This morning I chaired the usual Monday morning management board meeting. Normally we meet in the ‘flagship’ Jacques Delors building but, conscious that our staff are housed in five other buildings as well, we occasionally meet in one of those. So this morning we met in the Van Maerlant building, as guests of the Committee’s Head of Communication, Peter Lindvald-Nilsen (his meeting room, with my cup of tea, in the picture). Afterwards, I got to thinking about the reincarnation of buildings. The Van Maerlant building was erected to serve as an annex to the European Parliament’s ‘main’ building in Brussels, which is now the Jacques Delors building, housing the two advisory bodies. As a young official in the European Commission’s secretariat general I used to come to the Van Maerlant building, seeking out MEPs for particular messages. Then the Parliament moved into its new complex and the building was taken over by European Commission Directorate General for Education and Culture (DG EAC). By then a Head of Unit in DG EAC, I used to come to the Van Maerlant building for meetings with the Commissioner and the Director-General. And now I am Secretary General of the European Economic and Social Committee and come to the building in that guise: in effect, over three decades the building has housed three institutions. Are those ghosts I see wandering its corridors?