To La Monnaie this evening to see Toshio Hosokawa’s opera, Hanjo. The story is beautiful in its simplicity. Besotted young Hanjo waits for the return of her lover, Yoshio, but when he returns she doesn’t recognise him – he doesn’t correspond to her memory of him – and so she returns to her waiting. Hanjo, a former geisha,  was bought out by an older female artist, Jitsuko Honda, who is besotted with her. At first Jitsuko fears Yoshio’s arrival but realises with quiet triumphalism as Yoshio storms away that Hanjo’s Yoshio, who exists only in her deranged mind, can never arrive. Choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s staging is pared back to the barest necessities so that we are left to concentrate only on the three protagonists and Hosokawa’s music. I found the beginning – a lengthy silence alone with Hanjo, followed by a gradual crescendo – powerfully profound.

We’re approaching the end of the staff report season. I got the reports for which I was directly responsible out of the way some time ago. But I am also appeals assessor, and so I have had a series of appeals hearings squeezed into the cracks in my schedule. It’s always a delicate role to play. The appeals assessor surely must not lightly undermine the authority and considered opinion of his management. At the same time, though, the assessor, by being one step removed, is also there to ensure not only that rights are respected but that the greater good is served. These are moments of supreme responsibility and I find them humbling, since my decisions must thereafter be respected. In a lighter vein, I have also met a few retiring officials this week to thank them and wish them well. One made me laugh out loud when he solemnly assured me that he simply didn’t have time to work any more – no fear of empty days there, then! And a Portugese colleague taught me the saying ‘Ter mundo’. The French also say ‘to have the world within (one)’, but in Portugese it means somebody of wisdom who has travelled widely and has great knowledge of different cultures and traditions. He told me the story of such a wise man who retired, in Candide fashion, to the countryside to tend his vines. An English traveller passed through his village and the wise man conversed with him in excellent English. ‘Why?’ said the traveller, ‘What is this country where even in the middle of the countryside the vine workers speak English?’

For various reasons I have been studying the Book of Job in the Bible. I am fascinated by these characters (like Jesus Christ himself) who exist in both the Christian and the Islamic scriptures (Job is a prophet in the Qu’ran). But what is the story of Job really about? In the Bible’s version, he is a good man, living righteously. Cunning old Satan convinces God that Job is only respectful to him in the way a Sicilian villager is respectful to a mafioso – because he provides ‘protection’. So God removes Job’s protection, allowing Satan to take his wealth, his children, and his physical health, and all this in order to get Job to curse God. But the worst Job will do is curse the day of his birth. Moral of the story? Job was truly a good man. But God knew that anyway, so why did he put Job through such misery? Job tries to get an answer out of God, but the latter blusters and bullies and browbeats Job into submission, like an old-fashioned teacher caught out in the classroom. It is nevertheless a meditative text, particularly for those going through the wars in one way or another.

This afternoon the Committee’s Bureau met to discuss a number of important issues, from the pragmatic (for example, probable plenary meeting dates in 2012) to the political (for example, mandate for the renegotiation of the Committee’s Protocol of Cooperation with the European Commission). The morning began with a working breakfast meeting of the so-called enlarged Presidency (the President, Vice-Presidents, Group Presidents and the Secretary General). Both meetings passed off without major hitches. Having sat in more than a few of these meetings now I am struck by an ineluctable rule; no matter how well a meeting is prepared, and no matter how hard efforts are made to cover all eventualities, something unexpected will always arise. Today’s meetings were the exceptions that proved the rule and our colleagues the interpreters had a relatively early evening. On the substance, the Protocol of Cooperation with the European Commission, first signed in 2005, needs to be updated to take into account the provisions of the Lisbon Treaty, particularly on participatory democracy and structured dialogue with organised civil society.

Recent newspapers have carried obituaries of Sir Geoffrey Chandler, a genial businessman and modest war hero who championed the idea of corporate social responsibility in principle and in practice. He was of particular interest to me because he was, once upon a time, my equivalent in the UK. What do you mean? I hear you ask. There is no UK Economic and Social Council, so how could there be a Secretary General? But there was, dear reader, there was. The National Economic and Development Council, modeled closely and consciously on the French Economic and Social Council, was created (1962) and destroyed (1992) by Conservative Governments. In 1978 Sir Geoffrey became its Director General and so served (before my time) as my direct UK equivalent. The days of ‘Neddy’, as the UK Council was universally known, were effectively numbered once Margaret Thatcher came to power but it will have its place in the history books as a symbol of a time when British Conservative governments looked to French corporatist economic planning as a viable model for the UK’s declining economy.

Back in the day job, this afternoon, alongside my counterpart at the Committee of the Regions, Gerhard Stahl, I gave a short welcoming address to a meeting of all of the translation staff of the two Committees, who were holding a directorate meeting in order to address some of the common challenges they face. In a revolutionary and, to my mind, exemplary, arrangement the two Committees pool their resources in various areas in order to achieve synergies and economies of scale. Translation is one of those areas. My messages were simple. The work the translators do is vital – vital for the European Union’s cultural identity and indispensable for the work of our members, whether representatives of local and regional authorities or of civil society organisations. I brought my weekend’s experience to bear tangentially. Commendably, the translators set themselves exacting standards. Quite a few of them are, indeed, literary translators in their spare time. I recounted how on Saturday afternoon we had spent an inordinate amount of time with Adam Foulds pondering over the meaning of just one word in a William Morris poem. So I knew and saluted the importance of literary excellence. However, the most important aspect of translation for our members is not literary excellence but effective communication. It means constantly compromising between excellence and pragmatism, between deliberation and speed. It is often the way of our world.

You want a bollocking, or what?

The tutorial ended with an afternoon spent together with Hanif Kureishi – he of The Buddha of Surburbia and My Beautiful Launderette fame. Kureishi is punkish, argumentative, in your face – a born controversialist and fiercely faithful to his calling and to his art (to him, a literary critique is ‘a bollocking’). Here, then, was a third wonderful contrast. I can only give a flavour of the encounter through some ‘sound bites’, his insights delivered in staccato bursts: ‘bear somebody else in mind constantly’; ‘the criticism is the creativity’; ‘you don’t want short-cuts – you need long cuts’; ‘you want new difficulties, interesting difficulties’; ‘there’s got to be friction between you and your material’; ‘to speak is dangerous’; ‘almost all pleasures in life are about transgression’; ‘all great literature is about transgression’; ‘plot traps you’; ‘thank God I have been a writer’; ‘I’d love to stop being a writer’. We were given a simple exercise of writing for thirty minutes and then reading out the results. It was a simple but very effective device to illustrate a) just how much you can write in half an hour and b) just how well you can write in half an hour if you put your mind to it. Kureishi pointed out that this is precisely the sort of challenge screen writers face all the time: the scene has to be changed, but the crew and the cast are on the set. Just do it! Fascinating and a great end to a very rich and rewarding two days.

Yesterday afternoon and this morning our tutor was Adam Foulds, author most recently of The Quickening Maze, which was on last year’s Man Booker prize shortlist (I should note that Sarah Hall’s The Electric Michelangelo made the Man Booker short list in 2004 and her How to Paint a Dead Man made the longlist in 2009). If I had to use one word to describe Sarah Hall it would be ‘vivacious’; she is a bubbling brook of observation and insight. And if I had to use one word to describe Adam Foulds it would be ‘cerebral’; each word is weighed, pondered, evaluated. With Sarah we studied perspective, first- and third-person decisions, landscape and dialogue. With Adam we studied action, sentence structure, detail, specificity, gesture and authorial knowledge. With Sarah we analysed examples of the work of Richard Brautigan, Cormac McCarthy, Ross Raisin, Andrew Miller, Hilary Mantel and Daniel Woodrell. With Adam we started with William Morris’s The Haystack in the Floods, and went on to analyse examples of the work of Roland Barthes, Ernest Hemingway, Charles Dickens, Christopher Logue, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Henry James and Gertrude Stein. Having just drafted those lists I realise how intensive these one-and-a-half days have been. They have also been immensely enjoyable.

This evening I had the immense privilege and pleasure of seeing a review performance (the premiere is on 14 April) of London Road by my friend, Alecky Blythe, and composer Adam Cork, at the National Theatre. Walking across Waterloo Bridge I was thrilled and proud to see Alecky’s name literally ‘up in lights’. London Road, four years in the making, is an account of how a close-knit community, in London Road, Ipswich, reacted to the murders of five prostitutes and the subsequent discovery of the murderer in their midst. Alecky uses a technique, verbatim, that obliges the actors to reproduce real speech, recorded and edited. The innovations of London Road are that the actors have memorised this authentic language (no headphones, therefore) and Adam Cork has brilliantly caught the cadences of their language and set them to music. The result is poignant, humourous, at times chilling but never condescending and, thanks also to a brilliant cast and excellent direction, great entertainment. The relative intimacy of the Cottesloe adds further to the atmospherics. If you get a chance, please go and see this! For me, it was the perfect end to a day full of reflections about such matters as authenticity in dialogue in fiction. When we talk about written dialogue being ‘realistic’, we know full well that it isn’t real. In real speech people don’t finish their sentences; they trip over their words, hesitate, stutter, use the wrong word. Through her technique Alecky catches all of that. Thanks to Adam Cork’s music, though, we are not far away from Steve Reich’s Different Trains. I am fascinated by the way these different art forms are creeping ever closer together.  Stop press (added later)! There is a G2 review here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2011/apr/10/london-road-alecky-blythe-interview

Today finds me (via the red eye Eurostar) in London, at the headquarters building of the Guardian and Observer newspapers for a two-day Guardian master class in creative writing. Our teacher this morning was Sarah Hall and it was just great fun to explore literary techniques with her. My fellow classmates are a fascinating mix: a number of journalists turned creative writers; short-story writers; novelists; an academic historian now writing a historical novel about William of Tyre; a top-flight cancer specialist who survived the irony of cancer herself and is now intent on exploring the emotional side of illness; a singer and songwriter whose latest project is to write brief lives based on old bank statements found in bins. Thanks to Sarah I have discovered an American author, Richard Brautigan, who I will certainly be reading up on. But it is above all nice to be swimming in literary waters, for we all know what it is to be driven, to stare at the empty page, to doubt our ability, to suffer rejection slips, etc. But this is something, whether we are successful or not, that we must do. Interestingly, Sarah does not plot her novels but prefers to let them grow organically. For her, the structure is something that she imposes afterwards, in the many re-writes.