Today and tomorrow the Committee is hosting a joint conference of the European Disability Forum and the European Trade Union Confederation on fighting discrimination against people with disabilities in their access to employment and training. In the opening session this morning, in addition to EESC President Staffan Nilsson, we heard from the ETUC’s Secretary General, John Monks (in the picture) and Yannis Vardakastanis, President of the European Disability Forum, who is blind and one of the EESC’s most active members (Greece, Various Interests Group).

To mark the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day the Committee today hosted a lunchtime conference on the theme of ‘Women and Development; the Road to Durban’. A joint initiative of EESC President Staffan Nilsson and Vice-President Anna Maria Darmanin, our guest speaker was Anne Bergenfelt, member of the private office of Connie Hedergaard, the European Commission member responsible for climate action. To understand why women have a particularly important role to play in the context of fighting climate change one has to look to the developing world as well as the developed one. Modest changes to cooking habits and the introduction of more efficient wood-burning stoves can have major consequences for many people’s living and working environments.

We are in Nieuwpoort and this afternoon, with the tide out, we walked along the broad beach towards Oostdunkirke. We walked back along the dyke and so inevitably stopped to admire Jan Fabre’s boy on a turtle. Together with Heaven of Delight it is one of my favourite Fabre pieces. The boy’s gaze out to the horizon invites the viewer to pensiveness and the mood the sculpture creates somehow reflects the weather about it. Today was cold, misty, austere; the horizon not entirely discernible. In its own way, it is as inscrutable as the sphinx and I like to think of the boy, thousands of years hence, gazing out at a desert or just piercing the surface of the sea. What would our distant descendants make of it? An object of worship or veneration? Was the boy a god? Was the turtle a sacred animal? Would turtles still exist by then? As I wrote, the sculpture invites the viewer to pensiveness.

Today, I accompanied EESC President Staffan Nilsson and a coach of mourning colleagues to the funeral of a much-loved colleague, Françoise Poncelet, who died suddenly last week at the tragically young age of 43. Outside, it was a beautiful, crisply cold day, with all the promise of spring that Françoise will alas now never see. The beautifully arranged ceremony took place in the Ardennes town of Bertrix. Françoise was, among other things, a gifted musician and a passionate singer. She sung in several choirs and founded and conducted one herself. During the mass her friends and that choir, Ancora, gave a beautiful slow rendition of the Zulu song ‘Siyahamba’ (literally, ‘We are marching in the light of God’) and, later, ‘Walk in the Light’. Music was much to the fore and the tributes from her family, friends and colleagues all gave the same sense of how Françoise, whether simply walking smilingly down a corridor at work or conducting a choir in the evening, brought music and sunlight into our lives. As her sister and brother put it, ‘Alors comme ça, tu t’en vas! Tu nous laisses au bord du chemin, avec nos souvenirs et l’écho de ton rire dans le coeur.’

Today I had the immense privilege of hosting a lunch for one of life’s true and great heroines. In 2008 Robbie Hughes was attacked and badly beaten whilst on holiday in Crete. His mother, Maggie, flew out to be at his bedside. Severely brain-damaged, Robbie almost died. He will never fully recover but, a survivor, has been invited to play in England’s football team in the 2012 Paralympics. When she joined her son in Crete and started to live through the horrible trauma of his illness and major operations, Maggie found that everybody was very nice and helpful but that there was an almost complete absence of structured help, support and advice. Maggie, standing beside me in the picture, is (and she won’t mind me saying this) a very normal, modest person, but somehow, in the midst of her tragic experience and with a truly extrordinary inner moral force ,she decided that ‘something good has to come out of something as bad as this’ and so she launched a campaign to get structured help for families of people injured or attacked whilst abroad. Kathleen Walker Shaw, an EESC member (second from left in the picture), brought her to Brussels because at the moment the European Commission is about to produce draft legislation in this very area and, indeed, the Commission (the responsible Commissioner is Viviane Reding) and European Parliamentarians have been very receptive to the many suggestions Maggie has to make. During the lunch, we heard from Maggie how devastating this sudden catastrophe had been for her and her family (the other lady in the picture is Maggie’s daughter, Alaina). Maggie could very easily have become an embittered and cynical person, but she didn’t. She has become a simple, honest, insistent and powerful force for good; truly, one of life’s great heroines. Maggie’s campaign (‘Please enjoy don’t destroy’) website is here.

This evening I went along to the Royal Museum of Art and History to listen to Sam Pitroda delivering one of The Economist’s Innovation Lectures. The event, chaired by European Voice editor Tim King, was both fascinating and richly entertaining. Indian in origin, resident in America for a large part of his life and a veteran globetrotter, Pitroda is described as an inventor, an entrepreneur, a government advisor and a policy maker. His chosen theme was the Indian government’s ‘Decade of Innovation 2010-2020’ policy. Pitroda was deeply involved in developing the policy and is now part of an advisory board overseeing its implementation. I can perhaps best give a taste of his almost aphoristic style by repeating some of my notes (his slide show is here). India faces three challenges: disparity, demography and development. India has 550 million people under the age of 25. When you have a billion people you are bound to have 10 million bright ones. Everything we do today is essentially obsolete. We see IT and telecom as instruments of nation building. India is a nation of 1 billion connected people. There are 750 million mobile phones in India. The best brains in the world have been solving the problems of the rich, who do not have problems to solve. Indians invented the zero and the decimal system. India had two universities (Nalanda and Takshita), complete with dormitories and campuses, 2,700 years ago. Focus at the edge. Ignorance is a great asset. Twenty-five million Indians live outside India. Almost all US companies have R&D companies in India. What came across the most to me was an impression of the vast potential of the sub-continent, the indefatigable optimism of Pitroda himself and the way in which IT developments will surely change basic and so far unchallenged concepts about democracy and economics.

With our Egyptian holiday cancelled I decided to put the spare time to good use by painting and redecorating N° 2 sprog’s bedroom. So I stripped off the wallpaper, re-plastered the walls (where they needed it), sanded the woodwork and the radiator and repainted the lot. My father was a dedicated DIY-er. In his case, it was a matter of necessity. In my case, I suppose we could have got somebody to come and do the work but in fact I got a great deal of pleasure out of it. It is something to do with the ‘honesty’ and simplicity of physical labour and something to do with the satisfaction of seeing the fruit of your labour materialise. It also provided me with a golden opportunity to listen to BBC Radio 4 non-stop, from news programmes through documentaries and comedy to drama. And when I wasn’t listening to the radio, I was alone with my thoughts and able to think a number of issues through. Last but not least, it was a sort of homage to my late father, since everything I was doing I had learnt from him when, as a kid, I helped him with his DIY activities. Doing things we had once done together brought back happy memories. Indeed, the whole thing was a sort of meditation.

Tonight we watched Mongol (2007), a semi-historical film about the early life of Temujin, later to become known as Genghis Khan. At one level, this is a good old-fashioned war movie, with armies massing and battling each other. But it is also an epic and I think the film is worth viewing for three reasons. The first is the historical aspects. The Russian director, Sergei Bodrov, did a great deal of research into Temujin’s early life and the film faithfully portrays him as being, in turn, an orphan, a slave and a mercenary whose father was poisoned by a rival tribe and whose position as tribal chief was denied him because he was too young. This is Khan the survivor, and not the murderous colonist and monstrous autocrat he was later to become. The second is the extraordinary beauty of the actors, particularly Tadanobu Asano (the – Japanese! – actor who plays Temujin) and Chuluuny Khulan (the Mongolian actress who plays Temujin’s wife, Borte). The third is the extraordinary beauty of the landscapes (the film was shot in China, Mongolia and Kazakhstan). The sheer vastness of the steppes is frequently contrasted with the puny human beings who trek across them on their ponies. Indeed, there are strong echoes of David Lean (Lawrence of Arabia) throughout the film. It certainly stood up well against the previous night’s viewing and, indeed, deserved to be more widely distributed.

And so, this evening, to the cinema complex in Les Halles to see at last the Coen brothers’ True Grit – that is, three days before the Oscars. Before I comment on the film, I’d better be clear. I am a fan of the Coen brothers (I have recently posted admiring pieces about Fargo and The Big Lebowski) and of Jeff Bridges (my recent pieces have included The Men Who Stare at Goats and, again, The Big Lebowski). And before Hugo of New York posts a comment I should add that True Grit is great entertainment. But is it a great film? In the nature of things I read many reviews before I actually got to see this film. ‘Unfortunately’, the arguments in one of the more critical reviews stuck in my mind. The first question is why the brothers decided to reinterpret Charles Portis’s 1968 novel (rather, that is, than going for an original script) when they surely knew that comparisons would inevitably be made with the first film of the same name, starring the late, great John Wayne. The second question is to ask where the originality of this version lies. The brothers would argue that they wanted to be more faithful to the novel and, in particular, to put far more emphasis on the character of the fourteen year-old narrator, Mattie Ross (played excellently by Hailee Steinfield), but then why has all the ‘noise’ been about Jeff Bridges (who plays ‘Rooster’ Cogburn)? True Grit has also been portrayed as their homage to the Western genre, but here the critical review pointed out that the film is almost a collection of set piece scenes. Indeed, to come back to the question of originality, I suspect that this lies chiefly in the cinematography. How, for example, do you film a scene supposedly set in a dark forest at night? Or, equally, a black horse galloping across a plain on a moonless night? Roger Deakins somehow manages it and it wouldn’t surprise me if he were to pick up one of the many Oscars that this film is predicted to win.

This morning we visited the Louvre. Whatever one thinks of I.M. Pei’s pyramid in the Cour Napoléon, the underground complex of entrance hall and intercommunicating passageways works brilliantly at dispersing the crowds and avoiding massive bottlenecks. Since we were supposed to be on the Nile this week, we went to the Egyptian section. There is the obligatory selection of monuments, mummies, sphinxes and hieroglyphic slabs – indeed, I was going to illustrate this post with a picture of a wonderful statue of Horus. But what makes this section particularly interesting is a selection of artefacts designed to illustrate the daily life of the Egyptians, with everything from bathroom mirrors to dice, and from chairs to beds. I can never get over the fact that, preserved by the dryness of the desert, many of the carved wooden objects are over two thousand years old and yet in perfect condition, the colours of the paintings as vivid, one imagines, as the day they were done. So I have chosen to illustrate this post with a truly exquisite object. It is a floating soapholder (the soap went on the duck’s back), over two thousand years old.