I use irony because the Dardenne brothers have described the film as a fairy tale, with a good fairy (Samantha, the hairdresser) and a bad one (Wes, the drug dealer, played by Egon Di Matteo). I greatly enjoyed the film (to the extent that one can say that about brutal social realism) but for me the improbabilities distracted from the reality. What about Cyril’s mother? Why does Samantha buy back Cyril’s bike and why does she suddenly decide to foster him? At one stage the twelve year-old fells a grown man with a single blow of a baseball bat he can hardly lift. At another, he falls five metres out of a tree and a few minutes later walks away unharmed. Not to be missed then, but take a pinch of salt with you.